ICT Staff Tutors

June Jelly
18th February saw primary and secondary teachers come along to EDS to a CPD session on ICT for delivering the Sciences’ experiences & outcomes. Tracey Stewart, our QIO who looks after Sciences in Dundee, Helen Jack, our Curriculum for Excellence Staff Tutor, and I, helped set the participants on an exploration of ICT that can help [...]

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Web 2.0 CPD went very well last week. Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, Social Networking are very familiar to some people but now also seem to intrigue those people not in the know.
Blogs are like diaries.  Whereas diaries tend to be private, blogs are usually public and are intended to be read.  Pupils using blogs are often [...]

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James Robertson has translated Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox and A. A. Milne’s classic Winnie The Pooh into Scots. This Thursday, 5th November, S2 pupils at Menzieshill High School will have the chance to learn from James about the challenges that writing in the Scots language raises.  Pupils across Scotland will also have this opportunity, [...]

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On Friday I was visiting  Hillside Primary School in Dundee to find out how they have piloted the PS3 with Little Big Planet. Lynne Donachie, the primary 6 class teacher, was chosen to be part of the pilot along with St Fergus. She has done a marvellous job of building her topic work round the [...]

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P7b have been using Windows based Minibooks at St Andrew’s PS. They began a project around the book Dark Isle by DA Nelson which triumphed in the 8-11 category of the Royal Mail awards for Scottish children’s books. Mr Laing, class teacher, created a Glow Group for the class to use during the project and as [...]

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Tom Barrett, who has been exploring the use of Google Docs to encourage collaboration and sharing with his primary pupils, has been posting recently about introducing this way of working with his new Year 5 pupils. In Finding their voice he explains how he used questioning, hot seating and Voicethreads in literacy work. The class [...]

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Dr. Mel Gibsonheld an inspiring and thought provoking session on graphic novels at this years NILE conference in Edinburgh last Thursday. She has worked as a public librarian, and became interested in using graphic novels to get non-readers and troubled kids interested in reading. She has written an excellent resources for Learning Teaching Scotland on graphic novels in [...]

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I’ve just downloaded and have been playing around with the new Spore Creature Creator demo tool. The tool has about 25% of all the body parts that will be available in the full product. It can be downloaded from the Spore website http://eu.spore.com/whatisspore/creaturecreator.cfm.
In five minutes I managed to create the Bazzaloffogus. [...]

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A very interesting blog post on Transforming learning – responding to an image by Tom Barrett which looks at how ICT can change pedagogy in the classroom. Although the example is for a specifically primary unit, the points he has to make are equally applicable to secondary.
Tom introduces an activity he already uses and says
It [...]

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