Innovation Showcase

Our Technology School are exhibiting at the Excel Conference Center WorldSkills London 2011 05 from Oct 2011 to 08 Oct 2011, so for that alone, I would certainly recommend getting along for a visit in this coming week, I should be there myself on Friday, and really looking forward to it. I was even more pleased when on Tuesday Afternoon of this week, I was informed that a group of delegates from the conference would be visiting us at the college, and so would it be possible for me to arrange / organise a suitably impressive innovation technology type of showcase for them. I ran through a few of the broader possibilities, which I must say seemd to all go down very well. It occured to me, that we should together with our Marketing department, assemble in addition to any visitors pack that may already be in existence, include a folder, pad, pen and coloured flyers. The flyers being my suggestion would naturally be my job, OK with that. I finally delivered the draft version (shown here), to the Marketing team on Thursday afternoon and they did a great job of applying some desktop publishing effects.

I am planning for three of us staff to deliver the sessions, each lasting around 15 to 20 minutes, and taking place in separate IT rooms.

From the screen shot you can see that I finally settled on four, which are :-

The CISCO lab that we have as part of tour BTEC BXD Networking programme, with units that cover IT Essentials, CCNA – Discovery, Exploration, Security and CCNP.

Producing e-Content with Wimba Create. This is part of a wider eLearning initiative with the ambition of extending learning beyond the traditional curriculum boundary, using a learning objects approach for course materials.

Mahara, our fully featured open source electronic portfolio. Mahara is integrated with our Moodle system, and provides the tools to set up your own personal learning and development environment; used mainly in our Work Based Learning Projects for Foundation Degree students.


Finally Open Simulator, a web 3.0D collaborative face-to-face working environment, that we are deploying to enhance student communication and social skills both within the college and as part of the Comenius project, that will link us with two colleges in Holland and one in Belgium.


Looking forward to the coming week.