Had a great day today with Dale and the teachers from Building Design (Sue, Patrick) and construction (Justin, Mark...Hayden can't make it anymore, hence replaced by Mark, and Jason is on leave) plus Daniel (coordinator). Howard from E-works visited too.
The day has been a mix of brainstorming activities, demonstration of what we've done for Howard, planning and training the teachers in the OpenSim virtual world. The enthusiasm of the teachers is evident. Mark (new guy) had some great ideas on sustainability activities in the construction area. He is a gamer and keen.
Building Design (the simpler of the two planned suite of activities):
- On track to do training with Sue and students from weeks 2 -4 of term 4 (September). Will involve building houses from plans
- Idea emerged of using PushLMS to do a mobile GPS-based project on building styles in the Adv Dip of Blg Design, and to apply for this in the next round of AFLF funding (due September 20)
Construction (more complex):
- buildings and areas of Isle of VU to be completed in next few weeks (over holidays)
- Daniel's input: we will aim for having the system ready for delivery to ALL VET in Schools Cert II students (170) by early 2011, assuming that pilot is all OK, and then all pre-App Cert II students in 2012.
- 2010 pilot: we can either do it in next 6 weeks (Daniel's current lot of VET in Schools students, 1 day a week) or wait until November for next group. Flexible, can do teacher swap for the day so that Mark and Justin can do the training whenever suits. Fine to work the same way as last year: 3-4 hour sessions weekly with 6 students at a time. This seemed to work well.
- Dale and Mark/Justin currently planning new activities to include in their activities.
