A Journey into Learning

Stephen Fry shares my appreciation of Nintendo’s game machine – in particular Wii Fit. There has been a lot of interest from teachers across the school in learning to use the Wii console with lots of ideas for its use in the classroom.

The PE Coorninator is looking at providing a console in each classroom as part of an initiative to increase the amount of physical activity the kids are engaged in.

I saw this link to useful advice on using access technologies with SLD students (as seen on Wiltshire SEN ICT Nuggets).

I hope you all had an enjoyable summer. Welcome back!

We have had ongoing problems with both pupils and staff sending multiple copies to our networked printers. Our children have special needs, and many of the ASD students love to print hundreds of pictures of whatever the subject of the latest obsessions (Ford Focus cars, Korean cartoon characters, cricket scores and Dyson vacuum cleaners jump to mind – you know who you are ). The staff seem to have some peculiar notion that if they hit the print button a few dozen times their printing has “a better chance of getting through”. Printing costs have been getting out of hand.

I have managed to thwart them with the aid of the excellent Printer Manager from Pallista. The software prevents users from sending the same thing to print more than once in quick succession, and also allows me to set users print quotas – features that are lacking on Windows Server 2003.

Many thanks to James@Pallista – who after reading my blog offered us a discount to help support the work that we do. Many thanks James – we think your software is good!

We’ve had some child-protection issues at school lately involving social networking sites and I have been addressing e-Safety issues in class and assemblies. There are ongoing issues as to what sites to filter and whether online games should be permitted (Runescape is the current favourite amoungst the secondary cohort).

This film gave me food for thought – as seen as Susan’s blog. Could there be a role for using social networking sites as a teaching aid with ASD pupils who often have huge issues with socialising and self-confidence similar to (although more profound than) the 3 music fans in the video?

I had a good day at the SENJIT conference yesterday. There were some interesting speakers – including the inspiring Wiltshire special school head and Mac-nut Sean O’Sullivan, and the enthusiastic Jocelyn Chappel (ICT teacher and open-source enthusiast).

There was much discussion over the BSF programme and the share that SEN gets of the £4.5bn IT spending. There seemed to be a concensus that the raft of learning platfoms avaliable for schools are overly text based and are not yet suited to SEN schools.

On a personal level I find it hard to get excited about learning platforms whilst there is so many free Web 2.0 resources to be harnessed on the internet. How can a learning platform compete with the innovation of the internet? I worry that it would be constraining.

I’ve just finished the latest edition of Grapevine, Moselle School’s bi-annual magazine. Take a look!