Three very rewarding days at St John’s School here in Cyprus. Monday started with a presentation to the English and ICT departments and neighbouring Episkopi and Akrotiri primary schools.

Thank you to Amanda, Dave, Lia, Cynthia, Athy, Judith, Charles, Jane, Nigel, John, Zoe, Helen, Liz and all the other colleagues who joined us for a buzzing, thrilling, well-organised three days full of new experiences and ideas, problem tackling and professional cooperation. Everyone was willing to go way beyond the call of duty, developing new materials, searching for resources, setting up blogs and all for the benefit of the many children, who also steamed creatively through the challenging activities.

Thank you Maria and Martin for technical support and helping in our aim in making the techie elements painfree and invisible.

One of the things we discussed today was keyboard shortcuts. Here is a little HANDY HINT:

When you try to copy a group of files from one folder to another, Windows will bring up a handy little window if it notices files in the target directory with the same name as files from the source directory. You can manually choose which files to overwrite or leave be one by one. Or you can click “Yes to All” to effectively overwrite every file with a duplicate name in the target directory.

But what if you want to click “No to All?” There’s no button for you, but that doesn’t mean Windows won’t let you skip all the duplicate files. All you have to do is hold down the Shift key and click No. Now Windows will skip all files with duplicate names and copy the rest of your files to the new directory, thus saving you a lot of time, heartache, and repetitive finger motions, and giving you the opportunity to go and make a nice cup of tea instead.

I have written about this before, but it has been a regular enquiry recently: how to print really big images. In my presentations, I show some films of pupils reading their masterpieces to camera. They are excellent and always get an incredibly positive response.

One of the things people ask about is whether we use blue screen  to give the impression that the children are actually sat IN a Myst landscape.

No. We use the blueTACK method! We enlarge a picture, stick it to the wall and they sit in front of it!!

I use an old copy of PrintArtist (version 4!) to print on many sheets of paper.

A nifty on-line resource is BlockPosters

Select a picture from your computer that you would like to use as your poster.

Choose how many pages wide you would like your poster to be? Your poster can be up to approximately 7 feet wide and 4.7 feet high!

Your poster has been created - then just one more click to download a PDF file containing your images.

Check out this little YouTube video, by Andrew Brackin, doing a review of the program. This young lad has really caught the feeling of podcasts and Techie review films.

We hope to add further photos to this post A.S.A.P. meanwhile, be brave, and have a go at commenting.

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Working at King Richard School, Cyprus has been a delight, with new challenges for all.

Working alongside the secondary staff and pupils from Year 7, we have been investigating the worlds of words and the power of blogging.

First off, we entered one of the Myst landscapes and immersed ourselves in the incredible realistic and inspiring environment.

We used this to develop some beautiful, descriptive narrative containing some remarkable similes and metaphors.  One pupil was not too happy with his work, he went home and spent a lot of time getting it just right, returning the next day with a beaming smile and a fanbloomingtastic piece of writing.

Over the rest of the sessions we explored the region we were in, but also everything from hotseating, group problem solving, active listening, to developing open questioning.

(Thanks to Alan Peat for a couple of links above).

The teachers immersed in thought

In our second day, we transfered some of these skills into the REAL, analogue world around the school. We took photographs of some local scenery from a viewpoint that most pupils would not have visited.  We then asked the pupils to use some of their new linguistic skills to describe what they could see.  Some of the more lively pupils from day 1, really settled down to this task and produced some beautiful writing. 

 Blogging

The resident webmaster, RB from Year 10, helped set up the blogging facility on the school website and also solved various technical issues over the 3 days.  The pupils proofread their descriptions which were then uploaded to the website overnight.

Evaluating

On day three, we looked at ways of applying, in future lessons, the many ideas generated.

With great thanks to Rob Murphy, Jude Crowley, Mick Leverett, Chris Niven, Rob McCarthy and Martin Ainsworth for their warm welcome and enthusiasm through all three hard working days.

 It’s a hard job but somebody’s got to do it. A couple of sunny days (and some rain!!!) preparing for our time working in the Service Children’s Education secondary schools on the island of Cyprus.

Being down here at the other end of the Mediterranean Sea, yet updating the blog and communicating with so many people makes you realise just how small this world really is. Take a look at Breathing Earth to see it living and changing.

 (Can’t swim because of the fibreglass cast on my broken hand but doesn’t stop me stopping sometimes eh?! )

(Sorry this post is going up late. A big thank you to web-guru, Clive, for beavering away to solve some major technical glitches )

Joyous! Really enjoyed our day at Woolston Community Primary School, Warrington. Very responsive children, some of whom surprised themselves and their teachers. There was smiles, laughter and creative thinking galore. Well done all.

Thank you to Hannah Moore and Siobhan Regan for looking after us like royalty.

For a West Country lad, Hannah has a significant name, it being the same as the famed Hannah More who is buried in the church at Wrington Village where I now live. She was an educator, writer and social reformer, and instrumental in setting up twelve schools in the 18th century.

The encased (pink) hand hasn’t held me back completely. In addition to the many recent training days and school visits, we have also managed to enjoy some other events.

We had the opportunity to work alongside the Cornwall Literacy team and a select group of teachers from three secondary schools in developing a transition project to take place in 2009. This will integrate some of the visual Literacy ideas and MYST elements alongside Softease’s “Honeycomb“, an integrated set of online creativity and collaboration tools that work through the Internet.

I was also honoured to be invited to North Somerset’s “Find Your Talent” launch. This included a performance of World at our Door, a collection of 5 songs written, by myself, Caro and Tim Barrett. This was originally commissioned for a performance at the Millennium Dome in 2000.

North Somerset has been chosen as one of 10 pilot areas in the country for a government initiative called ‘Find Your Talent’.

The £25 million programme aims to give young people the chance to encounter a range of high-quality cultural experiences for five hours a week both in and outside school.

The scheme will trial different ways of offering young people a range of cultural experiences both within schools and in professional art settings. Different approaches will be used, based on partnerships between schools, local authorities and arts organisations, so that creative practitioners will spend time in schools, as well as children getting the chance to gain experience outside the classroom.

After weeks of anticipation, it was a great pleasure to make it up to the North West again to work alongside the Warrington ICT and Literacy consultants and colleagues from schools across the authority.

We had a quick look at the power and potential of blogging. Warrington itself has three excellent and regularly maintained blogs: Get IT Write, Visual Literacy and Warrington ICT.

Thank you to Chris Beedham and her colleagues for a well organised and fun filled, buzzing event.

Looking forward to a day of lessons at Woolston Community Primary School observed by colleagues attending today’s course.

I have referred to ways of making an internet search more accurate and on target before. A few folk today asked for some more guidance with this.

1. Banish tension by using extensions.

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One of the best ways to search for a file is to add the file extension, or file type, you are looking for.

(All file extensions are preceded by a dot (or full stop) and tell the computer which program or programs are to be used to open that kind of file.)

This can be useful when looking up movie files, images, sounds, and many other document formats.

For example, if you are doing your science planning and are about to spend hours making a PowerPoint presentation about the parts of a plant, save your time.

Try a search for “parts of a plant” and you will come up with hundreds of results.

However, now add “.ppt” (one of the file extensions for PowerPoint) and you will find many, and, some of them, very good presentations about plants and their anatomy. (You could also use “.pps”)

Below are just some of the main “file extension” labels you might find useful in narrowing down a search.

If you are looking for an audio clip, try the name you want (e.g. dog barking, or the name of a TV theme) and one of the following extensions (remembering to put a “dot” before the group of letters)
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Films and movie clips might be followed by one of these extensions:

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Pictures or graphics:
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Word documents:

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Flash files e.g. whiteboard activities:

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There are many other file extensions, but these might get you going to begin with.

Happy hunting!

Do let me know of any obvious (or less obvious) ones I’ve missed.

Thanks Geoff for the reminder of .pdf for… well… pdfs.

I can only apologise for the delay in getting this post up about our visit to St Ives School, especially as the trip was so much fun.

Thank you to Patrick Swayne and his class for an enjoyable stumble through the world of words.

One lass bore a uncanny resemblance to Yeesha, the main character in MYST IV:Revelation. She also rose to the challenge of responding to some probing questions from her classmates as she took on the role of her double. 

After all the virtual beach trips we take children on we were lucky enough to do it for real and had a beautiful explore on St Ives beach with bright blue skies and hot Indian Summer sunshine.

Talking of virtual, Flash Earth is an experimental application for viewing satellite and aerial imagery of the Earth from multiple mapping websites inside a single Flash-based interface.  It is not designed to be a fully-fledged mapping application but more for enjoying and exploring images of our planet.

Follow the global dancing exploits and travels of Matt