An interesting crowd sourced data project UK Sound Map answers the question: 'What does Britain sound like?'
All you do is record some sound with Audioboo and tag it uksm the boos are moderated and added to the The UK SoundMap. This, of course, reminds me of our EDUtalk project.
Discussing social media and this sort of thing with my daughter Christine we recorded a quick boo of the rather quiet traffic outside our flat.
This could be a nice classroom activity for iPhone equipped teachers and I intend giving it a wee try next time I am working with a class, perhaps a playtime recording would be a good idea.
Glow Light is a new alternative Glow interface designed with a simpler 'splash' page. This 'splash' page will display a list of user specific links to allow easier navigation to other areas within the Glow portal.
LTS have a video to show how it works:Glow Light - Making Glow better clicking on the thumbnail above will show a full-sized screenshot.
Lighter
In my opinion this is a great improvement over the 'Staff' home page that loads when you log onto glow, much less cluttered and easier on the eye. The branding is subtile and the page has indeed a light feel and it is lighter:
this is the NLC Central Services home page (Staff page) load:
And this is the glow light load:
Showing glow light is just over half the load of the Staff page.
Glow Light also combines the functionality of more than one glow page so it should save quite a lot of time. As a default it comes with 6 'navigation' buttons on the left side 4 'settings etc.' buttons at the bottom and a search box. (see popup image at top.)
Features
The search is much better than the old glow search. When you get to the results it gets even better linking to an advanced search with allows you to filter by type, and by various properties. The search is pretty fast (on the bases of a few Saturday tests). I never used the old search finding it nearly worthless, this new one looks like it will be valuable.
The six main buttons are as follows:
News: links to the old Glow Staff home page.
My Stuff: shows a further four buttons;
My Glow: opens the my glow page.
My Glow Learn opens the glow learn page.
My Forums: opens the forums in a new window.
My Blogs: opens your list of blogs in a new window.
Search: shows the search box as it is hidden when 'My Stuff' is clicked.
Favourites: opens your list of glow groups.
Create: shows buttons to Create Glow Groups and Glow Learn Courses. The Glow Groups button shows, or loads, a list of groups where you can create groups, clicking on the list opens the Create Glow group page for the group selected.
Timetable: opens your timetable page.
These are frequent tasks inside of glow and in the past would take quite a few click to get to.
You can customise the lists of buttons from the setting and add 'link' buttons of your own to the list. I 'll probably turn off the Timetable as I don't have any classes and the Create button as I would normally work down to the site I am creating while I think about it.
There are 4 smaller buttons at the bottom of the main list: Settings, which opens the glow light settings. Profile, Help and Mail which are self explanatory.
My Suggestions
Although glow light is a vast improvement I think it could be made even better. Here is my 2 pence worth:
I like the way the create button loads the groups list on the page and although I don't think I'll use it I'd like the favourites button to load my favourites (and just my favourites) in the same way rather than take me to my 'My Glow Groups' page.
The other thing that I think could be improved is the buttons. As indicated by the bold & italic text in the description above the buttons have different tasks. Some hide or show elements on the page, some open links and some open links in a new window. I think this is potentially confusing and would prefer something a little more straightforward:
This is pretty quick and dirty but should illustrate the idea: Tabs hide an reveal elements and action buttons show if the link is in a new window or not.
The Future
The future of glow is looking a bit brighter, this is a long overdue facelift and perhaps indicative of the way glow is going. It now is starting to look like hub linking out to different services: glow, blogs (these were updated yesterday too, forums, glow learn and mail. The move to using open source, (phpBB, WordPress) familiar web tools is surely a move in the right direction. I hope too glow will move in the direction of constantly upgrading, or perpetual beta that is popular with open source and web technology (google, flickr) generally. Five years ago I had no idea what sort of web applications I'd be using now and I hope that the next 5 years will bring improvements and completely new ideas. If glow was a portal they services could be easily added when necessary we could have phpMotion ( a youtube clone) or laconi.ca (a twitter one) dropped into glows safe & secure environment at the drop of a hat.
Interoperatability of Web Services using Open Standards
Scalable with capacity to expand the scope to serve a wider population
Glow Futures will apply open standards aiming to achieve unhindered data flow and interoperability. This model will help Glow to constantly evolve and remain modern.
The current Glow portal and data centre infrastructure is provided by a single supplier. We envisage that the new service could be procured in a series of lots which may be provided by a single supplier or by a variety of suppliers to allow for a flexible and dynamic approach to respond to evolving requirements.
Gives me a fair bit of hope. I just hope we have, in Scotland, enough money to resource it and the hardware to use it.
I joined in with Tom Barrett's Interesting ways to use an iPad crowd sourced presentation. Previously I had tweeted that I thought it was a bit early to start this one, obviously I was wrong some good ideas for using an iPad in the class surfacing.
a year long project between two schools, one in the London area and the other in Yorkshire. Students in two classes will be loaned an iPod Touch, for use both in school and at home.
The post contains a youtube video of how to use the Flickr Search and Stamp on an iPod touch and the blog has a lot of other interesting iPod Touch educational information.
The idea was to get around some copyright issues for children searching for images to create with on an ipod touch. Ideally children would save a photo, figure to the attribution and edit the photo to add this. That can be quite difficult and time consuming on an iPod touch so I though up this workaround. It searches flickr, only returning images that can be used and edited under a cc license, it then will produce an image with the attribution stamped onto it in the same way as my flickr CC search toy.
It is based on the iPod Touch Poems webapp I knocked together and has quite a few rough edges. I am sure I could improve the performance, interface & a lot more but it seems to work.
Here is Ian's video, which should give you an idea of how the app works:
I've added a link from the page/Web app to the video to act as in app help so many thanks Ian for this. You can also get an idea of it the app work in this Simulator.
I'd appreciate any feedback on using the app, especially in class and ideas for improving it.
This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress.
anywhere recently?
The above quote gets me 751,000 hits on google if I search for it. Why? Because it is the out of the box About Page on a wordpress blog.
Most education blogs I know are wordpress ones, and a fair number of them have never edited their About page. I don't think this need to be seen as self promotion, just politeness to your reader. When I see a link to a blog post and end up on a blog I've not visited before the chances are that I'll be interested in who is writing it and something about them. I click on the About link.
Schools blogs too, I want to know the sector, who the authors are, age & stage and where in the world the schools is.
We are expecting a new batch of educational bloggers in Scotland this session as blogging become simple to set up via glow I am hoping that these new bloggers will add themselves to ScotEduBlogs and I'll be able to read them and to find out a little about the writers.
As an aside, I've twitter set to send me a mail when I get a new follower, often these are folk who have not tweeted much, if I can tell from their tweets and they do not have a description or a link on their twitter page I often don't follow back.
My own About John page may not be very interesting or even spelt correctly, but it is there.
This is my personal blog, opinions are my own and not those of my employer (the blog is produced in my own time). My opinions are not set in stone, I frequently change my mind, make mistakes and contradict myself.
Joanne Watson: Stay in touch> if you know of any great ideas/resources, etc for nursery – let me know please!!!! :)… John: Hi Joanne,
I am a ICT Development officer in North Lanarkshire.
Previously class teacher at Sandaig … Joanne Watson: Hi John!!!
I’m glad you enjoyed looking at our website. I was the teacher in question that took th… Fearghal: Thanks for sharing your thoughts John.
I really like your positive approach to Glow’s development.… John: Thanks Stephen,
I am a dropbox fan already but have not tried the other two, I’ll check them out. Stephen: A brilliant post, not least because I have an iPad and have waited for ages to get hold of Dragon Di… John: Andrew, I can imagine how hard it was to get this going and am delighted it has happened. I had no d… Steve Beard: John, is the wordpress blog embedded within the sharepoint environment? If so has a custom webpart …
