Head in the Cloud

Blogging is a strange thing. If you know me, then you'll know I do tend to say things as I see them. My blogs are often a reflection of how I feel about something and tend to 'ramble' somewhat as I commit these to the screen. Therefore writing these things down and publishing them to the public, does sometimes leave me feeling a little exposed. In my last blog, I mentioned how I personally felt that the BETT show, since moving to Excel had become very 'corporate' and that it didn't have the noise, hustle and bustle and dare I say the heart, that was so very much part of BETT when it was at Olympia. Was this just me, or did anyone else feel the same? Unless someone comments on a blog post I don't really know how people are reacting to what I've have written. Are they indifferent, whole heartedly agree or really upset with the things I write? Interestingly that last post did generate some feedback from people who read it. They generally seemed to agree wit

Another year, another BETT Show begins and I'm going to be travelling up to Excel London tomorrow (Friday) to attend. I first visited as a classroom teacher and ICT coordinator in about 1999. An early morning Friday start, on a coach arranged by the local authority, full of excited teachers, happy to have escaped their school for the day. A four hour trip (if we were lucky and there were no hold ups) down the M4 to Olympia, London. Since then I think I've attended every single BETT event, first at Olympia and more recently at its new home at the Excel in London's Docklands. In about 2009 I even gave a presentation at BETT on the use of the CBBC Bamzooki software in classroom to support ICT modelling. However, I've noticed that over the last couple of years I don't get the same sense of excitement about attending. During the last couple of days I've been thinking about why I feel like this. I am actually looking forward to meeting some colleagues that I work wit

I haven't blogged for a while but I've just seen something I thought was really neat and I thought I should share it. At one time I used to do a lot of work with schools on using film trailers. One activity we used to do with classes was using a recent trailer in iMovie, strip off the audio track and get the children to rebuild the trailer using original music they've created from Garageband, adding sound effects, and a new narration track. Some great opportunities for literacy work and the creative use of audio. I used to use Zamzar to help me download the video, however several years ago this feature was removed. However, I've just seen a very useful tweet that showed me how to download Youtube videos very easily. Basically between the www. and the youtube.com just add ss - eg. https://www. ss youtube.com/watch?v=t-C..... You then get taken to a page where you can download the video to your computer. Simples! REMEMBER - Think about copyright and don't be tempted