FlashICT.net

Long time no post - so many distractions - my beautiful wife & daughter plus at school we’ve had OFSTED, Naacemark / ICT Mark inspections then there have been holidays in Scotland and much much more…. Plus I’m continually developing the ContentGenerator.net applications - more posts about them in the coming few days.

Anyway, I’m still looking for an ideal solution for displaying RSS on a static webpage. On my ReviseICT.co.uk website I display the latest BBC technology news in a sidebar. I really like this solution as it continually updates the site, keeping it fresh and current.

My aim is to show content from each of the forums that I run on the relevant website. I’d like to show the latest posts on the History Teachers’ Discussion forum plus the Student History Help forum on the SchoolHistory.co.uk homepage, I’d like to do the same with the ContentGenerator.net forum and the EffectiveICT.co.uk forum.

However, I cannot use the same method that I use for the BBC feed. This seems to be because the Invision Board RSS is a completely different format to the standard RSS.

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One of the areas I feel Flash has great potential in education is to enable students to help develop their own skills and understanding, using interactive tools to help them revise. Last year I identified an issue with my Year 11 class that they knew their facts, but were finding it tricky to put together exam style answers. My intended solution was simply to give them lots and lots of practice questions. Trouble is, once I do this, I then create lots and lots of marking. Fair enough, but a teacher simply cannot keep up with a Year 11 student producing 10 essays and expecting them to be marked in 10 minutes.

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Recently I’ve been developing free releases for ContentGenerator.net. Two reasons really - firstly I do genuinely want to share the technology. I’m really pleased with the concept - I can extend the use of Flash-based e-learning activities that I’ve created but not force others through the hassles of directly editing Flash files. My free releases allow anyone to download and develop their own e-learning materials.

Secondly I’m obviously giving some software away free to encourage people to purchase the pay-for programs.

The are now three entirely free programs avaiable from ContentGenerator.net. The time I’ve spent developing and tweaking them has made them - in my opinion at least - comparable to quiz generating software that you have to pay an extensive amount for.

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Using the tools I developed for the SchoolHistory.co.uk games search, I’ve now launched a simliar feature for my ReviseICT.co.uk website.

Unlike SchoolHistory.co.uk’s wider remit, the ReviseICT.co.uk website is much more focused upon just interactive games and activities so I hope that the dynamic Flash menu will become central to the website. As additional games and exercises are added, I just update a .swf datafile and the various menus across the site will all be updated.

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I’m delighted to briefly mention that my ContentGenerator.net website has been chosen as the ‘Site of the month’ on ‘NQ Online - part of Learning and Teaching Scotland‘ - the website for secondary teachers of National Qualifications in Scotland.

On http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/nq/resources/weblinksdirectory/ they’ve posted that:
“This multiple choice quiz generator is easy to use and fun for teachers […]

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This is something I’ve had ‘nearly completed’ for ages, but I feel confident enough to allow others to use it now. With the copious number of history game topics that I’ve got on the SchoolHistory.co.uk website, together with the topics that other history teachers are developing using my ContentGenerator.net programs, I found that it was too tricky for students to find the games they were looking for.

I thus developed a Flash-based menu system that would allow users to search and sort the various games until they found what they were looking for….

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I released the second beta version of the Fling the Teacher generator (version 0.8) two weeks ago. At the time of typing, there have been 376 downloads - which is really pleasing to see. Feedback has been very positive too. The Fling the Teacher generator is a free program, available for anyone to download once they have registered on the ContentGenerator.net forums.

This article goes onto explain how the Fling the Teacher game has developed, how I produced an vastly overly-complicated solution for the Fling the Teacher generator and how I’m now finally approaching a usable, finished program for all to use.

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