Month: September 2007

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Scratchscreen

I run a couple of after school clubs at Sandaig, today was the primary 7 computer club. The number are limited to 12 so that we don’t have to worry about resources and help. I usually have a lovely time. The primary sevens are working on Scratch. After one of the children’s nice flash movies produced last session I was tempted to stick with Flash, but Scratch is getting a lot of coverage so I though I’d try it.

We started exploring the scratch files on the projects page and watching one of the Scratch Videos. The next week the children worked through the Getting Started pdf. We missed the week after as I was at the Scottish Learning Festival and this week the children started on the Scratch cards. They are beginning to get comfortable with the interface and are having a ton of fun. It is lovely watching them find things out for themselves, some quickly found the record sound facility and gales of laughter echoed round the school. Some children quickly wanted to leave the introductory cards and explore ideas for themselves. Quite often these ideas seem pretty advanced and are leading up blind avenues but usually making interesting discoveries along the way. The children worked in pairs and sometimes one group has a solution the others need. I’ve not really explored scratch at all by myself, the children know this which hopefully will give them s sense of pride. I do have enough basic programming concepts to be able to give some help.
I a not sure if the children will be able to progress to the levels of some Scratchers (see for example munkeeb’s Stuff) in the time available, but I am sure they will have fun. I wonder how they would get on if they had an hour or two a day working with this stuff for a couple of weeks, could that work with the curriculum for excellence?

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Water lilies This is just a wee test of windows live writer I am thinking of trying it out with the children, if I can get it installed on the machines at school. It looks as if there are some useful features, especially for adding and resizing images. It looks like it is going to impress me, especially the bit for wrapping images and adding a drop shadow.

Live writer also lets you preview and the preview looks great.

Apologies

Map image

for the image I am on my old Masterclass PC and had to reinstall the system, only got the sample images on it at the moment.

Oh look Virtual Earth!

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As I mentioned earlier I recorded some of the presentations from TeachMeet07. I’ve turned these into a enhanced podcast. spent a bit more time in GarageBand and am beginning to understand a bit more about it and it’s relationship to the other iLife apps. As usually I made a silly mistake or two, the main one being I did not know the maximum length depended on the tempo of the Master Track. This lead me to having to change that after I had organised all the chapter marks and links, I then had to reposition these on the time line which took me most of the afternoon.

Anyway time well spent, as teachMeet07 has been one of the most exciting educational events I’ve attended for a long time. Have a listen and let me know if you agree.

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I had a bit of bother with this one. I’ve not used keynote much, but it was very easy to create a presentation with. While playing about with it I noticed you could record an audio soundtrack very easily and though I’d do that, export to quicktime or even youtube to let folk see what I’ve been talking about (and to play with the toys). Recording was easy enough, but when I came to export I got errors every time. A quick google fould more folk with the same problem and fixes for keynote 3 & 3, unfortunately I was using keynote 4 and the fixes didn’t work for me. I am guessing the problem has something to do with combining a recorded audio with movies and audio in the presentation. So what should have been a few minutes work turned into a few hours! I exported the presentation to jpgs, then I dug into the presentation package and found the narration audio. Next I imported the into GarageBand and one by one placed the images on the podcast track, adding urls as I went.

Next I exported the podcast to iWeb and published it, the first time I had used iWeb and again it seems easy enough to use without having to read a manual.

anyway here is a version of the presentation as an enhanced podcast.

As a by-product I now have a Podcast. I will not be adding to it very often, but I’ve got some audio from TeachMeet07 which I’ll publish soon. I didn’t manage to record all the presentations, but I’ve got some.

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I had a great day yesterday. I stared off blogging Ewan‘s We’re Adopting! An Adoption Strategy for Social Media in Education which I really enjoyed, it is very tempting to move to east Lothian for the support of David Gilmore and the great blogging community they have put together.

After that I chatted to a few folk and walked around nervously before my spot. I accually sort of enjoyed my self and the audience seemed happy enough, I posted a few links and hope I’ll put the presentation up at the weekend.

After that I tried to blog both In the Wild (Glasgow) and Stephen Heppell

I didn’t do a very good job of it so didn’t post anything, both INW and Mr Heppell were really interesting, but I didn’t type anything worth posting, David was typing away and I guess he will have done the job when they arrive on Connected Blog

teach meet audiance

At 6:00pm we dashed back across to the science centre for TeachMeet07. Previous events have been describes as “My best continuing professional development” by no less than Ollie Bray, who is often described as one of the best cpd providers so a lot to live upto.
This time we had a huge space in the science center and the biggest ever crowd, hopefully someone else will estimate, but 200 bottles of beer didn’t last long.
About 25 people had volunteered to present, most offering seven minute micropresentations and some two minute nano-presentations. This time Ewan had organised a virtual lottery to choose the next presenter and explained that folk should fell free to chat if the presentations did not interest them (it is an un-conference). He had also organised some excellent audio so even in the huge space everyone was clearly heard.
I was delighted to be pulled out the virtual hat first and raced through a quick intro and guide to scotedublogs.org.uk, trying both to explain what it is good for and to get the bloggers in the room to link to scotedublogs.org.uk (this might mean you). It seemed to go down well, the audience was very friendly and encouraging. Maybe because I only took five of my seven minutes.

teachmeet screen

After that it really was the best cpd in the world, speaker after speaker produced wonderful ideas, the audience cheered and wooted and before you knew it it was 8:30. One or two folk did not get to present, but we managed to here most of the list. I could not pick out anyone particular, but was sorry Ian Stuart and Theo Kuechel were not heard. I had an idea about what they would be talking about and it sounded great.

The atmosphere in the room was amazing, teachers are not always the most cheerful of folk when they are getting after hours training. I do not think I have been in such an open and friendly crowd.

After that it was off to Khublai Khan’s for some food and more excellent cpd. A vote of thanks to Softease who sponsored the weird and wonderful menu.
I probably got more ict teaching tips and great links and ideas than in the rest of my years cpd put together.

I have no idea how this event could have been improved but I am really looking forward to the next one.

Blogged from tm

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I am typing this as I wait to do my turn. For what it is worth I hope to have the slides up over the weekend, I’ve nearly finished recording the audio in keynote.
Here are the web pages that I refer to in my presentation.

UpdateI posted these links and they were all broken, I’ve fixed them now.Sandaig Otters – The Weblog of Sandaig Primary School in Glasgow
Sandaig Otters » Primary 6 Bio poems
Sandaig Poets – Poems from Sandaig Primary School
» Our Bio Poems – Thanks Sandaig Primary 🙂 Primary 7v Class Blog
Sandaig Television – A Video blog from Sandaig Primary in Scotland
Netherlands 2007 – Sandaig Primary Visit the Netherlands 2007
Eco Otters – The Weblog of the Sandaig Eco committee
Snakes and Ladders   
Sandaig Otters » Twin Castles
Sandaig Otters » our record
Sandaig Otters » P6 TO P7
Sandaig Otters » First Circut Movie
Sandaig Otters » Flick Flacks
Sandaig Otters » Gears
Sandaig Otters » Dancing
Sandaig Otters » Name Art
Sandaig Poets » bio poem by Kimberley-Jayne
Nicole – Sandaig Primary 6 SJ
Tasks – Blogging Tasks For Primary Six
Radio Sandaig
John @ Sandaig Primary – mostly what we are doing with ict in class and some links
John @ Sandaig Primary » Starting Blogging in the Classroom

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Ewan Getting Started

We?re Adopting! An Adoption Strategy for Social Media in Education A wee live blog to start the day. Waiting for Ewan to start a glimpse of the new edubuzz on the screen. Looks very sweet, David Gilmore should be please.
There are a lot more laptops in evidence than previous years at SLF/SETT.I think Ewan has finished installing updates, and is introducing himself. Now National Adviser for Teaching technology futures (an upgarde). Trying to get significant minority of a LA to use Web 2.0.
Social media allows one to listen in to so many conversation.
East Lothian very varied LA.
2005 20 teachers in EL sharing online out of 1000 teachers, now >350 teachers and 1000 bloggers (including pupils, six years old to Head of Edu).
Permission to fail, allows teachers try things out, makes learning more enjoyable.

5 points:

  1. Id Key User Groups; parents, student teachers & librarians, mixed bag of folk, not just geeks.
  2. ID and understand your key users & influencers. Get the ‘leaders’ onboard.
  3. Let Key users evangelise.
  4. Turn evangeliser into trainers. (avoid evangelisers turning audience off)
  5. Support folk at the bottom and emergent ideas.

Face to face very important (TeachMeet)
Don’t lead by mandate.
Big impact on parental communication in some schools. (all?).
How do you deal with fear factor. See: The Bass Player’s Blog

Do we spend too much time planning technology lesson, Ewan says we do because we will not go off plan to improve lesson. I probably disagree with this one. I don’t over plan but have to spend a lot of time testing if the tech will work.

Nice video of multi tasking musician typical HT would say useless. Ewan says no. 841,498 views, 9102 ratings, 8000+ comments.

Amazing example from Be Very Afraid:

Audience
Ewan has a huge audience.
David Gilmore, links beyond the school, p3 divers example, bubbleshared experiment, picked up by diver who commented, and visited.
Rate my Mates
>Ewan’s demoing blogging, email to the world. How quick is that.

Creativity must be shared.
Flickr, 5 photo story, comments, sharing goodness.
Note we need edu flickr.Ewan wrapping up with:
It is not about the tech it is the teachMr W’s bebo example. Ewan would not use Bebo, but we can learn from it.

Photo Mr. W

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It is about 7 am, I’ve been up for a while with pre-presentation nerves and am pretty excited about what the next couple of days will teach me

It is quite hard to focus on what I am going to be doing and yesterday’s prep found that I’ve double booked myself a couple of times today.

I’ve arranged to meet a few folk here and there and set up a few lightweight tools for keeping in touch.
My mobile will be on (it is not usually) and I’ll set twitter to tweet to it. I’ll be carrying a laptop and will have a few things at hand:

The best thing about the Scottish Learning Festival is the conversation, I am really looking forward to catching up with folk I know and meeting new people, and it is nearly time to go.

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Ottercubs tn

We have a new blog here at Sandaig: Otter Cubs The blog of the youngsters at Sandaig. Primary 3 made their first post today. The posts will appear on the Sandaig Otter’s blog as well as the Otter Cubs.
I don’t expect the primary 3s will be posting frequently until they have a bit more practise but please pop along and give them a comment if you have a minute or two to spare.

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A frustrating afternoon.
I’ve not managed to get blogging embedded in my class this session yet, although we have dipped our toes in a little.
I have been working with our primary sevens, my class from last year and the other p7 who are starting to use our new wordpress setup.
I am out of class on Friday afternoons this session to work with other classes and so far I’ve been trying to get the blogging habit going with the sevens.
Last week the p7m guys ran out of time before many of them posted there first blog to wordpress. This afternoon I was determined that they would do so and some would get a second post with an image. They got their text ready, resized the images and then began to run into problems:

MYIPROXY ERROR: connection refusedwww.sandaigprimary.co.uk refused to accept connection on port 80
________________________________________
While trying to retrieve the URL: www.sandaigprimary.co.uk/

I think we had some other errors too. At this point I though it might be a problem with the wordpress setup as I had not stress tested it, but the internet seemed to be generally slow.
The second half of the afternoon I was working with Primary Seven S on their pivot blogs, and while some of them managed to post we got lots of the same error messages. so I started to think it was a problem with our site, maybe because 20 children were all logging on at once, but when some of the children went to some edublogs.org blogs to read other school blogs they got slowdowns and the same errors.
The biggest problem seemed to be with blog sites, more straightforward pages just loaded very slowly. I’ve raised a speculative fault, but don’t really know enough about how network errors work to guess what is going on. Any hints or advice welcome.

Earlier in the week i had more frustration as I came into school early to upload a bunch of pictures to voicethread.com and it didn’t work, I got one up but kept getting authentication dialogs popping up. I guess I’ll have to try uploading photos from home and getting the children to add audio in school.

I usually feel technically savvy enough for a primary teacher, but I do not know much about the ins and outs of the network, I guess I need to find out.