Year: 2012

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Badges

I’ve been keeping half an eye on the Mozilla Open Badges project, mostly through the blog of Doug Belshaw.

I’ve also being looking at some of the Mozilla Webmaker tools on and off. This time last year I was Playing with Hackasaurus and popcorn and had some fun. More recently I was running an introduction to html, css and a wee bit of javascript for North Lanarkshire computing and business studies teachers and made use of Hackasaurus as a way to look at HTML elements. I had peeked at thimble, the third of the webmaker tools occasionally but not given it much attention.

Yesterday I read Webmaker Badges Are Go! and decided to check to thimble and how it had incorporated badges.

Thimble

Thimble is an in browser html editor with live preview.

Bad points

Unfortunately I was reading Doug’s post on my iPad and dived into thimble on that. This was not the greatest experience, selecting text was a total pain and the standard iOS text editing was disabled. I could not copy or paste. I managed to do a bit of a better job by linking a bluetooth keyboard where I could copy and paste via keyboard shortcuts. Selecting text was still very difficult.

I then switched to my macbook. Although this is not a recent model it is usually fast enough to get thing done. It runs 10.6 and I use it for all sorts of things. Unfortunately it did not seem fast enough to edit thimble. Again it was hard to select text, clicking somewhere to move the cursor was hit and miss and I deleted some bits of code without meaning too. This could be very off-putting for a school pupil or someone else unused to editing html. I did test Safari, Firefox and Chrome none were much good.

The Good Bits

After not having much fun with my macbook I switched to my work macbook pro. This is not exactly a monster machine, 2.3GHx i5 with 8 MB of RAM, but it handled thimble a lot better.

I began to see what was happening, thimble does a fair job of syntax highlighting as you go, alerting you to any errors. But the neatest thing was the integration of the badges. I had signed in with Mozilla persona at the top of the thimble page. As I added various bits of code to the page small alerts popped up to tell me I had earned a badge. Clicking on the badges button allowed me to send the badges to my Backpack. This entails accepting the badges and then you can organise them into groups.

I guess all the code highlighting and checking to see if you have earned a badge is what slows down the iPad and older mac.

Personally I don’t think I’d be very motivated by badge gathering but I could see this being attractive to some sorts of learners especially as you can show the badges you have earned on a public page and also embed them on your blog or other webpage.

I’ve added some more notes about thimble on the thimble page I made.

Sharing your Success

Badges Badges

As well as the public page there is a wordpress plugin WPBadgeDisplay currently at version 0.8. I’ve not had the chance o look at it. Iain Hallahan ‏ let me know about Badge Widget Hack which will generate some JavaScript to display a group of your badges I found that this limited the display to 3 badges in the group but it was simple enough to edit the code to see more it looks like open badges provides a json feed for the badges (eg: http://beta.openbadges.org/displayer/8358/group/5612.json) which you can use to display badges. Here is a slightly better looking view of my thimble ones.

Beta

Open Badges Backpack is in beta, it says so in the url, https://beta.openbadges.org. It seems to be developing nicely and it is now a lot easier to get your head round how badges play out in practise. I can see some real use for thimble and badges in the classroom and I hope to test performance on other older computers soon. Hopefully it is better than on my old (2008) macbook or that the experience will improve over time. I hope too that Mozilla will not forget about iPad users as we are seeing a lot more of these in our classrooms now.

Finally I just used the ‘Start From Scratch’ option in thimble, there are a lot of interesting looking starter projects that you can use to get ideas for what to make.

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Jim Birney of Fife Education:

I believe many of us have been trusted when we have encouraged our schools to use the glow e-portfolios. We are the people our schools will turn to if there are problems in the migration!

from: Moving e-portfolios to a Microsoft blog « The Scottish ICT Development Group

Wp Blue Ripped

I’ve been composing a post about this for a week or so now, but Jim Birney has nailed all the main points. If you are interested in ict in Scottish education you should read it.

It would seem to be strange indeed to abandon all the work and effort that has gone on in Scotland to create over 70,000 blogs/eportfolios and take a new track. I can think of no reason for this nor have I seen any. Please let me know?

It is not as if I am a wordpress true believer, this is not a wordpress blog but…

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Like a lot of folk who read blogs I use a feed reader to keep up with quite a few blogs. Most of the blogs I follow fall into unsurprising categories and are loosely organised into folders: edublogs, scotedublogs, tech, edu tech, mac tech, web tech and the like.

But there are a some that do not follow into these categories and I though it worth noting a few favourites just for fun.

  • tinywords: haiku & other small poems I always like teaching poetry when I taught in primary school. Haiku, lunes and other short poems were a favourite, very useful for introducing blogging to pupils as you could get a lot of practise in a fairly short time. Tinywords is a great site, small poems drop in to your reader everyday with a quiet splash.
  • Stephs Blog this is my brother’s hill running blog. I’ve next to no interest in running anywhere never mind up a hill but I enjoy visiting Stephen’s world once a week. Not only impresses me with times, miles ran and metres climbed but some nice photos and interesting psychology between the lines.
  • The Urban Fly Fisher I was a very keen fly fisher in my teenage years and spent a fair bit of my thirties walking my daughter through the botanics and along the River Kelvin. I doubt I very much that ever fish again but this blog is consistently interesting, fishing, the politics of fishing the Kelvin, conservation, the urban environment all with a local twist.

What blogs do you read outside of your main interests?

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Ironically just after my last post I had a very interesting and useful time on twitter today. Mostly about Glow and GlowPlus and Glew

I’ve collected the tweets here: #glow blogs – #glow365 – #glowplus #glew (with tweets) · johnjohnston · Storify

Interesting points include:

  • Glow blogs will be moving from wordpress to sharepoint. My worries is that they will then go back to wordpress with glowPlus, I am nor worried about WordPress, I believe it is the best of breed (see next post) but to many unnecessary changes in too short a time is not good.
  • Charlie Love can add something to glew as you think about it.
  • It would be possible to bypass 365 and use glew as way of getting from glow to GlowPlus, I don’t see that as being official enough for Local Authorities.

If you are interested in the glow/glew/glowplus events have a read of the tweets.

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For Graham Wegner:

Twitter is a low hanging fruit for online thinking and learning. I cringe inwardly a little when someone pronounces Twitter as the best PD they’ve ever had. I wonder how it is that they have had such a barren run throughout their career for this to be true.

from: Twitter Is The Low Hanging Fruit Of Networked Learning « Graham Wegner – Open Educator

I believe that the Best PD/CPD quote was originally TeachMeet, according to Ollie Bray, in 2007 way back when TeachMeet was ScotEduBlogsMeetUp1.

One of the things that made TeachMeet such effective cpd was the feeling of ownership and inclusion it brought about.

Graham goes on say:

But blogging is different for me. I can recall various blog posts that have turned on the virtual light bulb for me with ideas that couldn’t possibly be contained within 140 characters.

Although I find twitter, useful and fun you have to agree that it fall short of the inspiration and information given by a great blog post. I don’t claim this for my own posts, which often are hurriedly put together with no focused audience (see my last post, which was only of interest to me;-)) but you just need to look at the posts coming out of the pedagoo.org crowd, for example Kenny Pieper’s blog to see the strength of the long form.

Pedagoo do make great use of twitter2 , live TeachMeet like events but it is probably the detailed and focused blogs posts that hold it together. I have only watched from the sidelines but it looks like pedagoo might be making a solid claim on being the best cpd around?

1. TeachMeet07 – ScotEduBlogs Wiki ↩

2. See the #pedagoofriday tweets, currated on pedagoo, for example: #pedagoofriday 5/10/12 ↩.

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I like listening to podcasts. I usually listen to them while driving. I use instacast to play podcasts on my iPhone. Instacast allows you to subscribe to podcast feeds, it downloads episodes while you are on WiFi for playback later. I subscribe to a few educational podcast, some mac ones, the Scottish Poetry Library and Machine of Death. I change these about occasionally.

Sometimes though I want to listen to individual podcasts episodes without subscribing to the whole feed. Recently I’ve been doing this by downloading the podcast media to dropbox, making the files favourites on my phone while on WiFi(which downloads them onto the phone) and listening later. To speed this up a bit and to allow me to do this from my phone or an ipad I have a folder in my dropbox with an AppleScript Folder Action attached to the folder. I add a text file with the url to a media file to this folder (typically with droptext) and it is automatically downloaded to my desktop in a dropbox folder. I then can favourite etc as normal.

huffduffer

This still leaves a bit to be desired, I need to remember to favourite the files while on Wifi so that they are ready to play in the car.

Huffduffer looks like it is made to solve this problem. It is a service that allows you to create a podcast feed from episodes of different podcasts or just mp3 files found on the web. You use a bookmarklet which finds any mp3 files on the current webpage and adds them to your podcast.

Earlier this week I saw a link to huffduffer and created an account: Johnjohnston on Huffduffer. The only problem is I created the account on my phone and left it a few days to install the bookmarklet on my desktop. By then I had forgotten the password!

Attempts to reset my password failed, and perhaps because it is the weekend, requests to get this fixed have not been answered yet. It looks like a few other folk have the problem

Not Huffduffer

So today I decided to try a wee bit of DIY with AppleScript. I’ve already got a few dropbox folders set up with Folder actions to do some automation 1 so had a rough idea of how to go about this.

What I want to do is, on iOS copy the url to a webpage, switch to droptext, make a new text file containing the url and save it into the folder. The Folder Action script then parses the webpage for mp3 and m4a files and adds them to a RSS file. I’ve describe to this file in instacast so don’t need to think about it much other than opening instacast when on wifi and letting it download episodes.

Google helped with a couple of tricky parts, getting the address of mp3 files out of the web page:
how to extract an mp3’s url from m3u…: Apple Support Communities and getting the correct style of date so that the RSS feed validates:
RFC 822 Dates with AppleScript | Joe Maller.

The script basically adds the mp3 urls to a text file along with the date they are added. This text file is parsed to produce an RSS feed. The script certainly lacks any polish, but it works. Here is the RSS feed in my dropbox. And here is what it looks like in
Instacast:

instacast not huduffer

As you can see, the feed is quite minimal, the names come from the mp3 file name. The script (I’ve uploaded it here), needs lots of work. I briefly tried to get the titles from the tile of the webpage, but ran into some odd characters which threw things off. I’ve also hard coded file paths into the script and it would be better not too. Most of the script, dealing with detecting the files added is a lift form the examples that Apple ship. My bit just process the url. I’ve also adapt this to run from a mac grabbing the front url from Safari, this script is in my FastScripts folder s oI can run it with a keyboard shortcut.

Not sure if anyone is interested in this stuff here, but it fascinates me and posting it is one way of keeping track.

1. I’ve blogged a couple of other applescript/dropbox ideas OCR via dropbox with Tesseract and
Testing a new system ↩

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I am pretty keen on posting photos to the Internet, not because I have great interest (or any skill) in photography but as an alternative, to blogging, way of recording events. I’ve been using flickr since 2004 and am currently enjoying instagram (mine via api) and posterous

Mostly I take photos with my phone (the best camera). Recently I’ve been testing the ways apple gives you to post photos from an iOS device.

Public Photo Stream

I’ve become a fan of photo stream,

When you take photos on an iOS device or import photos from your digital camera to your computer, Photo Stream will automatically upload it so it is available on all your devices.

You can also publish photos to a public photo stream.

Here is a guide to making a public photo stream. Click to see a bigger version:

How to Photo Stream 500

And here is the photo stream:
Ben Challum – Photo Stream. These are simple and quick to create and easy to share.

iPhoto Journals

For these you ned to buy iPhoto. There are a wee bit more complex and interesting as you can include a variety of different elements, including, map, weather, notes and the like.

Journal Elements

Again they are pretty straightforward to create and upload. Here are much the same photos as a journal: Ben Challum.

Here is the gallery, created on an iPad viewed in iPhoto on a iPhone

Journal iPhone

Photo Stream vs Journal

On thing I noticed with photo stream was that you could post a link, before the photos are uploaded. With iPhoto journals you have uploaded the whole journal before you can share the link. You can share a photo stream privately, although I don’t think I would. Both produce online sites with pretty horrible urls (eg: https://www.icloud.com/journal/#2;CAEQARoQpdbIWlofBmKRAh_cPbtctA;09537452-2A80-49C7-A86F-71E8734846CF!).

Photo stream is quicker, with less choice, with a journal you can edit the layout of photos easily (especially easy on an iPad). Journals have more features for telling a story by adding non photographic information. The photo stream seem to be designed to share photos as you go.

Educational Use

I could see the photo stream being used by a class or group to share photos and images with each other as they go allowing them to work on or use images created on classmates devices as they are created. It is simple to add images to a shared photo stream over a period.

Shared Photo Streams don’t count against your iCloud storage, and they work over Wi-Fi and cellular networks.

Apple – iCloud – photo stream. Realistically I doubt there are many cellular devices in our classrooms.

Journals are more suit to creating artefacts, perhaps using photos gather via photo stream. Journals allow the addition of text, editing of layout and look like an interesting way to tell a story, record some learning and share it, a fairly easy way to create a image heavy, attractive mini Web site.

Thus far and no further

Apart from the lengthy and un-rememberable urls the other thing I don’t like is the locked in aspect of the sharing. There is on api or RSS feed that could be used take the images and reposition them, but I suppose that is what flickr is for.

Flickr Export from iPhoto

This is pretty good, it is easy from iPhoto on iOS to send images to flickr, create sets and tagging photos as they go, here are the same pictures on Flickr: Ben Challum – a set on Flickr and flickr makes it easy to repurpose the images:

 

above updated 18 Oct 2022, the object/flash embed code replaced by the url to the set!

Although both photo stream and journals provide slideshow views there is no way, as far as I can see, to show these elsewhere.

Finally

I still like to play with putting photos on a map: A Mapped Walk and a have a reasonable workflow that let me put that together in about 20 minutes. I also like messing with panos so here is one from the same walk:
Ben Challum Pano.

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I’ve come across a couple of new, simple to use, almost throw away blogging tools recently:

Throwww

Throwww – The Simplest Blog. An example post: Minimal Blogging engines – Throwww.com

Throwww is the easiest way to write something and share it. Just start writing, post it, and share the url.

Posts on Throww can be tied to your twitter account, as my examples, or anonymous.

Authpad

Authpad my example
Minimal Blogging engines – johnjohnston’s Pad.

Authpad (beta) is a frictionless approach to blogging. Our goal is to take away any distraction that keeps you from focusing on what’s important — producing quality content.

Authpad has more of a traditional username/password setup, comments via disqus and themes.

Both support markdown for writing and work on iOS (I tested with an iPad).

Both also get away from the relative complexity of most blogging platform’s ‘dashboards’ and editors. Authpad has a slightly less minimal editor, as it has a toolbar:

Authpad Toolbar

Whereas with throwww you just type on the home page. Once you type a bit the Save button and a Formatting Help link show up, the latter will give you markdown help.

Authpad also gives you an option to publish as website or a blog style.

throww_editing
authpad_editing

 

Both, in my limited testing, are straightforward and easy to use. I an not sure that they are tools for the classroom, markdown and hosting images elsewhere might be a wee bit complex for pupils. They might fit with some teachers for their own publishing, certainly they are quick to use.

I am also not sure where they fit with the current trend to reclaim ones data from web 2, or a Domain of One’s Own or Un-Web 2.0 which I am finding interesting at the moment.

A couple of other similar things, Calepin which I’ve not tried and Scriptogr.am which I tested a while back: John Johnston | scriptogr.am.

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This is an invitation to those attending the Scottish Learning festival, TeachMeet SLF 2012 or TeachMeet SLF fringe to share their thoughts and reflections via EDUtalk.

Three years ago, David Noble and myself organised, SLFtalk – Audio publishing by attendees at the Scottish Learning Festival, the idea was to gather reports and reactions from the floor of the Festival from anyone who wanted to join in.

This developed into EDUtalk – Audio publishing by educators, using mobile devices which has now collected around 400 audio recordings about education.

This year, I am not going to the Festival or TeachMeet, I’ve a 25th anniversary to celebrate and although I’ve spent the odd anniversary at TeachMeet before, I am not going to miss this one.

I realise that I’ve been very privileged to attend SLF for a number of years (Thanks to MasterClass, Glow, Moira McArthur now NLC council ) and not many teacher get the chance. This was one of the reasons behind SLFtalk.

This year

I would like to know what is going on. I am sure I’ll read blogs posts and news from Education Scotland but I would also like to hear from folk attending. I am sure this is true for many others.

Why Audio?

I believe that audio has some advantages:

  • For the listener it can be listened to when doing something else, the dishes or driving. It also brings an extra dimension of information from the sound of the voice.
  • For the recorder it is quicker to get ideas down by a quick recording than it is to write. It is also very easy to publish.

So if you are going to the Scottish Learning festival, or attending TeachMeet SLF 2012 or TeachMeet SLF fringe please send us your thoughts and reflections.

How to contribute

Contributions to EDUtalk are supposed to be easy to do, we are not looking for polished pieces of audio, although these will not be turned down;-)

There are 3 main ways of contributing now:

  1. Email any audio to post@EDUtalk.posterous.com
  2. Tag an Audioboo edutalk
  3. Tag an ipadio phlogs edutalk

There are of course many many ways to record audio, most devices, computers,smart phones and mp3 players have applications do do this. You could use any one of these, all you need to do is save an audio file, mp3, aif, wav etc and mail it to post@EDUtalk.posterous.com. If you can send an mp3 and save yourself some audio, but any audio format will do.

Audioboo and iPadio both have smart phone applications that are free. You just need to download then onto your phone, record audio and tag that audio edutalk, Audioboo limits you to 2 minutes with a free account but it is surprising how much information you can give in 2 minutes.

What to talk about

Anything you want really, as long as it is about education. Some ideas:

  • A conversation with a colleague following a formal session
  • chat with a presenter after their session
  • you own reflections on a session attended
  • about a stall or product on floor (no adverts!)
  • conversation with colleague about recent teaching and learning
  • a group discussion that you are part of.
  • or something else…

Pick up the mic or phone

Please do, I think we need to hear from all sort of folk talking about all sorts of things in Scottish education. If you are a regular voice or have never published anything, HMIE inspector or probationer, leader writer or blogger please think of adding your voice to the EDUtalk mix.

Cross posted at http://JohnJohnston.info/blog and http://edutalk.cc