This is a wee demo

Looks like the Poetry Pizzeria which hosts the Keepers Project had a face lift and more project could be in the pipeline. I’ll look forward to the new ones, our Keepers poem for National Poetry Day October 2005 is one of the most rewarding thing we have done online so far.

At the Naace conference last week a few folk mentioned using an iRiver iFP 790 to record podcasts. i think they are out of production, amazon uk has a second hand one for £60.

I was pleasantly surprised to find them at my local argos for £39.99.

First test the recording seems pretty good even without an external mic. Interface is pretty poor compared to an ipod, way too small.

Found the software for mac too: iRiver Music Manager for Mac. For some reason the iRiver does not mount as a disk.

I am not sure the Scottish Education Blogs on Suprglu is all that useful. Seems to list all the entries for one day from one blog at once, so a prolific blogger pushes everyone else off the front page. Worse it doesn’t seem to handle typepad feeds like:

http://pienews.blogs.com/pieblog/index.rdf

properly, giving all the entries the date of the latest one. I am not sure if it handles the atom feeds in a better way.

so I am testing lilina

s a simple but powerful news aggregator written in PHP. No database is needed, RSS/ATOM parsing is done by the excelent MagpieRSS library (it is included, no additional installation needed). It features feed auto-discovery and an easy-to-use interface.

This seems a handier way to look at the scot-ed-blogs, I am testing these scot-edu-blog feeds, on a box in my living room at the moment(this may not be accessible from everywhere). I don’t think lilina will do anything interesting with flickr feeds, but seems a quick and simple way to set up an aggregator.

Back in September some of he children in primary six posted an entry on a new popular hobby. There was a wee spelling mistake on the post, but it was a common one. This has lead google to rank the entry on the first page leading to 54 comments on the post! I am not putting the title in here for fear of something similar happening.

I mentioned a poem read by Peter Ford in Ewan‘s podcast. it turns out is is by Taylor Mali (via Ewan’s post):

What Teachers Make

If you are a teacher that should have made you feel a bit better.

Poem in MP3 Format and in Real Media format.

I should be talking about podcasting at Sandaig tomorrow at the Naace Primary Conference 2005 in Edinburgh.

Here are some notes:

Podcasting notes

edublogsPodcast 5: Peter Ford at ECML Ewan podcasts Peter Ford’s workshop. Took me 3 journeys to listen to the whole lot (over an hour long). Just when I was thinking listening to podcasts of presentations took to much time and were of poor quality, this changes my mind.

I was laughing like a manic at Peter’s poem of what the teacher replies to the lawyer. Got some strange looks walking along the road. Apart for the fun the podcast is full of great stuff affirming teachers and blogging.

The big problem with podcasts of this length is that you can’t quite remember all the good bits well enough to quote, but Ewan blogged them for us:

Peter Ford at Weblogs in Education, ECML, Graz

Lots of other interesting reports from Ewan to day and more podcasts.

Peter Ford is of course the organiser of the The Keepers Poetry Project and Ewan is the midwife of our offshoot The Dream Dragon.

A while ago I set up Scottish Education Blogs to aggregate some Scot’s Edu bloggers and started one for Primary School Blogs.

Unfortunately the entries do not seem to get sorted properly by time. A few from a couple of days ago are at the top of the feed at the moment. The New SuprGlu RSS feeds seem to be ok.

A second problem is that the whole of a post is included, which can take up quite a lot of space for example this post in Sandaig Otters has 8 images 500 pixels heigh each, only the first shows on the Sandaig Otters page but everything shows up at Primary School Blogs.

I guess if I could understand a bit more php I could use MagpieRSS to do something similar.

I decided it was time for some of my current class to try a bit of commenting on an other blog.

I took me until Wednesday to get round to it.

I showed them this post: Bullying: How to Cope. and they went off and wrote some comments on paper.

On Thursday the children typed them up and we sat around the whiteboard.

All we needed to do was post the comments this is what happened:

I had tested posting comments to The Blogging Zone from home but didn’t try from school.

Telling the children we will email the comments next week sounded a bit lame.