Let's kick off with the flying stuff
Airborne calamities
One of the fundamental rules of being (or learning to be) a pilot is to take full responsibility for your aircraft and the safety of those who fly in it (including yourself). Throughout your PPL you are drilled in the practice of doing a the walk-around to ensure everything is where it should be and functioning correctly. Only after that, do you start your internal checks.
So.... on a fateful Saturday afternoon, I am scheduled to fly solo to Cambridge from Southend. Flight planning done, booked out and ready to go. My instructor ran through the pre-flight and confirmed that the plane had been checked over. I naively hopped in and started my internal checks and set off. Taxi and take-off clearances given, I began my climb on to heading only to notice after 5 minutes a banging sound coming from outside the cockpit. Engine temps and pressures seemed ok and running smooth and flying controls seemed responsive. There were no visual signs of where the sound was coming from.
Nevertheless, disturbed by the sound, I put in a request to turn back to the airfield. On my approach I noticed two fire engines waiting for me at the hold! At this point I was starting to think something was wrong with my landing gear or perhaps there was a fire that I couldn't see. I continued the approach and landed safely. On arrival back to the club house the fire crew checked to see if I was OK and my instructor rushed out only to embarrassingly find that he had left the seat belt (harness) shut in the passenger door from his previous flight. I would have noticed it had I done a walk-around. So moral of this story is always take full responsibility for your own flight safety - don't learn the hard and rather embarrassing way.
To cap it off, I caught it all on a GoPro camera:
Following the ordeal (yes I am laying it on a bit thick), I got back in the cockpit a week later....and made it to Cambridge. I was also very fortunate to taxi out behind the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight!
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| Dakota @ EGMC |
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| Cambridge airport (International apparently) on the nose |
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| Lance |
Nearpod for engaging lessons
Recently, I have delivered a lot of training in assistive tools i.e. providing access to learning for students with both diagnosed and undiagnosed learning difficulties through digital technology. One root cause of learner struggles is the didactic method of teaching that we are all to familiar with. So how do you pass control to the learner? How do you engage those who do not have the confidence to ask or contribute in class?
A few months back I came across a great tool called Nearpod. This is an online lesson authoring kit where you can embed PowePoints and sandwich slides with interactivity e.g. polls, open questions, drawing/annotation and lots more.
When you have created your lesson you can then use it synchronously with your students in the classroom or remotely. They access the lesson either through an app on their device or via the website. To join the live session, you provide them with a simple passcode.
Once they are in, you can control the pace of the lesson or give control to them to manage it at their own. In addition, you can also share the lesson via email, social media or just put the link on your VLE for students to access for reflection and revision.
The thing I love about this is that it is seamless across all devices and gives your learners the choice of how they want to access learning. If they do not have a smartphone or tablet they can still join in from a normal PC or laptop through the Nearpod website.
I would strongly recommend this tool for anyone who wants to become more innovative in their delivery. For the purposes of the FELTAG report recommendations, this might be a quick and easy way of creating online course content and bringing those PowerPoints to life....and it's FREE!!!!
Don't just read my drivel....watch the vid:
