I have spent the last couple of days, three actually, creating training videos for a client.  In total I have created 11 tutorials, covering 8 skill sets necessary for their staff to master the basics of the software programme they have invested in.  The structure of each tutorial is the same.  In the first instance the skill is demonstrated with an audio track and on screen prompts.  Then the tutorial becomes interactive, it is a complete repeat of the first half  but the audio track, mouse animation and onscreen prompts disappear.  The user has to move stepwise through the video emulating what has just been shown to them.  All correct moves are confirmed and all incorrect moves are supported with prompts.

I departed the supertanker in August of 2009 and joined Team Solutions on 6 month contract.  That short but happy and productive contract has now ended and I am now out on my own as in independent facilitator.  Next year is already looking to be a full and productive year.  I will be working in many schools and also for some commercial clients too. I am spending the summer organising my computers and resources to meet the needs of the many different schools that I am scheduled to be working in.  I am blocked out for specific schools on specific days for all but a few days of the entire academic year.

I will be at Learning @ Schools 10 and have submitted a couple of proposals to the organisers and am waiting to hear if I have been successful again.  I am also intending to go to Ulearn10 in Christchurch, but that is much later in the year.

I am looking back at the last year and am very pleased with the journey that has brought me this far.  As the year closes, I am now eagerly anticipating the challenges of the coming weeks and months.

These guys used to be prime time Saturday night entertainment….  This clip is an instant classic.  Just think of all the claymation etc spin offs you could have in your classroom from this.

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I have just added a new resource to the resources page, the new resource is called Aviary.  You can check what I had to say here.

I have just got back from another exciting annual marathon that is Ulearn.  I had hoped to present three full sessions this year, but was only picked for two, better luck next year.  The conference was its usual mix of inspiration, affirmation and networking.  This year a good deal of my energy went into the networking aspect.  I have made some promising new contacts that are opening up exciting new leads, all of whom need to be followed up in the coming days and weeks.  Below is the presentation slide show that I gave in breakout 1

I have been busy these last weeks working on a variety of projects, some of which are coming to fruition and others that have a distinctly long gestation period.  What is so exciting about all of the projects is their diversity and the range of clients too.

I have been working in a range of secondary schools working with different LMS systems, in fact across the schools I have encountered all of the MOE sanctioned LMSs.  What is interesting is how each of the schools are addressing how they will integrate these tools.  Last Friday I was speaking to a teacher who was recounting some behaviour that he witnessed in a class.  He is a keen advocate for the particular flavour of LMS his school has opted for and as such has put up lots of resources and assignments to his page.  The behaviour he witnessed was three pupils being completely off task during his lesson, they were not disrupting the others in class, just not doing the task at hand.  However what the teacher noticed was that when he checked the logs for his LMS page, those self same students who were off task in the physical space of his class had later, much later 1:00 AM later, gone to the LMS page and had completed the tasks as set.  This prompted us to further discuss the nature of school in a few years time.  Will it be necessary for example for students to physically (at the secondary level) to be at school?  Will it be a requirement of time credits, served either in the physical space of school or via the LMS, in order to have successfully racked up sufficient time at school to qualify for the 40 weeks attendance?

This has been a feature of several advisory conversations that I have had with other schools, how to plan for the future in terms of infrastructure for the school if the only certainty is constant change?  Interesting times and interesting conversations.  It is also very interesting to have the privilege to sit a broad swathe of  schools, both primary and secondary and see how differently they have all approached or want to approach integrating ICT into their particular environments and the unique challenges that each school is presented with.

There are many challenges ahead for these schools and for me.  I am really looking forward to them and to the challenge of guiding these schools along their individual paths.

I have been mulling over a post that I want to make for several days, probably weeks now.  I have been taking notes from books, madly jotting down key concepts and the pages they are on, in my notebook.  In addition I have been making connections between the different texts and new ideas and concepts keep bubbling to the surface of my thoughts.  In a previous post I said that I was reading Born Digital, it is a fascinating book to read and have re-read lots of the chapters to re-visit some of the ideas that the authors have floated.  However in the last few days my latest ‘Red Cross Parcel‘ has arrived from Amazon and it is the combination of the three books that has set my brain off.

I am not really an economics kind of person, but the concepts that lie behind “The Long Tail“ have really begun to intrigue me and I have found myself asking if the economic phenomenon of infinite choice versus the traditional retail model has a resonance with education and e-learning, especially when the arguments of this book are overlaid with those of born digital.  I now have to add to the mix the third book “Convergence Culture” and you begin to see why my brain is fizzing and perhaps why I have been un-able to clearly formulate a post.  I guess that I know in the back of my mind that if I were to start writing where my thoughts are now, imperfect though they are, the act of writing would help me to clarify my thinking and allow me to draw some conclusions, but I think the post would be incredibly long!

I think that I need to perhaps explore the concepts in each book in individual posts and then draw the ideas together.