I am also really starting to think about the Naace Primary Conference Fri 25 & Sat 26 Nov 2005 where I am talking about podcasting. At the stage of thinking that just giving my del.icio.us podcasting links would be more useful than anything else I could say.

There is now so much information out there about podcasting: back in May when I talked to the Glasgow Masterclass about blogs and podcasting there was about 5,020,000 google hits for podcasting. Today I got 32,000,000!

I am really looking forward to working out what I am going to say as it should help me figure out what I think about podcasting. The Keepers poem for National Poetry Day blog and podcast we did the other week got more responses than anything we have done for a while, so I am pretty excited about podcasting at the moment.

Spending some time with http://www.sandaigprimary.co.uk redesigning the whole site to incorporate the blogs a little better. So far I’ve redesigned most of the site except for the blogs, the design is not live at the moment though.

Also going through my del.icio.us links and trying to organise them. I keep forgetting that ones tagged with education show up on the left. Since I installed an apple script to tag pages with @review I suppose I should organise my links more often.

I also went for a walk in Glen Luss yesterday in an effort to keep away from the mac, greatly regretting the loss of my digital camera.

Ewan posted recently:

David Warlickised – the Warlick effect, about the effect of linkage by a really respected educationalist’s blog can affect the number of people reading your blog.

Well he has had the same sort of effect here.

Ewan picked up the recent Sandaig Poets postings and associated Radio Sandaig podcast for National poetry day. he also alerted Anne Davis a major US educational blogger.

Yesterday I was delighted to tell and show the children the positive comments and links they had received from and on Ewan’s blog.

The keepers podcast is moving up through our stats very nicely.

Since Anne Davis posted we have even more comments to look at today.

The positive effect on the writers and readers cannot (imo) be overestimated.

I was looking at the stats for sandaigprimary.co.uk for October so far. I’ve noticed that the Primary 1 Toy Drawings from 03 – 04 are always in the top 10 pages visited. I couldn’t work out why. I also noticed a lot of of pages linking to the Toy Drawings following some of these lead to a picture of a particular toy from our page used on other sites.

turns out if you search for Action Man on google images our wee pict is number 4.

A Quick and Dirty celebration of National Poetry Day was organised on Thursday this week.

based on the The Keepers Poetry Project and the original Keepers poem by Phil Whitehead.

All the children in primary 2 to 7 attempted to write a verse in the last hour of Thursday. Primary Seven pupils types the poems up for the Sandaig Poets blog. apart from the odd file going astray this was a success: 150 verses written.

On Friday we recorded a podcast for Radio Sandaig with some verses from each class. for the sake of speed I did the editing on Friday evening and Saturday morning. This was the first time we have recorded children out side of p6 and p7, great excitement, but all the children took the recording very seriously indeed.

Next time we try this, it would probably be better to start before 2 o’clock, so that the children could see their poems online straight away, the primary seven typists just finished at 3 o’clock.

Two thoughts, one how easy it was to do the blogging involving a lot of children. Next time I’d be tempted to create a blog just for the day and have a category for each class so that the children see their poems go up one at a time. The second thought is that it would have been pretty difficult to do the podcast if I was not released from class. Classroom podcasting would have a lot of background noise, I was able to record the children (or let the older ones record themselves in the music room). Mind you the Radio Sandaig team can now handle recording without help, so maybe next time they could do the whole thing.

We have started recording the October podcast.

Goodbye lunchtimes for the next few days as we get the recording done.

The podcasters are incredibly enthusiastic, popping ideas all the time.

After this show we will really start to listen to ourselves and work on diction. Still having trouble with explosive Ps, I need to do some research on that, I think I saw one solution involving stockings, but cannot remember where.

I also need to start getting some more boys involved, the majority of the volunteers are girls at the moment.

We also hope to do a very short one-off podcast on Friday connected to our National Poetry Day event on Thursday.

I am testing WordPress at edublogs.org

http://cpdinict.edublogs.org/

and at blogsome john tests wordpress there seems t obe one or two things at edublogs which are not quite right, the themes editor doesn’t show many of the themes, a few broken links I guess.

The blogsome set up seems to offer a few more of wordpress’ features. Blogsome blogs come with google adverts, but tey are fairly samll. You seem to be able to turn them off, but they hosts ask you not to. I suppose that turning them off on a school site might be a good thing.

Andy Carvin’s Waste of Bandwidth: Creating the $100 Laptop

… a presentation from Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab. Negroponte discussed his $100 laptop initiative, in which he is working to produce a low-cost laptop for mass distribution in k-12 schools in the developing world

This might link to the discussions at SETT about the SSDN . The problem with having all the wonderful digital resources for learners seem to be the uneven distribution. In Glasgow with a fairly low percentage of households with internet connectivity maybe we need a £100 or even £200 laptop initiative for children.

This also links into the digital native argument somewhere, some disadvantaged children will not grow up using the technology without thinking about it, putting them at an educational disadvantage compared to their better off peers in the city.

tags: Scottish Learning Festival Andy+Carvin Digital Divide

Before SETT I though it was just me, Ewan and David.

But there seems to be a lot more, David has posted about Exc-el weblogs in East Lothian.

In the podcasting round table at SETT, we met someone with several (still can’t find my notes).

It would be nice to find some more or them all.

Sandaig’s main blog is listed at Scottish Blogs but I don’t see any other education blogs there.

Maybe we could start a Scottish Education Blog list somewhere.

I’ve started tagging Scottish Educational Blogs with scot-edu-blog at del.icio.us/tag/scot-edu-blog. If you are a del.icio.us using Scots Educational blogger or know one please tag it.

If you can think of a better tag than scot-edu-blog, please let me know in a comment.