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This year Kudlian Software, creators of the award winning I Can Animate, are supporting the DCFS’s Tune In – Year of Music by launching an exciting competition that challenges pupils to become animators and composers!

Animate to the Beat invites young animators aged 5 to fourteen years from schools across the UK to create a character and introduce them through a short animation and a piece of theme music.

Aspiring young filmmakers can use any type of animation to bring their characters to life and should compose or choose a piece of copyright free music to represent the personality of their character.

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Is there a budding Hockney, Turner or Lowry sitting in your classroom? 10 Downing Street is currently running an art competition for young people, which is divided into three age groups: 5-7, 8-11, 12-16. The winning entries of each age group will be displayed in Downing Street.

There are four rounds and the closing date for this round is 25 February 2010. Each round will have a theme and the current theme it is ‘Keeping Healthy’. The entries can relate to how the students try to keep healthy, diet, exercise, do sports, hobbies etc.

For more information visit: http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page21130

At BETT last week we saw a number of new technologies and approaches.  Click below for a quick intro into some of the things that we found interesting.

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Last week as I was asked by William Brookes School if I could attend their Open Evening and give a demonstration of the new video conferencing equipment the LA has installed in the school.

I put out an email to a group of people I thought could assist me and Tim Boundy from Janet (http://www.ja.net/services/video/jvcs/) came up trumps.

Tim arranged for Audra May from The Service Centre at ClearWater, Kansas to connect with us.  This was arranged at 5:30pm on Wednesday and I was due to kick off at 7pm – no pressure!

At 6pm I arrived at William Brookes and found a phone that I could dial Audra on to find out the details of her Video Conferencing unit, on obtaining the details I used JVCS to launch the conference immediately.  I was amazed to see how easy this and I was soon talking to Audra via VC and not the phone.

Audra arranged for three sessions to run and I was able to grab a couple of students to interactive with her tutors.  The sessions broadly covered, Kansas and wheat, learning Chinese and a session on Chinese culture and school life.  During the two hours the number of students I have interacting grew and parents were amazed that we were talking live to tutors in Kansas, USA.

The sessions were tremendously successful and I would recommend using the Service Centre at Clearwater for VC opportunities. You can book the session via CILC (http://www.cilc.org/search.aspx).

I have just shown this website to several of my colleagues and they all agreed I should post it up here. Thanks again to Ollie Bray for sharing this with the audience at Handheld Learning earlier this week.

Ollie suggested that it could be used to engage students during geography lessons, when do you think you could use it?

At the Handheld Learning Festival I attended a session by Ollie Bray from Learning and Teaching Scotland, he went through a variety of websites that could be used to support teaching and learning.  One of his suggestions was Bing, Microsofts new search engine, Ollie didn’t mention it for it search capabilities but for the picture on its homepage.

When you move your mouse over the picture on the homepage there are several notes/questions about the picture.  As the picture changes daily this could be a nice activity at the start of a lesson.

Augmented Reality technology has been just over the horizon for a while. It was even shown on the Gadget Show a while back so it must now be creeping into mainstream.  It’s been interesting to watch it develop and it would be great to see where it will lead educationally.  There have been  AR applications for various hardware out for a while but imagine the richness of an information source that reads your location and gives corresponding information on your handset about your surroundings. This article outlines some of the ins and outs of presenting data and information through AR.  As one developer says, it’s ‘…just like building a website.  You have your data source and you’re just trying to parse and present it in a meaningful way…’. The possibilities for businesses are huge if this takes off; conversely, the possibilities for mischief, misuse and hijacking of such a system for personal or commercial gain might also raise huge problems.  This could be a good lesson starting point for a discussion on the amounts and types of data that such a system could display on a handheld, where it could be gathered from, who would have access to and compile that data, and where there is a potential for the introducation of bias.

A rich source of AR content can be found at ARSights, where a huge number of 3D models have been built and placed on a Google Earth layer.  The models have been built in Sketchup and can be viewed in 3D by using a webcam and the printed marker page.

I’m looking forward to my 3D AR Top Trumps cards arriving soon.  3D Bugs or Ben 10 Alien Force in 3D cannot fail to be awesome.  Just for my children, you understand…

 This event was held in May at West Bromich, Albion Football Club. It was an opportunity to find out about future developments from the 2Simple team (Nigel, Max, Katie and Julie).  Guest speakers included: Margaret Zglinski from Sandwell LA, who talked about how they used 2Simple software in their successful creative projects for KS1 and Early Years called Time to Talk and Time to Think. Simon Widdowson from Porchester Junior School, Nottingham showed examples of how 2DIY has facilitated teaching and learning in his school.   There was also feedback from schools who piloted the new online tools. There were demonstrations of the newest software -2 Do it yourself,  2Simple French and Maths city 2.

2DIY is designed to allow pupils to easily create their own activities and games. Children click, drag and insert items on screen and save as a flash file(.swf).  Teachers can also use it to create personalised resources for children in minutes.

www.2simple.com/2diy

You can view (or add) samples of 2 DIY creations at

http://www.2diyarchive.co.uk/

2Simple French has over 200 activities and children learn correct pronunciation by listening to french speaking robots and watching how their lips move. There are also developments in 2 Simple  Spanish and  a suggestion to create a 2Simple  English as an additional language.

 www.2simple.com/french/video

2Simple Maths City  (shape, space, number and measure) – foundation stage children explore these concepts through topics – The Birthday Party, The Building Site,  The Shoe Shop, The Fruit Shop and Underwater World.

www.2simple.com/mathscity2/video

2Simple are also in the process of developing “2Assess”. It will be a snap short tool of skills and is not intended to give a level or measure ICT capability or to develop self reflection. It will be an additional tool to annotated work. There will be videos to go with each activity.

In his Shropshire ICT conference keynote speech Russell Prue mentioned the i-GotU GPS device for tagging photos using GPS.  After a colleague purchased one for under £20 from Maplin I thought that I should give it go.  So at Easter I set the matchbox sized device to log my position every 15 minutes and simply left it in my rucksack as I went off on my travels.  The image shows the tracks that the device logged overlayed onto Google Earth and also photos that I then tagged.   Superb value for £20 although there is a more powerful version 2 that is now out but that is still less than £50.  One of the key questions is would it be better to spend a little more and buy a Garmin device?

All Shropshire secondary schools now have access to Encyclopaedia Britannica. It is accessable through the Learning Gateway in 2 ways. It can be added as a webpart to a page – this allows all staff and pupils to access it to undertake research.  Alternatively, staff can add Britannica resources and links to lessons within Talmos. One of the nice features of Britannica is that pupils can create and share workspaces so that pupils can collaborate on research tasks. For further information email Steve Compton (compton.s@shropshirelg.net)