This week I have added five new apps to my iPad and thought I’d post them here.
The whole post was made on the iPad all text 'written' with Dragon Dictation.
The first is BBC News and this is just a translation of the BBC’s new site for the iPad that it works very nicely. It’s pretty slick there is a series of all news feeds on the left and you could see the articles on the right. You can customise the feeds so I’ve already remove sport and added the Scottish news it seems very iPad friendly and like quite a few designed read and access media in an attractive way.
Another media viewer I’ve installed is FlipBoard which has been getting a lot of attention on the Internet and on twitter. This app pulls information from different sources, Facebook or twitter and from collections and about different things, say technology or entertainment.the app presents these streams in an attractive way. You can to flip through the pages with some pretty effects. What I think is really impressive that is with the tweets from your twitter stream it doesn’t just to show the tweets, if a tweet has an article linked it will present some of the article, with a photograph that will present the photograph. FlipBoard has been a little controversial as it is pulling in content by scraping rather than they’re getting it from RSS feeds. To me this doesn’t seem too much of a problem most of the longer articles are shortened so you need to display the source along with any adverts and branding to read the whole thing. This viewing is done in the app rather than in safari.
The next app is regexecutioner which is an app to help learn about regular expressions. I do occasionally attempting to learn and to use snippets of regular expressions. Hopefully this may get me up to speed. It is a pretty straightforward app were you can see examples and you can take a regular expression and a text block instantly see it’s result.
StripDesigner is more of a creative app. You can see from the screen shots that are illustrating this post that I have used it to present and annotate some screenshots of these application. It’s a really nice ComicLife clone. I tried on the iPhone first there the screen space is a wee bit limited but on the iPad and it just works very nicely indeed. You can choose different layouts of up to five pictures. You can add texts and the other things, adjusting fonts, text size and drop shadows in an easy and intuitive way. I think it would be a great application to use in a classroom and I imagine I’ll be using it quite a lot.
The final application I’ve installed this week is Dragon Dictation which is an amazing application. I have recorded all of this post and it turned into text using Dragon Dictation it is very straightforward to use: you press a record button, you talk, you hit the Screen to stop. Dragon then analyses this (I imagine it sens the audio to a server) and brings back the text. You can quickly clean up and edit the text. I tried it first on my iPhone you can tweet straight from Speech. I then they tried on the iPad and had one crash so made sure to a copy of each section of this post as i recorded six different sections. I had to do a little cleaning up, but given my accent and the fact that there is no training period make this application seem like magic.
With Glow blogs looking like they may stimulate the use of blogs in more Scottish classrooms I though I might put together a few posts about some ideas around starting to use blogs in the classroom.
The above still stands but I want to pick up some details and tips, starting with short term blogs in this post.
Setting a date by Damon Duncan Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
I couple of weeks ago I was following a lovely class blog: International Week. The blog uses posterous's ease of publishing media very well, the children are recording short pieces of audio with easi-speak mics and uploading them to the blog. The mics are in my opinion a great tools for the classroom.
In the week the blog has also had pictures, animoto, youtube, a survey, google maps and writing. It is a great example of using posterous in the classroom.
One of the things I like about this blog is the length of time it ran: 1 school week, 5 days. I spent a fair bit of time moving old posts across when I left Sandaig to here. I am a digital hoarder. I love the ability to look back through a year or 3 of a blog and I really like the connections that build up and grow on a long term blog. When I was teaching at Sandaig Primary my main blogging focus was Sandaig Otters which ran for 5 years at that url and is still being updated at a new home: Sandaig Otters.
But I also organised quite a few other blogs some for individuals, some for particular projects and these included a few short term blogs.
Short term blogging is, I think, a great way to add any short term project, trip or collaboration in class.
One of the first blogs I organised for short term use was The Listeners - Primary Six Writing Week which only has 11 posts. I probably spent more time customising the design than the class did blogging. I still feel it was a success, the children in the class were very much focused by publishing their work online and very much encouraged by the comments they received.
Since then I've organised quite a few short term blogs, including trip blogs and blogs for short school projects. Of course if you have a established weblog you could just use categories or tags to organise a set of posts round a theme or project, but this can be a great way to dip your toe into blogging and finding out how it could help your teaching.
Scottish teachers now have easy access to blogging tools with the release of glow blogs. At he time of writing the blogging facility is fairly basic but several improvements will be made before the start of the next session. Setting up a glow blog is very straightforward and LTS have produced some introductory material: Glow Blogs – An Overview « Glow Help Articles, glow blogs can be set to be private with only glow users, or a subset of those users having access or open to the public. I would recommend that you open the blogs up to the public. If I didn't have access to glow I think I'd be very tempted by posterous as a simple way to set up a blog and get pupils started.
Although setting up and using a blog is technically very simple you need to think a wee bit about the attitude of the pupils, they need to know that they are not using bebo, facebook or messaging their friends, that they have a responsibility to themselves, their class and school.
Short Term Advantages
The pupils will not have time to forget the safety information or become fedup with you reminding them.
The initial excitement of publishing online will hopefully not fade over a short term project.
By setting limits in time and scope for the blog makes it more doable and less likely to lose focus or drift off which can happen with long term class blogs.
If the blog is collaborative with another school setting a fixed period will give all parties a target that is easier to met and give attention to than an open ended project.
If you are hoping that an audience will have an effect on your pupils organising that is simpler, and your audience will be more likely to stay the course.
It is probably easier to give pupils more control over the organisation of a short term blog with simple aims.
Short Term Tips
Makes sure the blog is set up and you are comfortable with using the interface
If you are going to use photos make sure the pupils know your rules for posting, (probably no named faces).
Pupils can use the cameras, edit and resize pictures independently. I am alway surprised at how many school taking photos is a job for adults.
Similarly with other media, make sure that you are not going to be needed to get it sort out and posted. If your pupils are not regularly handling cameras, importing and editing media files make sure you have at least a couple of experts before the project starts.
You can prep an audience, contact another school, explain to parents how to post, do a wee bit of online publicity (twitter).
Short Term Examples
International Week the blog mentioned at the start of this post is a great example. The rest are ones that I have organised, not that I think they are particularly good examples but I know more about them.
Snakes and Ladders, this blog was set up for a project designed to help integrate children joining our school when the one across the road closed down. Half a dozen primary sevens were given the responsibility of keeping the project blog up-to-date and did a great job. Another team were tasked with creating a video which was posted at the end of the project. The pupils were not in my class and basically organised themselves during the project.
The Dream Dragon - A log of the dream dragon project quite a different blog, mostly updated by myself and used as a teaching tool for a fairly long project with sporadic activity, I wanted the class to have an overview of the project.
World Cup 2006 I noticed quite a lot of classroom blogging about the current World Cup, this one stimulated a few reluctant boys, unfortunately the Scottish term cut it short.
We blogged trips to Holland in 2005, 2007 and 2008 these blogs were much appreciated by parents as were the Holland 2010 posts which kept my 'tradition' going after I left school. Trip blogs are a great way to demonstrate some of the powers of the internet to your class and to get parents interested in blogging.
I blogged a weeks trip to Glencoe 2006 to do outdoor activities. When a class I had previously taught to blog went with their next teacher to Blairvadach they were perfectly capable of organising the blog themselves.
Elephants was another week long poetry blog which gathered some of very interesting comments I'll return to some ideas about comments in a later post. Like the The Listeners blog having a separate blog meant we could customise it for a particular project.
McClure - Sandaig is a collection of 3 blogs for a collaborative project with a class in Georgia in the USA.
In one of the blogs I made some fairly crude customisations that allowed comments to appear with the same weight as posts. I did this, as usual, at the last minute but I think it was a nice idea it reminds me that blogs are not fit for every purpose and were not designed with the classroom in mind, hopefully in the longer term we will get blog like software that will allow even more customisation than is available now.
This particular hack was performed quickly at the last minute and I would not have been able to do it if the blog had been a long term one. Short term blogs are ideal for all sorts of experimentation.
I am sure I've only scratched the surface of the use of a short term blog I hope these examples show that it can be a useful tool in the classroom and would allow folk unfamiliar with blogging to make an achievable and worthwhile start or experiment.
I hope produce a few more posts about classroom blogging which might be helpful to people starting out with glow blogs next session and will tag them glowblogs. I would be interested in collecting any other short term use of blogs in the classroom.
Here is what is going on: Line 1 includes the jQuery Library hosted by google.
We then have a simple script using the library. Line 3 setting jQuery to noConflict, this means that we use jQuery for our main function name rather than the $ shortcut. I am not sure if I need to do this but it fixed some early experiments. Line 5, this is where we use jQuery, we use it to add a css class of top_up to any link that links to an m4v file. Line 9 add the TopUp javascript library from gettopup.com. This is enough to make m4v videos play in a popup window but in the last bit of the script we just ajust some settings.
Yesterday saw the launch of blogs in Glow. A much requested feature from the beginning it is great to see Glow getting into a web 2 world at last. To set up your blog you need to have creating a blog allowed by your ASM, after that you just add a Blog webpart to a glow page and click create. You can create a private blog, one that can only be viewed by glow users and an open blog, I know which one I'd go for
Alan Hamilton has published a table explaining how glow users roles map to the blog's role: Glow Blogs | #learnerham. I think I'd go for giving any pupils as much permission as I could. At Sandaig Primary the children always blogged with admin rights and they never put a foot wrong.
Yesterday I set up a quick test blog just to see how thing work, I managed to get in first and spent a while trying things out. It is, on first impression, a pretty standard Wordpress set up and I managed to change my theme, add stuff to the sidebar and make a couple of posts. I had a bit of trouble posting an image as there seems to be a wee bug in the system, I'd guess this will be easy to fix.
The blog both integrates into glow, with a version (without media) of the Quick Press area in the glow webpart:
this could be handy if you wanted a text only blog, but I am more interested in the fact that with a public blog you can log into the blog admin directly using your glow login through the magic of Shibboleth.
Feature Requests I'll be making
To celebrate day two of glow blogging I though I'd make a couple of feature requests.
Storage space; at the moment this is set to 10mb: Two header graphics and a couple of other small pics and I am at 3% of this already. My graphics are fairly well squashed (unlike some who should know better ), 10mb gives very little space for audio or video files. I've not tested the upload file size limit. I know Glow has been very good at increasing storage space for standard glow sites when it is needed and hope they will take the same approach here.
Settings, not too surprising but you can't do a lot with these, the one thing I would love to see turned on is the ability to activate the MetaWebLogAPI, this would enable lots of good stuff, the use of specialised blogging clients and, more interesting to me, blogging from mobile devices (ipod touches for instance).
I'll not be lobbying for lots of extra themes, though other folk might, the one I'm using, K2, has a fair amount of customisation available and I don't think the limited number of theme is that important.
Getting started blogging
Especially if done in full public view there are some potential difficulties. I personally feel that the advantages hugely outweigh these, but I also feel it pays to tread carefully. I always used to repeatedly stress to my pupils there responsibilities in publishing to the world. I likened it to a school trip, explaining that blogging was like going out into the world as a school representative. In the same way as I expected excellent behaviour on a trip I expected excellent behaviour on the blog.
Teachers too have their responsibilities, we need to try to get he best out of blogging, introducing it in a structured way. Three years ago I blogged: Starting Blogging in the Classroom and think that is still a reasonable approach.
Ever since I started pupils blogging I have felt that it is a wonderful classroom activity and I hope that the glow blogs will lead to an explosion of classroom blogging across Scotland.
I am also hoping that these blogs will be listed on ScotEduBlogs making that an even more powerful resource.
For quite a while now there has been a fair amount of discussion about how twitter is becoming the main conduit for web 2 type teachers to keep in touch and that blogging is on its way out.
I was interested to hear a couple of views about this on the edonis project podcast recently. Jaye Richards wondered if twitter was just a little too positive, not having space for critical discussion. Robert Jones talked about how it was hard to interest teachers in twitter if they did not already have an online network of some sort.
Although I tweet with a fair degree of enthusiasm I do sometime worry that it twitter takes something away from blogging. I've noticed a decrease in comments here and elsewhere and a decrease in my commenting beyond a quick tweet. For example my previous post here is sitting with no comments but several tweets.
Yesterday I read a few posts that convinced me that blogging is alive and well. I though I'd link to them here:
Margaret Vass posted Learning, Teaching and ICT » A Secondment Whirlwind Tour – 2 Years in 2 Minutes. Margaret's blog is a constant source of inspiration for me and this post has me thinking hard about my professional role. She also points to some of the work she has done on ePortfolios and the main points she has learnt, one What about the pupils?: Comments should go beyond “I think I did OK” or ” I think I have more to learn.” is perhaps relevant to the blogs versus twitter theme.
Mr Mallon, posted some Good Advice from Rolf which he recorded on a trip to CERN. Particle physicist Rolf Landau gives advice to the many Scottish young people who are about to take up Physics. I've not listened to the 59 minute recording yet, but what a wonderful example of the way blogging can provide resources to pupils.
Meanwhile in the English Department Mr W asks What Texts D’you Teach? he is in the market for new texts for his English Department and would appreciate any suggestions. He is collecting them on a google spreadsheet through a form Neil already has a good number of suggestions.
I found all the above on the ScotsEduBlogs front page, but saw the next linked from twitter.
S1 adventures in posterous on Kenny O'Donnell's blog. Kenny gives a rundown of some of the ways S1 in his school have been using posterous. There are some great examples of students work linked. I was particularly interested in the students not only persisted, but experimented with their blogs because it required nothing more than sending their work from e-mail and the suggestions about e-portfolios.
I could of course linked to lots of other great blog posts from around Scotland this week, but I think these give a flavour of the the valuable information and conversation going on. As much as I love twitter posts like the above linger in my mind for longer hopefully helping me in all sorts of ways.
This brief unscientific survey shows the great value of blogs and I'd suggest that the odd visit to ScotsEduBlogs will always interest and inspire at least as much as watching the titter stream.
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.
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 … AB: Hi John,
glad you liked your first play with Glow Blogs. It’s important to me that you suggest imp… Maria Campbell: Totally agree that the blogging format provides more context, particularly in weight of response and… Juliet Robertson: Hi John
I got an iPad a week ago. So I’m still in the process of exploring its potential. I plan t… Ben Barton: I have commented at: bit.ly/aTDnRN
Its all very, very exciting.
