Digitalkatie's blog

Teaching the basics...of how to write a letter

With our fancy Web 2.0 world we sometimes forget to teach the basics.

I have been teaching Word Processing to my third years. Today I asked them to type a letter. I showed them how to lay out the page and what information to include and when to put 'sincerely' instead of 'faithfully'.

Their task was to write a letter to someone of their own choosing - a family member or friend far away, a politician about something they feel strongly about, or someone famous if they could find a postal address online (via an agent or organisation if necessary).

Once the letters were written we printed them, signed them, folded them, put them in envelopes, addressed the envelope and put a stamp on it. This was all a bit of a novelty to them. They were unfamiliar with the conventions of where to write the address and put the stamp on the envelope. One pupil wrote the school address in tiny writing on the front of the envelope instead the address of Arsenal F.C.

They then didn't know how to fold the paper to then fit it in the envelope. One pupil held up the A4 paper and the envelope, waving it at me with a look of confusion on his face. I'm not even sure he knew it NEEDED folded.

They have all now written letters to famous people and are very excited at the possibility of getting a response (no matter how unlikely I said it might be). All of the pupils have chosen to post their letter themselves (I checked they knew how to post a letter!). One girl didn't seal the letter so she could show her mum :-)

Also today I was doing an SQA programming task with my fourth years about paying staff who make food mixers. First I need to give a different example about making microwaves instead as most of the pupils won't have seen a food mixer before or even know what one is. We can sometimes make a lot of cultural assumptions in teaching and it's sometimes strange what you end up teaching young people.

Samba de Amigo!

We bought Samba de Amigo yesterday.  It was our anniversary present to each other (yes, we're that sad!)  It is brilliant, even better than when it was on the Dreamcast.  Our friend Stuart had it and would bring it to our New Year's Day parties and we would hook it up to a data projector I had borrowed from work.  Ah those were the days! (Of course the vast amount of alcoholic cocktails helped with the inhibitions of standing shaking maracas)

We started to get quite despondent.  It took us about half an hour to configure the game.  The key factor is the new version is not so dependent on height as the Dreamcast version, where you would have to enter your height into the game.

The Wii version also factors in angle of the wiimotes/maracas.  If you are shaking high, point the wiimotes upwards.  You don't actually have to lift them too much.  For the middle shakes, keep the wiimotes level.  For posing with both wiimotes to one side (this is where we had the major block in the configuration stage) point them behind you.  It seems to work. 

Happy Samba-ing everyone!

Giraffe Hero: the making of...

We made a little film recently.  I had seen this fantastic red giraffe soft toy in TK Maxx and was quite taken by its spotty resemblance to the Guitar Hero controller.  I decided this would make a great film, and as TeachMeet08 was coming up, it was a good deadline for making it.

First of all we discussed how to animate the computer game part of the movie.  I wanted to show the dots floating down like they do in Guitar Hero.  Two options that came to mind were stop motion animation with a very large sheet of paper and some cardboard cutout dots, or using a graphics package like Paint.Net to produce a series of images to then put into an animation program.

I have been using Scratch, a simple games programming / multimedia program developed by MIT with my second years.  They have just finished working through the task cards that are provided on the website and now we're all starting to make Pacman games.

Sean pointed out that Scratch might be a good way to animate the Giraffe Hero game.  I then got very enthusiastic and spent a day creating the sprites and the board and trying to code it all (Sean and Louis had a lovely day out and about enjoying the real world away from computers :-)

The big issue was timing.  I wanted to create a game that worked, so that the individual sound clip for a chord played as the dot got to the bottom of the screen.  This worked first time round, but as it looped it became more and more out of sync.  Ideally I wanted to be able to adapt the game later so that it could be played.  You would press buttons 1-5 at the right times to get the chord to play and win a point.

Here's the first game attempt.  I did have the dots getting brighter and bigger as they got to the bases but I took that out thinking it might speed it up. (Click on the image to play) 

After this version I realised this wasn't helping me get on and make the movie.  I took out the sound clips, but that didn't help with the timing so I then copied the looping dots and made three sets instead that just wait until they're needed before floating down.  You can see that version here on Scratch.

Maybe some day I'll get round to making Giraffe Hero the game, but as you can see my target audience hasn't gor the hang of holding the wireless soft chewable red giraffe controller yet, let alone pressing the buttons on time!

Here's the finished movie:

Back to blogging

I haven't blogged for a long time.  I don't get much time sitting at a computer and I got really put off blogging on my phone when a large batch of blog posts (about a dozen) got deleted by the Typepad program (its a stupid program - deletes posts if there's an error rather than letting you correct it, and won't let you pick entries to publish - it's all or nothing, hence the backlog of posts waiting to publish.)  I still don't have the program working on my phone yet, but never mind, here I am back again.

I'm back at school now too. I went back for a week in June which went well. I wasn't timetabled for classes so I got a lot done that I'd been trying to do since I arrived.  I'm back part-time now, with Wednesdays off to play with Louis (and catch up with sleep!)

I'm amazed what difference energy levels make to teaching.  I'm happy at school!  In the last month I've only had one stressful moment, which was about IT faults and beaurocracy not kids.  I'm having fun helping with a badminton class after school on Mondays, I'm starting a lunchtime thing on Thursdays doing more traditional games outside rather than on computers, like bowling and dominoes.  I may also be getting involved in a Duke of Edinburgh Award group that is being started.  They need help with the skill section so I've offered a) a lego robotics competition b) games making or c) sign language.

There are still problems, but they're not phasing me as much as before.  Slow computers (at times not logging on till 7min before the end of the lesson!), internet and printing down, useful websites blocked, etc.  I'm trying to have a GTD mentality, getting things done there and then, and off my desk.  It's working, and I'm slowly getting through the backlog of tidying and organising.  I'm also getting better at documenting classes and doing decent handouts and activities as I go, fixing stuff that didn't work well before.  I'll finally have a good set of lesson plans as the curriculum changes!

TeachMeet08 @ the Scottish Learning Festival

Next week is the Scottish Learning Festival (previously known at SETT) at the SECC in Glasgow. Hopefully all the Digital family will be going along.  In preparation I've been working on a presentation about the science class I helped with in New York. 

Louis now has Moo cards to hand out when he's networking, and a couple of snazzy handpainted t-shirts with educational slogans on them.  On the back of one is an advert for TeachMeet:

Hopefully Louis will attract lots of attention during the day and then lots of teachers will come along for the free drink to see the presentations and chat to other educators ;-)