These are edited highlights from Doug Dickinson’s presentation at the second Textease CT workshop in South Gloucestershire on Monday November 19th.

Despite a few issues with production (an audio glitch within the first couple of minutes, a debutant’s camerawork and the real difficulty of editing HD video on an ordinary-spec PC…) hopefully the many key messages Doug discusses are clear to follow. Look out for more audio and video materials to come.

If you were at this session or found it useful CPD please leave a comment below - two stars and a wish style perhaps?

Thanks to Doug Dickinson for leading the first of three hands-on seminars in South Gloucestershire this month.

Today’s hosts were The Manor CEVC Primary School in Coalpit Heath. Most of the teachers had never seen Textease before but within minutes Doug had them playing with text-to-speech, as well as recording their own audio files and embedding them into their own images in a multimodal style.

The introduction of kinetic calligrams paved the way for everyone to make their own animations including a ‘my local area’ geography journey to school activity and even a sophisticated scientific model of the Moon and Earth orbiting the Sun. The complete set of Textease CT stepthrough guides are available here.

The dates and venues for the final two sessions are:

• Monday 19th November - St Ann’e CE VC Primary School, Oldland Common, BS30 6PH
• Thursday 29th November - St Michael’s CE VC Primary School, Stoke Gifford, Ratcliffe Drive, Stoke Gifford, BS34 8SG.

If you’re a South Gloucestershire school who would like to participate please contact Sue Morgan from the Local Authority who has kindly been making arrangements for these sessions.

Look out for audio and video uploads from these sessions to complete your Textease CPD!

Following on from the firework themed pictures, Simon Mills has come up with some great ideas for extending seasonal use in other ICT tools.  Suggestions made include using the firework images created in Textease Paint as a starting point for a guided or shared writing session.  He then goes on to point out the benefits of importing the images to Textease Presenter and using Presenter to create work with images supported by sound and text.  Podium is mentioned as a great oppertunity to present and perform work giving it purpose, context and a sense of audience. 

 All these ideas sound really good for extending the use of ICT within a topic, providing the opportuninty for pupils to be creative and add their own ideas or experiences, combining pictures, sound and text.

To look at Simon’s lesson suggestions in full go to:

http://twowhizzy.blogspot.com/2007/10/remember-remember-5th-of-november.html

Being a fan of fireworks and as this is the firework season I was really pleased to find some fabulous examples of firework pictures made using Textease Paint.  It’s great to see seasonal work, it keeps things fresh and exciting.  I’m already looking forward to seeing some Christmas pictures!

If you want some fantastic firework inspiration have a look at Doug’s picture at http://redbridgeprimaryit.blogspot.com/

Following a recent announcement by Curriculum Online, schools are being reminded of the service’s scheduled closure in August 2008.  Further to this, all e-Learning Credits must be used before the 31^st August 2008 in order to gain maximum benefit from the allocation.

To read the announcement in full click on the following link: 

http://www.curriculumonline.gov.uk/News/Curriculum+Online+-+news+update.htm