Hand Held Learning Conference Day 1: Moblogging Rocks

Well I'm back in the room we are staying in having a look through some of the photographs we took today, and getting them ready to put on the blog tomorrow. We took one or two extra pictures on the way back this afternoon that I will be sharing with you then. I thought we would have to wait until we got back to school or Bristol to do this, but the people at the conference have set up a cybercafe, and something called a wireless network, that mean we were able to write our last post on Mr Mills laptop at the conference hall and to upload it to the internet there and then. How exciting is that. MOBLOGGING ROCKS!Tomorrow morning you will be able to read what I am writing now, see where I am and have been doing. As well as the sights we have seen some fantastic computer tools that hopefully one day students in school will be able to use to do what we have been doing.

Anyway here are a couple of extra pictures we took on the way back to the hotel. The first one is of a red bendy bus we saw in Parliament Square. So what you might say, we have Bendy Buses in Bristol. It is not the type of bus that is important, but the colour. Even though London Transport Buses are owned by different companies now they still have a red livery. Livery is an intersting word, it is very old, and comes from the days when everything was pulled around by horses. We use it to describe the colours used to paint trains and buses. There are lots of words like this still in use today, like "stabling points," places where trains and buses are kept over night. We know buses and trains don't need stables anymore, because they don't have horses but the name is still in use.

This is a photograph of the Houses of Parliament, from outside Westminster Tube Station. I used to think that the clock tower was Big Ben, but I learned today, that "Big Ben" is the name of a huge bell inside that chimes the time.

We are in October at the moment, but in November people all over the UK will be having firework Parties to help remember something that happened here, in 1605. I wonder if the students in Year 2 and 3 will be able to help me find out more about the story of this man, Guy Fawkes, why he is so famous? What happened on November 5th 1605? And why it is so important?



As you can see from the photograph, the weather today has been drizzly and overcast. By the time we went to catch the tube this evening it was also getting dark.

Tomorrow morning we are going to walk along the River Thames, so I hope the weather is a bit brighter and sunnier. Take care for now. Tizz.