Stroud College ACE students Personal Projects

What makes you laugh?

Cory “Mr SafetyMan” Williams has 2 nominations from me. One in the most inspiring category for “The truth about my disorder” and the following.

Go Sparta

Last week we experienced an earth tremor. I was awake so experienced it as did many other’s Im sure. I checked out Youtube to see if anyone happened to be making a vbolg entry at the time.

Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely created by its Residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by millions of Residents from around the globe.

Here is a news report from the Metaverse TV channel

So my nomination is:

YouTube gives all fundraisers a chance to get donations from people all over the world.  My nominations is

Photo credit James Thew

The web is massive. When you start to look for information online, very often the first place you turn to are the search engines like Google and Yahoo to give you a list of web pages that will fit what you’re looking for, but sometimes you end up wading though pages and pages of irrelevant results. 

Social bookmarking adds the human touch. Just as the internet has millions of pages, so it also has millions of users, and if even a fraction of those users share the sites they’ve found interesting, useful or just plain bizarre with each other, there is suddenly a vast resource for anyone searching the web to tap into.

This commoncraft video explains further

Del.icio.us is one example of Social bookmarking software. Go to their website and create an account.

Welcome back!

Hope you all had a good break. In this lesson we are going to look at improving our learning skills. One of the best lessons you can learn in life is how to teach yourself. I left school at 16 because I was fed up of learning things that didn’t interest me. I personally find it really difficult to sit in a class and listen to someone “talking at me”. I have always found it much easier and a lot faster to teach myself. I did however have a close friend who stayed  on at school and went to university. One weekend I went to stay with her and the parties were so good it convinced me to get “A” levels and go myself.

Because I was very motivated I studied “A” levels by getting books out of the library and teaching myself. Just a few months later I passed my exams and went to join my friend in University!

You have so many opportunities to teach yourself today. The hardest thing is knowing what you want to learn. That’s the part that you need to decide for yourself. What do you want to find out more about?

I aim to teach you how to learn.

•  How to use the help files that are a part of all software packages
•  How to use the Internet for research
•  How to showcase whast you have learnt

I hope these lessons have been useful to you. If you have a problem that I can help with, dont be afraid to ask. I may not know the answer but I probably find someone who will.

If you are finding something difficult chances are someone else will have had similar problems and if you are lucky they may have posted on the Internet how they solved them!

Last term we see a Greek play “Antigone”.  How much do you remember about the play?

Here is a youtube reminder of the plot

We all really enjoyed watching the play, but did you understand what it was about. It was written a long time ago and the language used is quite difficult to understand. In todays lesson I would like you to use the Internet to find out more about the play, who wrote it, when it was written and what it is about.

Happy surfing!

In November 2006 the government launched e-petitions  Petitions have long been sent to the Prime Minister by post or delivered to the Number 10 door in person. The primeminister now has his own website www.pm.gov.uk is some useful information from their website.

Downing Street is working in partnership with a charitable project mySociety to provide a service to allow citizens, charities and campaign groups to set up petitions that are hosted on the Downing Street website, enabling anyone to address and deliver a petition directly to the Prime Minister.

mySociety is a charitable project that runs many of the UK’s best-known non-partisan political websites, like HearFromYourMP.com and TheyWorkForYou.com. mySociety is strictly neutral on party political issues, and the e-petition service is within its remit to build websites which give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives. For more information about mySociety and its work, visit its website.

The e-petition system has been designed to be transparent and trustworthy. For legal and anti-spam reasons this site cannot host every petition submitted, but the rule is to accept everything that meets the terms and conditions of use.

No petition will be rejected unless it violates these terms. And even when petitions cannot be hosted No10 will still publish as much of rejected petitions as is consistent with legal and anti-spam requirements, including the reason why it could not be hosted.

If you have any questions about the service, you can email either the Downing Street web team at webmaster@pmo.gov.uk or mySociety at team@mysociety.org.

Today we are going to add a bit of fun to our blogs. You may have noticed I have a new pet on my blog called tigger!

This is an example of a widget I have added to my blog. I found it on widgetbox, which has a gallery of thousands of widgets you can download and add to your blog. You can even turn your blog itself into a special kind of widget known as a blidget!

I stumbled across a great interactive webRadio site musicovery. You can set what type of music you like and it actually learns to recognise what sort of music you like.

Kalidescope Painter is how I managed to create this masterpiece

Our last lesson for a while!

Thankyou for your Shelter Christmas card Johnny! It inspired me to send one to lots of my friends.

I came across a good video guide that explains what a blog is. Can you watch it for me and let me know in the comments what you think of it  Blogs in plain English

Today we are going to look at the college’s online learning environment. It’s called Moodle. If you look on your desktop you will find a link to it. There is also a link to it on this blog under useful links. You logon using your normal userid and password.

After you have logged on select courses

and then choose Access to College Education (ACE)

then select this course