Just found iPod Video ? a far better audio recording device ? (ideal for student podcasting!) just need to find a couple of hundred quid.
Year: 2005
New RSS tool
for those interested in RSS this is a new tool to pull together various RSS feeds. SuprGlu
I gave it a quick try:
which displays a couple of my blogs my del.icio.us and flickr accounts and the school podcast, took about 2 minutes to setup.
Obviously this example is not much use, but I can imagine a time when you could connect together a set of photos links and blog posts into one resource for pupils? As you seem to be able to pass SuprGlu any rss feed you could provide a particular category of photos from flickr, tags from del.icio.us etc.
I am going to have to wait until I’ve a few more than 2 internet connected computers in my class before we could really exploit this. I must admit internet research is not a frequent part of individuals in my classes daily practice. All together on the whiteboard, lets google this is more like it.
Not getting any classroom blogging done
Today should have been a good day for the Sandaig Otters blog.
It was a whole school display day. All the classes pull together to produce a new display for or dining hall. Lots of things going on, but we are off timetable so I should have had some great chances to get some children blogging between art activities. I planned to have some going round taking photos of all the art activities in school and blogging that. I had a few poems in jotters that should have been blogged too.
It didn’t happen, I just got too busy with other things. I really need to get blogging into our daily routine fitting in with the rest of the curriculum. Too often it is an add-on or afterthought.
I did manage to test the video conferencing unit contacting Richmond Park in the afternoon, although this was just a test my class were pretty interested (ie shouting hi very loudly and waving enthusiastically to the staff at the other end) , which bodes well for later on when they will be conferencing with a few other schools.
Art Gallery: Emilia
Emilia’s brain seems to have been invaded by some wierd alien plant life form whose tendrils spread out in all directions!!
Art Gallery: Emilia one of a set of beautiful drawings by children mapping their minds.
More wonderful and stranger than I would have imagined.
Quote:
Following a discussion of individual learning preferences and discussion of a variety of different approaches to thinking and just what a brilliant tool the mind was, pupils were asked to draw the layout and organisation of their minds. As you can see the results were fascinating and I have really got my work cut out to find space to cram in any new learning!!!
Linked from and part of The Blogging Zone a new to me teacher/children blog.
ICT Coordinators meeting
I gave a short presentation on weblogging and podcasting. I think I use the wrong slides. these are the ones I meant to use. A few missing bits.
October Podcast Notes
We got a new podcast out last week on Radio Sandaig.
And the first comment. I am looking forward to the children’s reaction. The comment lead me to Room 613 Talk another nice primary podcast.
We hit a last minute snag with Audacity, after moving a bit of the podcast that had been recorded in Audacity from one machine to another (in order to speed up editing) the children had trouble saving, on reopening their work the was nothing on the audacity timeline. After my initial suspicion that they were not saving properly, and a few desperate attempts to work around the problem, we had to do the whole edit and export to MP3 in one session.
The recording and editing are still a time consuming process, I’ve been talking to Mark Warner who runs Downs FM. Mark’s podcasters basically record the whole show in one go, live, which seems to be a lot quicker. Before the recording they prepare clips etc. I think they are using GarageBand. The Downs FM was a live weekly Radio broadcast to the school last session and obviously have a lot of skill in the production process. (A nice description here: about Downs FM)
I think we will try and adapt some of their working practices for the November podcast). We used the Down’s promo in our podcast and hope to send them one.
Podcasting seems to be helping us make connections (Room 613 Talk, Downs FM, all the feedback from the Keepers Podcast) with other schools a lot quicker than blogging did. Podcasting seem to have had a faster uptake too.
Pupdate, Downs FM has gone, here is a link to the archive
Frappr
Josie Fraser EdTechUK has set up a frappr edubloggers group map.
Frappr is an online tool that lets you map out the zip code where you live, work, vacation, or anything else! You can then share your unique URL with friends and find out where the rest of them live and work in relation to everyone else.
It would be even more fun if you could edit the shoutouts, mine is a bit of a mess.
Radio Sandaig Comments
I’ve added a comment system to Radio Sandaig using HaloScan Commenting and Trackback
Seems pretty simple to set up, the Radio Sandaig listings are parsed from the rss feed using MagpieRSS so it was easy to add the HaloScan stuff.
Lucida Grande
Not Lucida Grandie, I was wondering about that.
I got rid of the dotted line between the columns too, and played about with the templates, not that it makes much difference but it beats doing whatever work it was I was going to do this morning.
Bit by Bit Podcast: 14
Listening to Bob Sprankle’s
Bit by Bit Podcast: 14 which is as usual full of good ideas.
I was comforted to hear him discuss the problem of children without access to the internet getting to hear the podcasts. It is easy to get the idea that other places are a lot btter connected than we are. I was excited to here a solution send home an audio CD, great idea. I am going to burn a CD with the Radio Sandaig podcasts for children at school to take home. We just sent some audio to our partner school in Holland, so the idea chimed with me. I think I’ll include a bunch of podcasts from different school as examples to the Radio Sandaig team.