Month: January 2007

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If you read my blog much you might have noticed the odd moan about flickr, not being able to be used it here.

Recently I found Pics4Learning. This is

intended to provide copyright friendly images for use by students and teachers in an educational setting.

There does not seem to be a specific license attached to the photos, they only ask for attribution. Yesterday my class searched for photos to go with poems they wrote, downloaded them, resized them and posted them to their blogs. I also explained that they need to give some sort of attribution, unfortunately I had not found the instructions, so we just linked to Pics4Learning, next time the attributions will be to the photos.

I was quite please that quite a few of the children a managed this as there are quite a few steps involved. I was especially pleased to see Courtney who didn’t have time to finish her post went hope searched for a picture, added it to her blog (remembering to resize it) and attributed it.

I realise that the site is nowhere near as wide and deep as flickr, but it will be a great asset to our blogs this session. I also think there is some advantage in the children downloading and editing photos rather than just linking to flickr. It should also insure that readers of the children’s blogs who also have images sites blocked will see the pictures.

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I just want to point to Robert‘s post about Scotedublogs – A New Hub for Scottish Educational Blogs which is pretty wonderful news.

Teachers doing it for themselves;-)

What is great about this project, like the Scotedublogs wiki is the fact that anyone can join in and influence the project. Robert and Peter are doing the heavy lifting (code/programming) at the moment, but anyone can help with that or just an opinion on what needs to be done or the best way to do it. I am no coder, but I can put in my 2 pence worth about features, design etc as can anyone else.

Check out Robert‘s post, the Scots Edu Blogs Aggregation Project page on the Scotedublogs wiki, the discussion group and the project itself: www.scotedublogs.org.uk.

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A cross between putting my money were my mouth is and enjoying the last couple days of freedom.

Click on the left right hand side of images to advance, the left to go back. The slides sort of explain the hows, whys and wherefores. You can try the editor I hope it will be usable by the children. If not I’ve enjoyed playing with flash.

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An interesting pessimistc/optomistic post by Will

Yes, there are more and more examples of teachers and students using these tools in their practice, but the numbers of examples of students on the K-12 level whose learning is being transformed by these technologies is amazingly small, at least to me. I mean really, where are the examples of students blogging?and I mean blogging, not just using blogs?and building global networks of learners? There are some, yes, but not enough to make the case that these tools can work in the current school environment.

Which hits a few nails on the head. I certainly feel that blogging has done my classes some good but I don’t think their learning is going through a major transformation. I am not too worried though. I am not at all sure if any optimism is possible on the other global events Will refers to, but it should be for educational blogging.

First I think the methods to help children blog in the first place, fitting this into the curriculum and the school day, are developing and need to be explored before we build global networks. This will take time (more time). As a class teacher who is starting the fourth year of blogging with children I am still scratching the surface, just starting to move from giving the children an audience to letting them develop a community. I’ve seening this happen more this session than ever before.

Secondly as we slowly integrate blogging and a world wide network of children learning together it will hopefully dovetail nicely with A Curriculum for Excellence, Assessment is for Learning and other educational efforts outside the blogosphere which I think are pushing in the same direction. (Maybe extreme-learning too, but I don’t know much about that).

Thirdly a lot of the edu blogs that have started up over the last year have been professional development blogs not learner blogs. I do not see the sort of changes that I think Will wants until more children are given the tools, hopefully as teachers use the tools themselves they will start giving them to their classes and then as Will says we

will have our kids leading us further toward where we need to go?

I don’t think this will happen in 2007 everywhere, but we already know The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.

I’ve a few ideas of where I want to go in 2007 and hopefully will be planning them here before long.

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From the Akismet stats page

524,143,055 spams caught so far

1,606,961 so far today

94% of all comments are spam

The spam log on the Sandaig blogs tells me our good comments (ham according to Akismet) to spam ratio is a lot poorer than average, we seem to get 100s of spam comments every day. The trend in the Akismet graph is pretty depressing, the fact that so little spam actually gets through to protected blogs is not.