John's World Wide Wall Display

TeachMeet Falkirk 09 Video

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.

TeachMeet Falkirk Audio Part 1

I've done a rough edit of the audio from the first half of TeachMeet Falkirk, taken from the FlashMeeting with WireTap:

or download from my iDisk.
I hope to get time to listen to and edit the second part later this weekend.

TeachMeet Falkirk

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 took quite a few photos at the event but was let down by my lack of photo skills, my iphone photos turned out better.
• Mark Rushton has published a nice set on Flickr: #TMFALKIRK09 Pics and hopefully some more will turn up tagged tmfalkirk09.
• Twitter / Search - #tmfalkirk09 is still going
• Tess provided a stream of tweets with with yfrog photos
• Margaret blogged: A Successful Falkirk TeachMeet! including the gist of her presentation.

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.

iMotion - Stop motion animation for iPhone

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

EDUtalk

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

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.

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.