More than ok

The team did a fantastic presentation about their learnscope project to the PINR Full Faculty Forum last week. It was a very popular workshop selection. They showed the resource they have produced for students to use on portable DVD players. Then demonstrated how easy it is to create an instructional movie using Photo Story. They created one on "How to make a cup of tea"! We'll get it on podomatic when the team return from their well-deserved break. Unfortunately the attempt to record all the audio of the presentation on an mp3 player for podcasting didn't work - too many menus and steps to go through for recording voice - I'll have to get an easy to use digital voice recorder for this purpose.
Earlier this week I presented to the Regional ICT Conference on this Earthworks Learnscope project and led it into use of web2 tools in education. It seemed to go well - they asked questions, requested a progress report on web2 use for teaching and learning at their next conference and asked for URLs. I was also asked if I could talk about this stuff to the regional schools conference (yes). It was interesting that these people, the staff who support ICT for TAFE and schools in western NSW and must have great computer skills, generally appeared not to be particularly aware of what is happening on the internet and certainly aren't engaged with it. Their focus is on maintaining our hardware and supporting corporate systems. Only one or two have a background in education, so the potential of the internet for teaching, learning and assessment is not clear to them. But the Regional Manager is aware and interested enough to have invited me along to give the educational perspective and his crew responded well - cause for optimisim.