Stopped in, yesterday at a secondary school who were keen to share how they were using The Camera and Data projector and screen to enhance students learning in Home Ec. As you can see there is a data projector and camera mounted on the ceiling. The Workbench, plus beating eggs and flour are writ large on the screen behind the teacher. This was great and I felt that it could have been extended with the use of an additional camera and mic on the teacher. The recording of the practical could then be kept and available to students who missed that lesson, for whatever reason- I suppose the fear for the teacher is that the students would prefer to watch the videos and not attend the practical, but whether that would actually 
happen in reality is another matter. I know that one student came in and asked if he could be excused for that session as there was an exam the next day. Wouldn’t it be great for that student to have the video available on Thursday to view once his exam was done.
ULearn08 was a great opportunity to talk with a variety of folk. I was delighted to be trialing the Easi-Speak for Sitech Systems. As part of that trial I was interviewing a number of delegates and vendors in a variety of situations. My interview with Mike from Learnz was conducted in the busy entrance way to the Expo area. I have to say I was delighted with the clarity of this microphone but let me talk about Mike for a moment.
He is one of the Learnz team who have just secured funding to ensure free subscription to the Learnz project. I could type for hours about Learnz. I’m hoping to tap into the resource on my next teaching assignment next year. I let Mike do the explaining .
I stood up in church the other week and was asked to talk about what it was like to be a Christian teacher in today’s secular society. I shared a bit then at coffee afterwards some lovely people said how great it was to here ordinary folk with ordinary lives for a change. It was nice, but it’s not why I’m mentioning it. A teacher friend of mine chatted with me afterwards and brought to my attention something I hadn’t thought about for a while.
When I was relieving at Sherenden I was paid mileage for the trouble of going out that far. I talked about this with my friend at church and he was relating a story about the fact that he requests mileage for each of his relieving days. Apparently there is a 10km radius where you can’t claim but after that you can claim regardless of the school you work in. There was a certain administrator he was dealing with that basically claimed they had no knowledge of the ‘mileage allowance’ and therefore refused to pay. The NZEI rep said that the reliever was entitled to the allowance provided he had to travel more than 10km to the school. Please Educate the Dragon . Does anyone know anything about this or have similar stories. Is the relieving pool being conned out of hundreds of dollars in mileage each year? Or is it just me and my mate?
I wondered around with a Easispeak mp3 recorder for a while and caught peoples initial thoughts and reactions to ULearn. Below is a list of links that I gleaned from my conversations. Have a listen .
http://www.mogulus.com/
http://kpetv.blogspot.com/
Today was crunch time for me. The schools competition for the A&P show had a welcome addition this year: A digitalstorytelling section. They already have an handwriting section (for many a long year) A creative story section, a variety of 2D and 3D art as well as a digital photo section.
I was charged with putting together the material from the digitalstorytelling section and presenting it at the show. I did this as part of the BreatheTechnology company I work for and so you will see the familiar colour scheme at the stand. I am hoping to have permission to upload the entries to Teachertube some time in the next week. 
I’ll keep you posted. For now you’ll have to settle for a couple of shots of the stand- please note the really cool backlit projector mounted above the stand.
Please also note the desktop in the corner which took quite some sorting out for it to do what I wanted it to. It’s done and the school trips begin today and tomorrow. Then the real fun begins as the Friday is Hawkes Bay Anniversary Day and then Labour day on Monday. Two short weeks, can’t wait.
