Branching out

I've been blogging at the East Lothian Council Exc-el site for a few months now, and decided it was time to set up a proper blog for myself. So here I am!

I expect to be blogging mainly about stuff.

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Learning styles are a myth and I am not an auditory learner

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I switched on Radio 6 this morning, and the track they were playing had a drum sound which caught my ear. It reminded me of a rototom - a tuned drum which was quite popular in the 80s. I had a set of three in my drum kit.



I doubt many listeners would have made that connection. I suspect many listeners would not even have particularly distinguished that drum sound. I think many people just hear songs in a much less differentiated way, unless they make a real effort. I, like most musicians, tend to hear the guitar, the drums, the bass, the keyboard and the vocals separately.

In other words, I am extracting more information from the audio than some might.

It would be tempting to imagine, therefore, that I would learn better through hearing than through other senses. But that is nonsense. Imagine trying to learn about the physical geography of a country through hearing about it without a map!

But this is exactly the argument made by people who insist they are "visual learners" d…
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My TeachMeet slot - Animation in Maths

Here's what I would have said if I'd had more time:

I have grabbed one hour per week in an IT suite with my class of level B/C S2 mathematics pupils. We have spent some time using Tutpup, which has been good fun, and has caught the students' imaginations. But it does not fill an hour per week - 20 minutes is about enough at one time.

The biggest success has been the work we have done on creating mathematical stories. We happen to have been using GoAnimate, but I think this would work just as well with Comic Life, Digital Video or any medium which has some depth of skill acquisition but delivers rapid initial gratification.

Here's an (unfinished) example of one of the animations:



I am pleased with this project for several reasons:

The pupils are enjoying learning how to make animations. Enjoyment is sometimes a bit thin on the ground in maths for some of these students, despite my efforts to jolly things up, so I'm delighted to see them turning up early to the computer l…
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ActiVote Walkthrough Part 1

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At my visit to Musselburgh Grammar this morning, I spoke to some of the maths department about using Activote. They were enthusiastic about the potential of the technology, but said something like "it looks easy as you stand there and explain it, but we'll forget everything you've said by the time we next come to use it".

So.... to provide a bit of backup, here's a step by step guide to using Activote with your class.

The following assumes that the voting pads have been registered with your PC. If not, chase up IT!
Setting up the User Database
You'll want your pupil names to be stored in the system, so that their names appear at the top of the screen when you run a vote. Here's how....

In East Lothian, we have a problem - we don't have write-access to the place on the C drive where the user database is stored! To get around this, we need to copy the default user database to somewhere that is writeable, then tell ACTIVStudio that we've done so:

In ACTIVS…
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