Cardonald college

Well thanks to Claire for her and her colleges hospitality. Especially for the notes on the wall directing us. A great example of how it is the little things that make the difference.

I found Grahams talk very interesting. I am still a little surprised that they found it so hard to recruit educators, and also that there are 10,000 questions for computing - hubba, hubba. The subject mentors must seem like the answer to all his prayers. A friendly subject mentor with a group of specialists in tow must seem like a god send.

Well I have a list and am slowely ticking names off it (a podcast list that is). Sorry if you were not able to do yours, I know that there was a rush and people had to go to other meetings and catch trains. However, fear not, I will get you....and your little doggies....

Podcasts For Thursday

Just a little reminder that I will be bringing along the video to take the video podcasts for all of the subject mentors on Thursday at the meeting.

If everyone could perhaps think about what they want to say then that would be great. Ideas would include:

• Introduce yourselves


• Your Subject area


• Your contact details

Quick talk about what you hope to accomplish and any project info you want to share

Should be fun

Penny's Group

On Thursday we had a fantastic couple of presentations

Firstly Duncan Gillespie and Robert Brown stunned(I think it deserves this) Peggy and her group with their introduction to their Blogging system. Duncan and Robert where able to show how easily they were using a 24/7 medium to deliver learning and support for students and staff. Since first seeing this shown to Gerry and I during the Action learning sets a few years ago, I have watched how this initiative has blossomed to the easy to use, educator friendly, accessible to all tool that it has now become.

Even SQA, have sat up and are now looking at ways of putting together a matrix to show how this very student friendly and engaging tool (using eportfolios) can be linked to the many different core skills with which it embeds as part of the process.

Even more fortunate is that Duncan and Robert have licenced it under GNU (which is free for all open source) and are even offering to help set people up. They have created much of the back-end procedures to make using it VERY easy, and for all those out there with kids are true higley town heroes of the elearning field.

The Second Demo was carried out by Colin and David Burgoyne

As many might know David is looking at using SameTime to carry out learning as part of his project, and now that he is (wether he knows it or not) our resident expert it was great to see the demo. Both Colin and David clearly demonstrated:

1. How simple it was to use


2. How effective it was


3. How easy to share resources

All in all it was a very interesting and informative morning - real seat of the chair stuff