mikes web log

On a Monday my wife has to cover for an hour a reception class in her school. She was working with the pupils and eventually sat down with an attractive long haired girl and asked her for her name. No reply. A few other questions were forthcoming but again no reply. Was she an elective mute? Possibly but there was no information to support this. Another girl approached. “Hello do you know this girls name, Yes , she is Janice” “Why does’nt she speak” “She is Italian”. What do you do when faced with this dilemma and you know no Italian. You have a picture of a dog and say “Bella cain” and the girl suddenly replies “Bella” The ice is broken.

Based upon the Aston experience and discussions with Lancaster
University I thought we could move the intergenerational learning into a new field of study. The European Union has launched several bidding rounds inviting groups to use innovative ICT to support carers and those cared for.

It is likely that most of the projects submitted will be linked to assistive technologies where for example a cared for person has a blood pressure, or similar monitor feeding information over the internet to a support unit.

My idea and that of the Brodie (Dave Brodie – ex Headteacher Prince Albert Primary) was to use ICT in its social format to support the carers and cared for. For carers and particularly those cared for independence and communication are two of the most important features of their wellbeing.

The problem is that there is in many instances a lack of confidence and skill in using ICT to support effective use of social interaction. If this is the case then why not use the young people of the community to upscale the adults so that they can gain the necessary confidence to use ICT for social interaction and in turn support the development of the cared for persons confidence and skills.  We spoke to a local secondary school and the idea was received enthusiastically.

The next stage was to get a few ideas down on paper and look for funding to support a small scale case study. European bidding is OK, if you are fairly confident your idea will work and you have sets of established partners in other countries. Seeking European funding is also a bureaucratic nightmare so we decided at this point to look elsewhere. We eventually decided to bid for a small amount of funding from the Nominet Trust. Nominet Trust bidding is completed online, you submit an initial outline of your project and within 20 days they will say Yay or Nay. For this idea we got a Yay so it is now in development for a final submission on the 14th September.

During the Aston Pride experience (see previous blogs) the team decided to look at developing some intergenerational learning. This recognised that those within the Aston community with the most ICT skills were the young people of the community. We had children moving from Year 2 – year 3 in the primary schools having a remarkabke skill level in PowerPoint, they could all email, edit pictures and use Word competently, however in their parents generation ICT skills were noticeably absent.

The projects long term plan was to upskill the adults by getting the young people in the home to teach them how to use the ICT that Aston Pride had put into their home. To this extent we persuaded schools to run ‘Inspire’ workshops where the parents joined their children for ICT lessons in the school. We also created the award winning  booklet ‘Keeping IT in the Family’ which in cartoon form helped the children teach their family members abour such things as email, using a digital camera, internet safety, social networking online shopping etc.

Aston Pride and the Computers in the Home project has now ended (March 2011) although it has got some sustainability and we do not expect the project to officially end until March next year. There is however a growing collection of evidence that shows that the intergenerational learning has had an impact. Parents are more involved in their children’s homework if it has an IT element and parents are talking more about their own use of ICT. For a view of some of this evidence you can read the final evaluation of the project by Don Passey of Lancaster University.

This story is worth the restarting of the blog. One of the classroom assistants at Gina’s school has a husband who is a fire officer. He was recently called out to a school where a child had somehow managed to get his finger stuck in a hole in the flooring of the school hall. It was a hole that is usually designed to hold some PE equipment.

The fire brigade arrive and the senior officer approaches a side entrance to the school. A teacher opens the door. The fire officer introduces himself and explains why he is there. “Sorry ” says the teacher “I don’t know who you are and you have not had a CRB check, I cannnot let you in” said the teacher. “Surely you must recognise who I am” says the fire officer as he points to his uniform and the fire engine standing outside the school. “Here is my identification”. “Sorry” said the teacher “I cannot let you in, you havent got a CRB check, you must go to the main entrance”. The fire officer reluctantly and quickly goes to the main entrance where he is let in and is shown to where the child is sitting in the hall with his finger stuck in the floor. He sits down and talks to the child. “What happened?” “I thought I saw a hampster under the floor so I wanted to stroke it” said the child. This was apparently linked to some fluff that was in the hole. “OK” said the fire officer, “Let me look around the hole so I can see how I can get your finger out” said the officer. “OK” said the child as he withdrew his finger from the hole “Can you see now?”

After the event the fire officer had a very informative conversation with the headteacher about CRB checks and the emergency services.

One more day before Egypt!

With trepidation we borded the Dash at Tioman airport. The doors closed and the plane began to taxi along the runway. It stopped! Consternation….why had it stopped. It had stopped because an iguana had decided to stroll across the runway. We waited as in a leisurely fashion it dragged its four foot length body to the otherside of the runway. We then continued.

Back at KL we seemed to join the longest queue of traffic ever to get access to our hotel. Were however pleasantly suprised that they had upgraded us to a premier suite with excellent views of the city.

 Now trying to kill a few hours until we aim again at KLIA for the journey to Dubai and Birmingham. Business Class…of course.

 Its all been pretty hard work for the last three weeks, but somebody had to do it!

Just a little note on the aircraft that brought us to Tioman ( which is the Bali Hi of the musical South Pacific). The Dash 7 was built between 1975 and 1988 so it is a least 20 years old. It seems to be made of cast iron …its got that look about it. As you take off you notice smoke coming from the air vents above your head. It’s not smoke, its condensation. It must be drawing in the cooler air r from outside the plane which then makes the water laden air in the cabin condense air. It is a bit disconcerting. Eventually they must pressurise the cabin because it stops … then as we come into land it starts again.

The airfield on Tioman is titchy so it needs a plane that can land and take off from nothing.

A reminder to myself. Diffusion by waves and my theory about the separation of light bulbs and shoes by wave power.

Yep, it truly is. We wake up in the morning and sit on our veranda and watch the jungle wake up. We see the odd movements of the black monkeys in the distance watch the bats finish there night of activity and hear the awakening calls of the birds. In the short distance you can hear the waves on yet another sandy beach.

 The jungle hut is very pleasant. It is a two storey hut on stilts. We have two 42 inch TV’s, one in the lounge downstairs and the other at the end of the bed. No TV stations, however a huge collection of DVD’s that we can access. On the veranda we can sip wine from the minibar or take a dip in the jacuzzi plunge pool. It is a truly glorious environment. They have just fixed the 56K Internet access so I will not try to upload the video we created.

We walk down wooden walkways to the restaraunts. This means you avoid the unpleasant things about jungles … like leaches. There is one restaraunt on the beach and another at the end of a pier like structure which is sitting in the sea. As we walked across there last night there was a family of black tipped sharks swimming beneath us. I think they are fairly harmless! Or is it the white tipped that are harmless? We were swimming in the same waters earlier in the day……

The lovely thing about this hotel and the previous ones is that there seems to be so few people here. You almost seem to have it to yourself.

We have only one more full day here(today). Tomorrow afternoon we are back to KL and then back to Birmingham on the following day.

Would you believe it we have to travel by boat to our new hotel. There is only one road on the island and it doesn’t go to our hotel! In addition we have a jungle room and we need a ‘shoe’ to climb over the rocks to get to the beach … at least thats what the hotel suggest. Maybe in contact during the week ….may not be.

Sorry for the lack of notes  We left The Aryani Hotel, Terengganu just in  time ….they had run out of wine! Would you believe it … a hotel that had run out of wine.

Also found out that there are no crocodiles in Malaysia. What we saw must have been an Iguana.

We have just completed 4 nights in a great hotel and have now arrived back on KL before we move on to Tioman Island tomorrow morning. The great hotel was the Tanjung Jara  about 50 kilometres south of the capital of the Terengganu region of Malaysia. We transferred by car – a 2 hour journey which had me in agonies for the first hour because I thought the taxi driver was going the wrong way! There I was thinking that we should be going South and instead we were going North. Gina seemed to be very happy about the way in which we were going. I couldn’t understand it. We were going North to a place that should be South of where we last stayed. The sea was on the wrong side of the road! Hell. It took me an hour to get the courage to mention this quitely to Gina…..’I think we are going the wrong way’. ‘Of course not ‘ was the quick reply ‘Whats wrong with your sense of direction?’ The result was, as expected …we were going in the right direction. I had not realised that when we arrived at Terangganu we drove North for our first hotel. I thought we had driven South. It was dark , and raining .. thats my excuse.

The last four days have resulted in knee injuries to Gina and sunburn injuries to both of us. YES..sunburn. We have had no daytime rain for six days. The knee injury was due to a slip on some steps leading to our luxury bathroom (rub it in) the sunburn was due to a days snorkelling on a Jurrasic Park type island where we chased a few turtles and met Nemo. Yes Gina has snorkelled. And she loved it, just like a duck to water. I spent most of my time trying to catch up with her as she raced from one place to another. The unfortunate aspect was that we forgot the suncream so both of us are suffering rather badly today. We have both agreed that we will go back to the Tanjung Jara resort and it didn’t run out of wine.

Tioman here we come. Here are some videos and pictures.

Firstly a sea slug that I found that actually moved. You can just see the black feet on the right hand end of the thing.

slug1.wmv

This is a few seconds of a turtle I met.

turtle_0002.wmv

Guess who this is

Our beach

Our room

Our room