Employment in IT Industry in N. Ireland

The research, ‘Technology Insights 2011’, shows that despite the recent recession and ongoing high levels of unemployment, demand for IT professionals in Northern Ireland has increased over the last year, with 16,000 people currently employed in the IT & Telecoms professional workforce – representing just over 2% of total employment. 60% of these IT & Telecoms professionals are employed in the IT & Telecoms industry itself, while the remainder are spread across every other sector of the economy.

Flip camera - converting movies to work with movie maker.

Flip cameras have been growing in popularity somewhat over the last year or so.  Their versatility, ease of use and HD quality certainly tick a lot of boxes for those involved in education.  There does seem to be one major issue though that schools struggle with, and that's taking the movie from the Flip Camera into Windows Movie Maker.  Fear not for a solution is nigh!  Simply open the Flipshare software that is built into the camera.  You will need to install this first if you haven't already done so. Select the movie or movies you would like to convert, then click on 'Share' and select the 'Publish to Web' icon as circled in the screenshot opposite.  You will then be asked to share your videos to 'myspace' youtube' or 'other web sites'.  Choose the last one 'other web sites'.  This will save the video as a WMV into a specified folder. You will now be able to use this Windows Movie Video to import into movie maker.

CEOP's "Back to School" Campaign

As part of the "Back to School" campaign, to encourage parents and carers to become more involved in protecting their children online, CEOP has designed a letter that can be sent out to parents to promote positive steps to help safeguard their child.

You can distribute the letter through your school website and email or print off paper copies. It's a great way of engaging parents at the start of the school year and introducing internet safety as a key aspect of their child's life.

You can download the letter by clicking on the link below.

Back to school letter

Remember you can access all sorts of information and useful resources on internet safety from Think u know - created by CEOP

Follow-up Evaluation of The Use and Impact of Learning Environments in Schools and in the Wider Education Service

In 2008, the Education and Training Inspectorate carried out a comprehensive evaluation of the use and impact of learning environments across the schools and wider education service. The evaluation included Learning Northern Ireland, which is the regional virtual online learning environment of the Classroom 2000 (C2k) managed service solution. The purpose of this follow-up evaluation is to determine the extent to which the key recommendations outlined in the original evaluation have been addressed by the various stakeholders.

Online Learning Graduation for Northern Ireland

Pictured above back row: Aidan McCanny (SELB), Daithi Murray, (St. Paul's Bessbrook), Ciaran McCrumlish (SELB). Front row: Elaine Dunne (St. Paul's Bessbrook), Anne McKinless (SELB), Vivien Kelly (SELB).

On the 3rd June 2010, the Regional Training Unit (RTU) for N Ireland, celebrated another graduation event in Malone House Belfast. Over 60 practising post-primary teachers and officers from the education support services (ELBs, ETI, CCEA) successfully completed RTU’s Online Learning and Teaching for Educators Programme (OLTE). The keynote speaker at this year’s ceremony was Mr John Anderson, Managing Inspector ETI. Presentations were also given by Mr Sean Sloan, Headteacher, St Patrick’s Grammar School, Downpatrick and Michelle Clancy, OLTE Graduate. The certificates were presented by Mr Stanton Sloan, Chief Executive of the South Eastern Education & Library Board.

Backing up your website/vle

This post is for those people whose web hosting company uses the 'cpanel' to manage their sites.  Most of the popular ISPs use cpanel including Bluehost, Hostgator and Justhost.

When you log into your web host, you are automatically taken to their cpanel.  In the Files section of the cpanel, there is an option (icon) called Backup Wizard.  When you click on the icon, you are presented with two options, namely Backup or Restore.

Using Yacapaca for Controlled Assessment

Yacapaca can be used to help in the Controlled Assessment aspect of subjects. A subject teacher simply creates a portfolio within Yacapaca which provides the students with an area to upload their files (max 15M per file).

When the lesson is nearly over, the students will upload their work to the portfolio. The teacher then opens up the specific portfolio and selects all the students:

The teacher locks their portfolio by selecting the 'Actions with selected items', then 'lock/unlock' as shown above.