Slideshare from an OpenOffice Impress presentation on the basics of fractions. Based on an idea from Malcolm C. It worked for his students so I’ll try it out with my Level 1 Adult Numeracy students.
A couple of worksheets coming as well…. You can download a PDF of the Introduction to Fractions presentation [ 160Kb ]. If you load this into Acrobat Reader you should be able to view it in full screen/presentation mode. I’ve seen a couple of people have problems with cross platform transfer of presentations this week, so I’m developing a ‘lowest common denominator’ style (if you will pardon the mathematical pun). The ‘builds’ in this presentation are actually separate copies of the final slide in the sequence with bits removed to form earlier slides. There is no custom animation, and so less to go wrong!
Thanks to Geoff Rebbeck for telling us how PebblePad is used in his college. PebblePad is a rich system, so I should not have been so surprised that the way its being used at Thanet is so different to the way I’ve seen the system for assessed portfolios.
The new building has IWs in each room (240+ across all the campusses), with PCs in teaching rooms. Staff do not have laptops, staff PCs are allocated to staff rooms. There is a campus wide wifi for students so they can use their own laptops – the students authenticate and are taken to a landing page. They can’t print yet but that is being worked on. Some classrooms have pop up PCs on flat desk. The point was made that the layout of the desks necessitated by these PCs was a bit traditional (in rows).
In the learning centre the students can talk quietly, sit at drop in computers, some of which are Macs for the designer students. Some of the other drop in computers are Macs but dual booting into Windows. FaceBook and other social networking sites are not blocked. I asked a group of students if they used FaceBook for college work and they said they used the chat function to talk about things so as not to disturb other students in the centre. They also remind people about deadlines. The College has some software that allows access rights to be assigned flexibly, and allows blanket policies for cases where there is a duty of care.
There are IWs in the catering kitchen, the workshops, the salon and the theatre. Another post soon…
I’m attending an unconference tomorrow at Gloucester College. This event is supported by a community page on the ning.com social networking site, I’ll link to that when the event is over. Ning is easy to use as a participant and provides a range of tools (photo, video sharing, automatic generation of slide shows from photos, pages for each participant, forums).
The organiser has laid the foundations for some useful workshops, and a group of FE teachers should be able to self organise if anyone can! More during and after the event.
Most of us see ourselves as corks floating in a stream, persisting things moving along in the stream of time … The fact is, however, that there are no corks in the stream. There is only one stream. What we conceptualize as “cork” is also stream. Steve Hagen
I’ve been using the EeePC with my t-mobile modem in class to show selected YouTube videos and slide share presentations about GCSE / level 2 maths. Individuals can see an exposition of a topic to remind themselves, but the main outcome is increased use of the access maths blog.
There is loads of stuff on YouTube and similar sites, enough to allow choices of approach for different students. Using the modem means that I can access YouTube in the classroom, like most UK Colleges, we block YouTube on the College network because of inappropriate content in the comments left on videos and some videos themselves. I am using pre-selected videos ‘embedded’ on a blog with mature students so there is little risk of misuse, and once students see the material they seem more likely to use the blog.
Update on Ubuntu 9.04 on EeePC: A stock install of Ubuntu 9.04 Beta is working great on the Asus 701 EeePC with most functions working. There is very little storage space left on the 4Gb SSD, and the 512Mb of RAM means that I had to allow for a small swap partition – Firefox and the OS take around 200Mb of Ram increasing as you pull in the flash player and multimedia functions. Running OpenOffice Writer on top of that puts you well into swap. Using a recent Ubuntu means that wifi and my t-mobile modem ‘just work’. I’ve not yet cracked getting the projector recognised by Ubuntu – others are having problems with this, and I need to spend a bit of time trying some xserver configuration.
