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Thought for the Week

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 10:32:28 GMT

A man rides into town on Sunday. Three days later he leaves on Sunday. How is this possible? Answers please via a comment. Solution and new problem next week.

Growing Knowledge: The Evolution of Research

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 10:31:20 GMT

A spectrum of information resources – - – - the library of the future will be coming TO the reader and the researcher. Growing Knowledge: the evolution of research Filed under: Future Directions, Learning 2.0, Research

Crab of Mystery

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 09:48:57 GMT

by Ace Crab of Mystery Mister Crab found a magical place. He fights a monster. He won the fight and another monster attacked the city, destroyed houses and hurt the people. The monster attacked Mr Super Crab and Mr Super Crab destroyed the monster. He defeated the other one too.

Pass the [password] test

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 09:47:44 GMT

http://howsecureismypassword.net/ Here’s a great tool to demonstrate password strength to staff, students, family and friends. Try out your usual favourites and see how they fair! I ran some of my trusty passwords through it and found pretty much what I expected. One regular password I use for sites that I don’t care about much in [...]

EDUtalk at the Scottish Learning Festival

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 08:37:00 GMT

Sharing Curriculum Change through the EDUtalk Project

A bit of a mouthful, but this is the title of our Scottish Learning Festival Seminar.

David Noble and myself will be running a seminar: Sharing Curriculum Change through the EDUtalk Project to talk about Edutalk on Wednesday 22 September at 12:30

We will be explaining how the EduTalk project kicked off at the Scottish Learning festival last year with SLFtalk which recorded the voices of educators attending the Scottish Learning Festival 2009. and grew from there.

We will hopefully give practical demonstrations of how the technology works and explain the thinking behind it. It should be fun.

SLFtalk 2010

As part of EDUtalk we hope that folk will be creating short reports and thoughts about SLF on EDUtalk, in the same way as last year but using the tag edutalk on audioboo and iPadio. Participants can also email audio to post@EDUtalk.posterous.com or phone Gabcast (033 0808 0214 channel 30938 and # password 1234 and # when asked record your audio and press # when finished)

Full details of how to send audio to EduTalk are on the How to EDUtalk page. Further help from twitter: @johnjohnston or @parslad

how to draw scale diagrams

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 08:36:19 GMT

Here is a short video covering the points we discussed when we drew scale diagrams to find displacement vectors. Vector Scale Diagrams from mr mackenzie on Vimeo.

Links for 2010-09-05 [del.icio.us]

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Mention of #EdCM: Put the customers before technology if you want to win - Scotland on Sunday
"One of the most exciting opportunities for the tech startup scene in Scotland is the potential to fuse the worlds of our creative talent and our equally robust technical talent," says Mitchell.

"For example, taking the Edinburgh Coffee Morning community and all the talent in Leith and mixing this in a crucible with the phenomenal talent in our Tech Meetup community that meets each month, not only in Edinburgh but in Glasgow and Aberdeen.

"This could generate a significant number of design-led, customer-focused startups. Scotland has the talents of Ive and Dyson and we have the makings of an entrepreneurial ecosystem to help them flourish."
Engine Service Design | About us
Founded in 2000, Engine is one of the world’s leading service design and innovation consultancies.

S5 Careers Talk NBHS

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 05:44:02 GMT

Take this survey

Update

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 20:45:26 GMT

Updated to WordPress 3.0.1 which caused a few problems server side until 1and1 kindly gave me the missing code for my .htaccess file! All well now and blog posts being lined up for the new term.

Alps Summer 2010 Part 1

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 20:44:48 GMT

School broke up for Summer on Thursday afternoon, and on Friday morning I was on a plane to Geneva with Alan. We took a train then a bus to Saas Fee, and arrived in sweltering heat about 6 pm, to see this inspiring view. Saas Fee is completely car-free, so we had to haul our luggage [...]

Measuring the Speed of Sound.

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 20:18:23 GMT

Jamie Lang of Mr Mallon`s Physics class shows how to measure the speed of sound using two microphones attached to an electronic timer. The distance between the microphones was 1 metre. Your browser cannot play this video. Learn how to fix this. Download speed of sound worksheet here.

It’s as if I’ve never been away!

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 19:05:02 GMT

Loving having primary two this year and being back in school. After 3 weeks I now feel as if I am getting on top of things but the first two weeks, particularly in language, I felt that it was never going to get any easier! I have 28 pupils, who were in two different classes [...]

I know a place...

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 18:29:21 GMT

Categories: Geography General, Rivers, Urban
I was reading a link to a competition at the weekend and I thought it might be an interesting alternative exercise for students in the lower school. Hodder Geography are holding a competition to draw your own map of the world, real or imagined. This could be a map of favourite places, hidden places, happy places, a mood map, anything at all. After discussion with the S2 in particular, some students had struggled to relate to maps in the S1 unit in terms of their relevance and usefulness. This highly personalises the map as a medium and I feel would be a good addition to the S1 course that we have currently to engage the students with their learning. I wonder what the students would come up with, for instance, if they mapped their hometown as they would like it to be against as it is?
I had a test of audioboo today. I'm hoping to use this with one of my S4 classes tomorrow, as whole school assemblies played havoc with my plans on Thursday. It's quite nice, as I can record audio, tag its location on the map and then embed it. One use I'm thinking of for this is in a proposed microclimate investigation around the school which we could probably fit into the new weather unit. I'm also trying to use differenet types of media for presenting homework. The results are variable at the moment, but I quite like the crowd sourced revision wall by 3D1 below.

<iframe src="http://www.wallwisher.com/embed/3D1rivers" style="border: 1px solid rgb(153, 153, 153);" frameborder="0" height="400px" width="100%"></iframe>

Finally, with S2 tomorrow, an easy period first of all completing a Japan mapping exercise and then comparing lifestyles at similar age groups using diary entries.

Climbing, catastrophe, and a poem

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 16:30:11 GMT

I've been writing about the climb I did on Thursday - a poem seemed an appropriate vehicle for what I'd been thinking about on the top, and you can read it here. But the extraordinary thing for me on the summit ridge of Ben Donich was that I was alone. Ok, it was only for 30 minutes or so, but in 58 years of climbing in Scotland I've never been alone and it was an exciting experience. A forgotten crag not far below the summit had meant that Mr B declined to accompany me - it's a rock scramble that you have to descend before the last easy climb - and as I knew I'd done it before, I decided to go for it.

That solitary moment or so as I took photos and looked at the blue hills around me gave me time to reflect on the time when I won't be able to do this any more. I'm happy to say, however, that the catastrophe of a sprained ankle waited until I was down the hill - I fell off the back garden path when we arrived home. Should'a kept the boots on ...

Back to work!

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 16:04:56 GMT

A very busy holiday period is now over and a very busy time back at school is now on again!

I hope to produce and share more resources online, with an obvious focus on Curriculum for Excellence.

I have to admit that there have been some incredible news stories of late, with the Chilean Miner's Crisis one that everyone prays will have a happy ending.

But the devastating floods in Pakistan, the massive earthquake in Christchurch, the Pakistani Cricketers Scandal, Tony Blair's book launch, end of US military operations in Iraq... an incredible period for news, business and the economic saga.

Also I felt pretty sad at the woman who threw that cat in the bin. Shameful.

The Probationer becomes a Mentor

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 15:06:58 GMT

So it really has been a while. I think 2007 was my last post.
I have been a teacher now for 4 years and how time flies when you are having fun...or (rather being busy). To think that all those years ago I was posting about: not being able to do the job, thinking about leaving teaching, getting stressed out because of the work load. Well, not too much has changed from those days because I still have days like I did in my probation year but it does get easier and more enjoyable.

The probationer has now become a mentor (not exactly sure if I'm a great mentor) but I am still a mentor. I use to believe that I was completely under qualified to mentor a probationer however now I believe I have the confidence and experience to guide someone who is at the stage that I was only 4 years ago. It actually makes you revaluate your teaching and inspire you to do better in the classroom.

Geocaching App

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 14:04:22 GMT

We have been out of a lovely walk on a very pleasant Sunday afternoon. While were out we managed to find a couple of geocaches using C:GEO on Philippa's Android phone. If you are looking for an app that is easy to use, free and works on Android then you will struggle to find an app that is any better than this. You need access to a 3G network and GPS in the phone. once you have that sorted the rest is easy. You can search for caches near to where you are, read the logs and even log your find while you are out on the field. One of the big plusses is that it is free! Very highly recommended.

CPDMeet: Subject Learning Communities

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 12:03:28 GMT

I’ve put together a little presentation to kickstart my CPDMeet on Subject Learning Communities on Tuesday, so I thought I’d upload it here too.

Mobile Phone Pictures of Cells

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 11:39:27 GMT

Mr Mallon`s second year science class used their mobile phones to take pictures of cells. Using their magnifying capability we examined the cells in detail and discovered each cell has a nucleus. Andrew Jackson brought in some pond water which was teaming with microscopic life. Check out the amazing picture of a midge larvae captured [...]

Test

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 08:09:47 GMT

Survey

iPod to iPad

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 23:10:00 GMT

This posting was created on my new iPad using BlogPress Lite for an iPod/iPhone.

I'm wondering if there's any point in using the app when I can access the webpage in Safari. The downside being that this is an iPhone app so I have to scale up the screen. There's also no facility to alter text style from within the app or to insert a link or. :-(

I can insert a photograph from the ones stored on my iPad.

Lastly to test the spoon my iPad I've tried to add a hyperlink to the word iPad.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad...