Film Premier on an Updated School Website

It has taken a while, but the long awaited upload of Doug's movie to the school website has eventually happened. Potato Romance can be found by following this link, and if you want to download and save a copy, you can do so by right clicking on the link and then clicking, "save target as." Hope you enjoy. As a first atempt I have to say I think it is pretty amazing. Well done.

Stop Motion Animation Afternoon

We had a bit of a disaster this afternoon when the Internet went down all over the school. This put a block on the session we were intending to have. However with a couple of potatoes, a box of cocktail sticks, and a few balls of plasticene we whiled away the afternoon using a pair of Digi Blue cameras, by making some short stop motion animation films. Here are a some photographs from the session, maybe we will be able to upload the movies we made to the community learning section of the Teyfant school web site soon. What a creative bunch you are. Well done and thank you.

A question was asked about where the cameras came from. Here is a link to Tag Learning, the company we bought them from. You can download Movie Maker, a tool for editing home movies and video files like this for the PC from the Microsoft Website by following this link. Microsoft also have a really nice program that allows you to add sounds, music and text to digital photographs. Rather than a slide show you can use this program to make short movie type files called Photo Stories. The program called photostory, can be downloaded by following this link.

Looking Forward To Our First Session Friday 2nd March 2007

This Blog has been set up as an online journal for a series of workshops that will be run for parents, within Teyfant Community School, South Bristol, England. Our first sessions are to be developed over the Spring term of 2007, building on experiences gained from 2 previous, Parent and Children together, Internet Rangers workshops, in the Summer and Autumn Terms of 2006.

During the Autumn Term many our students were introduced to Think.com, as an online learning and community tool. During these sessions we will introduce the adult members of our wider learning community to some of the free and open source tools available to them online, and seek to establish the beginnings of a similar online learning community.

We will explore netiquette and e safety through the use of several resources available through Google services, including Gmail as an online mail service (plus), Blogger as an online publishing space, Docs and Spreadsheets, picassa or Flikr and Google Groups. Hopefully we will all gain a great deal from the experiences we share. Using these online tools will also enable us to begin sharing and collecting material that can be used with other free and open source software downloads that alongside our school website can build on work carried out in school to support student learning at home. Hopefully we will all find these sessions great fun and valuable. I know I am really looking forward to them.