Monday, 6 June 2011

Update on blogspace

Hi everyone, it's time to update your links to where all the latest blog posts are being put. Please subscribe to the new blog at http://blog.digeratidom.com/

All the existing posts from this blog have been migrated in to the new blogspace. The reason for the move is simple - I wanted to move from the Blogger platform to Wordpress as I have quite a few new developments in the pipeline. Please do visit the new blog and say hi. Not only will my blog continue to chronicle E-Learning developments, but I am opening up its remit to cover all manner of things relating to educational technology and school leadership.

Catch you soon,

Dom

Friday, 8 January 2010

Costello Technology College Shortlisted for ICT Register Showcase Award

Yes, it's official! Costello has been shortlisted for an ICT Register Showcase award by a panel based on our submitted portfolio, portfolio of strengths and presence on the ICT Register website. Our submission has been based on the fantastic progress we have made tackling parental engagement through the use of our parent portal, alongside how we have developed E-Learning to support KS2/3 transition through our transition portal on FROG. We are really excited that we have got this far and hope that we make the final shortlist down to four. A lot of time and effort went into putting our wiki for the submission toegther. Our presence on the ICT Register can be found here.
If you would like to look at the nominations then you can find the ICT Register Showcase Awards voting page here. If you feel that our submission is worthy of recognition please tke the time to vote for us

Saturday, 14 November 2009

Online Publishing Service - YUDU

Thought I would share this with everyone as I think it is absolutely brilliant. Our newsletter is a fantastic publication which we have traditionally printed out to go out to all of our parents as an A5 publication. As good as it was photo's were not in colour and it was not the most environmentally friendly aproach that we could take due to the volume of paper used. So, a big thanks to Simon - you know who you are :) For pointing me to this excellent service last academic year. I thought it was about time that I share this with everyone else. For £99 a year the school gets its own online media presence which is easy to upload, organise and manage content. In it's simplest form you can just upload an existing pdf document for example and the service will do it's magic to create an online version of the publication for you - the flash implementation is excellent. More exciting however is the functionality to embed rich media into a static publication by way of flash and audio. Just imagine the college newsletter, turning over to the sports page, having a writing article on last week's rugby victory accompanied by an embedded video. We have been stunned with what we have got off a £99 per year.

Our November 2009 edition of the newsletter:

Click to launch the full edition in a new window.

We are going to be putting all sorts of publications live onto this service over the next few months, including a rich media prospectus for the college, option booklet, revision guides to name but a few. What is really nice is how simple it is to embed the digital publication back into FROG. Verdict 10/10

Monday, 5 October 2009

Developing and enhancing school management through FROG

Have just been developing some new pages for our staff presence in FROG. Teaching staff now have to record all formal lesson observations using FROG - a great way to get a handle on the quality of teaching and learning. This information is then presented to SLT when they log on to the portal.