The time has come to get my head out of the clouds - well the heady influence of K12 Online... back to the real world.
New projects in school this week. I finally got my act together and began to teach the basics of podcasting to a group of Year6 pupils in an after-school club. They had a quick guide in how to use Audacity to record sound, imprt music and mix audio and music tracks into a single track. To them they saw how easy it was to begin to play around with their own words and music. The pupils found it hugely rewarding and just great fun to do and by the end of their time just about everyone had produced a piece, converted it to mp3 format and saved their work to our server - a great start to our new Year 6 Podcast Radio Show.
The second piece of news from the week is that I have been asked to make a presentation to a group of fellow IT Co-ordinators on using a site called Making The News, ( run by e2bn - East of England Business Network and the Open University) at an upcoming ESIS day Conference in Treforest.
Making the News is a site which allows school pupils to become journalists - they can post news stories and are encouraged to add multimedia clips ( interviews - video film clips ) to their post. The work is then saved and sent by them. As the moderator, I have to look at their work, do any edits, and then rate it ( using a star system0 and publish it, at which time it goes live to the MTN site. I also moderate any comments that are made on their work... the site certainly gets the pupils posting - in fact at present a group of Y6 pupils ( 15 or so ) are giving up lunchtimes to post their latest news. So now it's my job to spread this enthusiasm to a wider audience here in Wales. I'll let you know how I get on.

** check out Tom Barrett's site ( on left under friends ) he has a couple of really interesting project on the go, at the moment**

We look forward to our half term break next week - not a day too soon !!!!!