Just what can you uncover in one week?

Just one week ago today I was at the Naace All Members' Autumn Conference and there, in discussion with colleagues, picked up on the vast amount of things that people are consumed with.

This week my inbox has been dominated ... and I do mean dominated ... by the inappropriate use of an email forum by a group of urgent people discussing the nature of e-portfolios. I do wish that they had got themselves sorted out early enough to talk in a private forum about the topic or at least managed to digest it. As a subscriber to two of the groups I kept getting a double dose of the information ... interesting though it was I do feel that they could have carried on privately. But ... if they had done this would I have missed out on some important details ? A real cleft stick !

I spent two days this week in Cornwall working with some delightful young people podcasting using the Podium Software in French and Spanish. The software proved no barrier to these intelligent youngsters but the impressive thing was the way that the various groups cooperated together and produced the podcasts without 'batting any eyelids'. The school, Helston Community College should be heartily proud of their young people. Their podcast can be found by pasting http://www.podiumpodcasting.com/~182812/
ManyGroups051007130013/rss.xml into your favourite listening tool. This was a first shot for these teenagers and the software wasn't the barrier ... in fact there were no barriers ... they now need to repeat and progress.

Arriving home and checking my feeds I discovered , yet again, that Ewan and Kent were ahead of me.

The Kent ClusterBlog is always a source of new and exciting information and this time has come up with a very interesting web 2.0 app called Jing Project well worth having a look at for image capture and computer screen capture.

I have not had chance to try another suggestion found there but feel that Poly might well excite some mathematicians.

I did notice that my globe trotting friend Ewan was on the other side of the world enjoying himself in New Zealand at the ULearn07 Conference
where I feel sure, judging by his blog, he opened eyes and ears and had his opened too. I noticed that he chose to highlight the excellent work done by Stephen Heppell in terms of emphasising the correlation between creativity and ingenuity. On the 'Be Very Afraid' blog there is reference to a superb piece of 'creative ingenuity' that far outstrips anything a closed school curriculum could possibly imagine. Just watch the Ravensbourne College initiative... and this is now two years old ... where will the thinking be at this end of 2007? It is well worth listening and looking at this year's ideas.

After Shanghai, New Zealand was certainly a place to be!