A while back I made a simple flickr search tool this is not as slick as some of the beautiful search tools out there but it was designed for pupils to use to get images to embed into their blogs and to create the attribution, clicking on a thumbnail gives this:

Flickr Ccstamp

Which has a text box with the html code to embed the image and attribution, you can choose to align left of right and to use small or medium images.

The tool if far from perfect an needs quite a lot of work but it has proved useful to quite a few folk and I believe used in glow training by LTS. Recently at the suggestion of a fellow ADE I added a more somber style to the rather bright colours I had used (a link at the top right of the page toggles the styles and sets a cookie to remeber your preferences).

At the Scottish Learning festival I was delighted to see Neil Winton‘s pupils using my tool and working with the images. This gave rise to the thought that it might be useful to create images that could be used without the embed code that show attribution. I’ve added a feature, above you can see stamp medium and stamp original links. Clicking on these will produce an image with the attribution stamped on.

Stamped by flickr cc
my crop

So I am wondering would this be useful in your class and two, is this legal (stamping a No Derivs photo? ) and is the wording (Flickr photo by name – license) and I would appreciate your comments on both of these questions.

I’ve had this installed for a few days now, but the flurry of snow tweets (the #uksnow Map 2.0 is looking great) reminded me to try the live streaming from my iPhone to USTREAM.

I must say I was surprised at how well it went. This was using a wireless connection and a G3 not G3s iPhone. I think the quality is not too bad especially after I turned the phone the right way up. A stand would have helped rather than a pile of videos(sic), dvds and books. The twitter integration is good too.


Twitter Hacked, Defaced By “Iranian Cyber Army”

We’ve received multiple tips right around 10 pm that Twitter was hacked and defaced with the message below. The site is currently offline. We’re looking into this and waiting on a response from Twitter.

Woke up early this morning, very strange…

The wee project David Noble and I set up for the Scottish Learning Festival, SLFtalk – Audio publishing by attendees at the Scottish Learning Festival, received a Edublog Awards nomination in the ‘Best educational use of audio’ category.

David posted this on SLFtalk

John and I are passionate about podcasting and digital audio; we feel that the range of technology used by contributors to SLFtalk ‘lowers the bar’ to publishing a variety of audio online and we hope that others experiment with these ways of gathering voices (John calls it “guerrilla podcasting”!).

which sums up the idea.

We have extended the idea with EDUtalk using the same technology and opening the scope out.

Fell free to give us your vote for ‘Best educational use of audio’ it is really a vote for all the contributors to the post cast over the 2 days at SLF and look out for some EDUtalk news soon.

Feel free too to contribute audio on any educational topic to EDUtalk.

Radiosandaig 144

A couple of weeks ago I was delighted to get a series of email from some ex-pupils. They were back at Sandaig Primary for some work experience. These pupils had been part of the original Radio Sandaig team and two of used the nom de guerre’s of ‘Thelma and Louise’ when they visited, kidnapped Sandy the Otter and took him to the Be Very Afraid event at Bafta in London. (details at Radio Sandaig @ Be Very Afraid).

As part of their work experience the pupils were tasked (tasked themselves?) with restarting Radio Sandaig and helping with blogging at Sandaig Otters. They had a few questions about GarageBand, I think they used Audacity, and suchlike.

The fruit of their hard work (or fun?) has now been published on Radio Sandaig with some new young voices taking over. I feel slightly jealous that I am not part of Radio Sandaig any more and delighted that it has kicked off again.

Thanks to Katie Barrowman from LTS for the Marretech files from the Glow Meet. The video from the Glow Meet was a lot better than the FlashMeet, there is a section in the middle that is missing as the network went down. The edit is basic but hopefully this will be of interest.

On Tuesday I was at TeachMeet Falkirk_09, we had a great night. As usual I was amazed at the amount of work put in by the organisers lead by Margaret Vass and folk from Falkirk.

This time I had the honour of MCing the meet. This was particularly nice as I was not involved in all of the hard work. It did mean that I didn’t really fully concentrate on what the presenters were saying, as I was trying to thing about what I was doing and saying. I did gain a lot of great ideas form the presenters and am currently working my way through the FlashMeeting audio. It is hard to pick out any particular presentations, but for me, Nick‘s Webcam desktop visualiser (pictured above) embodies the DIY aspects to TeachMeet.

Margaret had asked me to talk a wee bit about how TeachMeet started, on listening to the meet I realise that I might not have been to clear or informative, concentrating more on the fun and Guinness rather that the principles. I hope to remedy that in a blog post soon.

In the run up to Falkirk there was some discussion about the ‘rules’ of TeachMeet and they were tweeked a little. As I prepared to talk about the history of TeachMeet I realised that the rules are not really rules. There is a perception that these are fixed, but over the early TeachMeets at least they changed to fit the event. A while back John Connell posted Time For A TeachMeet Alternative? and generated a lot of discussion (Be sure to read TeachMeet Alternatives: follow up on John’s blog too). As TeachMeets are organised by whoever has the energy and good will it doesn’t really matter if you don’t like the format: you can change it. The power of TeachMeets is not, for me, the format but the proof that people can organise and share in a way that is not top down.

As is now customery with TeachMeets the meet rippled out:

I hope that most of the presenters will post details, or links to their presentations. I also am hoping that a few folk might use edutalk to podcast a reflection or review of the event.

I am going to go and post these links to the wiki, please do the same for any others or leave a comment (or tweet me) here and I’ll do it.

Recently I’ve been doing a bit of stop motion animation, cpd for staff and in the classroom. Using a variety of software: SAM animation, FrameByFrame and I Can Animate. Recently I spotted iMotion for the iPhone. This app makes stop motion and time laps videos on your iphone. It will export via email or to your photo library. It seems to work fine on an iPhone g3 without the S.

T“>

The app can record on click or automatically at intervals, I’ve tried both and it seems easier to use auto. It is quite hard to keep the iPhone still when clicking. setting it to 10 second delay gives you time to move your cast about. A good mount for the iPhone would help. Maybe a gorrilapod?

iMotion give you options to save in different sizes: 80 x 170, 160 x 214 or 320 x 247 and exports to mp4 or a set of images. There is an option to publish on the iMotion blog where you can see some more examples.

While I would not think of getting iPhones to use in class just for the ability to animate, it could be a useful feature if you are already using iPhones in class. especially at the price of 59p

4edutalk screen

After the success of SLFtalk David and I have been chatting about how to take the idea forward. It seemed a good idea to continue to provide educators the opportunity to post short podcasts with as low a technical barrier as possible. David has pushed this on by getting the EDUtalk.cc domain name and applying it to a new posterous site we have spent a bit of time preparing the site, writing instructions et and yesterday David posted a long tweet:

The EDUtalk project launches with a brief Flashmeeting on Monday at 8.30pm. Following on from the success of SLFtalk, EDUtalk is a space for educators to publish digital audio content via mobile devices. DM me or @johnjohnston for the Flashmeeting URL and please follow @EDUtalkr

David also tweeted:

EDUtalk launches on Monday with FMeet + competition. It’s a space for educators to publish audio using mobile tech (like SLFtalk) @EDUtalkr

So it looks like we are ready to. The idea follows the SLFtalk pattern, folk can record and send audio by a variety of methods to the site; audioBoo, gabcast, mailing mp3s direct from a phone or iPhone. Instructions are on the site, liked from the sidebar. This time we have added Skype recordings with Pamela into the mix and ipadio. Quite a few people asked for ipadio support in SLFtalk but it was not possible at that time.

Ipadio Icon

Last week I did a bit of testing with ipadio and found it didn’t have a RSS feed for specific tags (this is how we push audioBoo onto the site), but I did get a nice welcome email for ipdaio. I replied to this suggesting the feature, and within a day or two the developers had added it! You can now record an ipadio phlog tag it EDUtalk and it will turn up on EDUtalk.cc. As with posterous helping out by adding to their API I continue to be very pleasantly surprised with how developers provide us with free products and then alter them on request.

I’ve also improved my system for creating posts from audioBoo and ipadio, by changing the html a bit we now ebed the audioBoo and ipadio players and by using feedburner the audio will be in the RSS feed.

I am very excited about the project, listening to the audio from SLFtalk provided a different dimension to reading blogs or watch video recordings. I hope other people are too. Anyone interested is invited to the flashmeeting (Just DM me or David for a link) and to start submitting audio next week you ght even win a prize.