I have a few Y13 students who are resiting their Unit 2 (G041) paper in January (OCR Applied GCE ICT). They have been panicking a bit and wanted to do some past papers. The issue is that Section A is based on a case study and changes everytime, so lack of time means that’s out of the window. Therefore they can only practice the section B which is generic info about ICT and business. I have set up a small Edmodo group for them and have been sharing hints and tips for passing the exam as well as how to write the three main pre-release task. I also decided to create interactive past papers. These papers would enable them to answer different section B questions from past papers and click a submit via email button and I’d get their answers.
Having recently got from school a licenced copy of Adobe CS3 Master suite I had noticed a function called create form. Using Adobe lifecycle design I have managed to create a very simple and rustic interactive past paper. The video below will hopefully show how its done (although it seems to take an age to load! – was my first attempt at jing and think I made it too big – got carried away with my widescreen – updated now – used Camstudio and uploaded to youtube):
When the results are emailed back they come in an xml format. There have been a couple of issues with this…
my school email won’t let me open it
the opened xml file wasn’t the easiest to read
If you have a solution to either it’d be much appreciated… I’ll probably work it out if I RTFM but haven’t got around to that yet. Here is an example of a past paper that I have created. Jun07questionpaper
I have now had my flip video for a week and most of that time it has been evaluated by ICT support. The reason for this is that I want to use it for the DiDA 202 course and possibly iMedia. This means that my pupils have to be able to edit the footage. This is where flip video develops some issues.
At school we will be using Adobe premiere elements across an RM network. The raw video from a flip video is a compressed AVI… hence the reason you can get a reasonably high quality video on 2GB of storage. Adobe will import this format, but then requires you to render the footage first before editing. This means that it can turn a 29MB file into a 100MB file. You also need to have a DivX package rolled out across the network.
So from a secondary, video editing point of view the flip video suddenly has a few issues. However, I would firstly like to say that these issues do not necessarily out way all the positives:
Looks great (until it gets security stamped etc by over zealous techy dept)
easy to use
good quality
excellent accessories (waterproof case, helmet mount (we are a sports college) and colour coordinated tripod
Plus, after consultation with ‘ICT support’ they tell me that all cameras of this style are going down similar routes and some are even using file formats that aren’t unique to the camera. Personally, I am going to get more flip cameras. Discuss with the techies about extra storage (its pretty cheap these days) and compromise on the fact that media back up might not be as rigorous as the rest of the network.
I would like to add that this is my experience so far, and if anyone has alternative views, feelings etc, then I am more than welcome to receive them.