ACTIVslate and Exc-el Board Meeting

After a very quick start to the day things actually ended up being relatively quiet first day back (very unusual!). This gave me a chance to tinker with the S5/S6 preliminary examination timetable and get to the bottom of my outstanding in-tray left over from the end of last term.

I also managed to get round a few classes and I was really pleased to see the ACTIVslate in action in the Maths department. Although it’s a cheaper alternative I would still be interested to see a wireless tablet PC fulfilling this function. Although our students are just getting used to the ACTIVslate it seems they are having some difficulty writing with it – as nothing actually appears on the slate itself. I must find a chance to have a play around with it after hours.

At 4pm I attended an exc-el board meeting at John Muir House. The purpose of the meeting was to see where we would like to go with exc-el over the next three years. We really have come a long way in the last year or so and I was really pleased to see that the website now gets nearly 50,000 visits a month.

I thought the meeting was pretty productive and there were lots of ideas being banded around the table. I am keen to explore the use of social software for two purposes 1) professional development 2) student learning. The current exc-el web site is a good example of social software (in particular blogs) being used for professional development. However, I still think we have some distance to go before we truly get students on board. We do have some isolated pockets of good practice which we now need to nurture and develop. One suggestion is to develop a sister (or replacement?) site ‘edubuzz’ which will be more appealing for Children. We are going to invite some young people to be part of the board.

Ronnie Summers and I are keen that we get all of next years S1 students at MGS blogging before they leave their primary schools. I think this will make an excellent transition project, that can then be embedded into their secondary career. As part of this we will need to train student to use tagging and other social software tools to allow them to quickly read other people’s blogs from their class (an aggregator). This will hopefully encourage them to leave comments on other peoples blogs.

Dave Gilmore took some more detailed nots of the meeting and I’m sure he will post them in due course.

One last thing – if you have not seen Alan Coady’s new blog layout it well worth a look and getting more and more musical by the day. Great work Alan.

Comments

[Ewan McIntosh]

I was really sorry to not know about the meeting since, along with many others, I've put a fair bit of work into trying to make more of a success of Exc-el of the past wee while. Never mind - I'll be there next time.

The eduBuzz name and the ideas behind it (i.e. why it's different from Exc-el) were not really meant to be public yet, but since the cat is out of the bag I'll try to make sense of what we're in the middle of negotiating with quite a few companies.

It will be different from Exc-el and, as far as I am concerned, is a replacement for Exc-el which, for several reasons, can be improved upon.

I'll explain as much as I can on my blog once I've had a chat with the team with whom I'm building the portal and branding.

[OllieBray]

Sorry Ewan, I had assumed the name was in the public domain because Don had mentioned it on his blog. Sorry you couldn’t make the meeting – I thought you might be joining us by speaker phone:-) See you soon, Ollie