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CPD event January 25th 2006.

Venue: STDC
Cost: Free to all Shropshire and Telford & Wrekin secondary schools
Course code: 52365C

Objectives:

1. Delegates will become familiar with the basic functionality of GameMaker
2. Delegates will understand the benefits of registering the software
3. Delegates will produce a series of lessons to use GameMaker in the classroom

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An interesting new handbook from NESTA Futurelab entitled Games and learning by Richard Sandford and Ben Williamson. The book is available to read online or download as a pdf. The handbook makes good points about the potential for learning and (section 5) acknowledges the scope for learner as games creator. On the other hand evidence shows that the use of games is not a panacea for all and of course “it may well be educators who will need to run to catch up with the emergent understandings, skills and capacities of their students.” Contents include:
1 Introduction: why games and learning?
2 Learning from playing games outside school
3 Using games inside school
4 Games designed for learning
5 Young people designing games for learning
6 Annotated reading list
7 Recommendations
8 Key features tables

From the Becta ICT Research Network:

On Monday 7 November 2005 at 15:00 CET, Xplora (www.xplora.org), the gateway to science education in Europe, is holding an online chat for schools with the inventor, Ray Kurzweil. All teachers are invited to register their classes for the event. Pupils can pose questions about computer, robots, artificial intelligence and more.

An engaging personality, Ray Kurzweil has been a pioneer in many fields. He invented the first optical character recognition machine, which involves computer software designed to translate images of typewritten text. Not only that, he also made the first digital scanner, using a charge-coupled device.

If that weren’t enough, together with pop artist Stevie Wonder, he created the first music synthesizer and he’s also worked in the areas of speech recognition and voice synthesis.

To register for the chat, send an email to Karl Sarnow at karl.sarnow@eun.org.

European Schoolnet (www.eun.org) a network of 28 Ministries of Education across Europe - operates the Xplora portal. It is supported by the PENCIL project, a project funded by the European Commission’s Directorate General for Research as part of Science and Society.

The PENCIL project is part of the wider Nucleus framework, a cluster of science education projects including Europe’s major research laboratories. Read more about the PENCIL project.

Read more about Ray Kurzweil.

As the new term begins, it is likely that you will want to import new users into your schools Digitalbrain account. The new set of instructions are now available to help you to export the relevant data from SIMS.net, make necessary alterations in Excel, and upload to Digitalbrain.

There are also instructions to help you manually create user accounts. This is very useful if you only want to make a few additions, or if new users arrive during the year.

This and other Digitalbrain support information is available from the DB Support Community.

Enjoy!

Originally posted by Steph Ruddick

I have now organised the bus to BETT 2006 on Thursday January 12th 2006.

The bus is open to Secondary, Special and Primary schools.

CPD are going to handling booking and have assigned course code 52366C for the event. There will be no charge for the bus as the total cost has been paid by Stiperstones C of E Primary School.

The bus will leave Sainsbury’s, Meole Brace at 7am and will leave Olympia at 5pm.

It is advisable to register with BETT beforehand, this will save you a lot of time when you get to Olympia.

If you have any questions send me an email.

I have created a new DiDA section within the ICT Community. I have uploaded the various documents I have which cover DiDA, there is a link to DiDA related websites and you can find details of the schools in Shropshire and Telford & Wrekin who are studying a DiDA qualification this year.

Autostitch is a great free application that allows the creation of panoramic views from multiple photos. You simply tell it which photos you want to include and it automagically does the rest. I’ve tried it with small numbers of photos, but the example on their site uses 57 images. Not sure my processor will stretch to that….

This article was in the latest NAACE newsletter:

From Becta colleague Chris Faulkner (Project Manager - KS3 Onscreen Testing Support) is the following item on Becta Support for KS3 ICT onscreen test pilot
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The following is taken from a blog written by Mr Mackenty, I have been reading his blog for several months now and a lot of what he says hits home with me, and the use of Games in Education.
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