New Sandaig News is going to replace the Sandaig News page I hope.

This session I want to try and combine the Web site and the blogs. I’ve had a few goes over the summer, but I’ve not managed anything I like so far. I learned a bit about laying out the blog with the Elephants, Netherlands 2005 and Sandaig Poets last session. Due to the school computer monitors we have to fit on a 800 by 600 screen. And I’d like to keep the Sandy with a blackboard menu in some form too.

I’ve been putting together a unit on blogging for editc and gathered a fair number of links, which are here. (they are also in my bookmarks, furl and del.icio.us links). I am finding it quite hard to decide where to keep all of this stuff in an organised fashion.

Anyway here are the links…

General Research

Teacher Educator Blogs

  • edu.blogs.com Ewan McIntosh shows how blogs and podcasts aren’t just a gimmick: they can be used to provide powerful learning in Scottish schools.
  • edcompblog random thoughts about Educational Computing from a lecturer at Jordanhill, the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow
  • weblogg-ed.commaintained by Will Richardson, blogvangelist: site is dedicated to discussions and reflections on the use of Weblogs, wikis, RSS, audiocasts and other Read/Write Web related technologies in the K-12 realm.
  • blog of David Warlick Educational technologist.
  • Educational Weblogs, numerous links and resources all about educational weblogs and best practice examples.
  • edublogs.org is a no-profit adventure into providing free WordPress blogs and hosting for teachers, students, researchers, librarians, writers and anyone who is interested in or working in education. May be a good place to get a free blog.
  • anne.teachesme blogvangelist
  • Alan November?s blog.
  • ?Reflections of a Techie

School and class Blogs

Other Blogs

  • edugadget blog about ?interesting technologies that could be used in the classroom.?
  • SQAComputing blog the web log of computing staff within the scottish qualifications authority.

Just added the Sandaig Otters to this UK based edubloggers directory .

Then spent a hour or so following links to various interesting things:

Pebble Blogging app (Java/tomcat)

earth-to-blogger

britcast wiki Uk Podcasting

edTechUK Josie Fraser who started the CamabanWiki

And many more blogs, not much in the primary school area, (except for our pals at Berkhamsted Collegiate Prep School) lots of tech from FE. Problem for teacher is the volume of information out there and the time need to absorb it, my head is spinning.

I’ve just added a Tag Cloud from: http://www.tagcloud.com/ to the left of this blog.

I am going to be using this blog to play with some blog tech over the summer holidays.

TagCloud is an automated Folksonomy tool. Essentially, TagCloud searches any number of RSS feeds you specify, extracts keywords from the content and lists them according to prevalence within the RSS feeds. Clicking on the tag’s link will display a list of all the article abstracts associated with that keyword.

http://edu.blogs.com/ great blog from Musselburgh Grammar School’s Ewan McIntosh.

I started trying to puttogether something of an introduction to blogging for Edict today, but of course ended up reading blogs. Ewan’s lead me to David Muir‘s blog and to thinking about del.icio.us again, if I am going to write this I am going have to get disconnected.

Radio Sandaig

Our most ambitious project yet. Interviews with children and teachers, News from the school and our Holland trip, ending with a suprise musical item.

Lucy and megan from primary six carried out the bulk of the work, supplimented by News from Emma B and Darren, some Holland reports from various primary sixes and a musical item from primary seven.

We are begining to get the idea with podcasting I think, just need a bit of practice with the software to get the sound quality right. I’ve not really spent much time with audacity, which we use to edit the sound files, so I can’t teach more than the basics.

We have been learning as we go along.

The Children have done most of the scripting, recording and editing, I’ve been trying to keep in the background.

I am not sure if this is the best way to go about it, it might be better to have a more hands on approach. Hopefully next session we can expand the program a bit to include a regular programme and include more children.