Year: 2009

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I’ve not posted here for a bit longer than usual. I am not sure why as I’ve got a few posts running round my head at the moment. I did have some time this week but that was eaten up by sorting out a few backend things on this blog. Last weekend I updated the blog to PivotX – 2.0.0: beta 12j and I must have made a mistake or two. In the new version of pivot some thing have changed (Upgrading from previous beta releases). By the middle of the week I had noticed a few funny things going on, individual posts were giving 404 errors. I tried uploading the files again but due to the careless way I had originally installed pivot I had to be careful not to over write my templates. I them made things even worse. To cut a long story short I uploaded a clean version of pivot, and move my data across then deleted the old directory. Hence the change of theme.

I suspect that the root of the problem stems from the way I move the blog to here from the Sandaig Primary site.

I could probably footer around and put the old theme back in place but as I had never really finished that one I was not too sad to see it go. At the moment I am using the bare bones theme which is designed to be customised.

Flatfiles

One of the main reasons I use Pivot (which is now officially pivotX) is the fact you can easily customise the theme of you know a little html. The original reason I picked it was it was the only blog I could find that used flat files rather than a database. PivotX now gives you the choice to use MySQL if you want. At the moment I am sticking with flat files.

I also quite like the barebones theme, I’ve always like fixed width or maximum width webpages but flexible is beginning to grow on me.

I guess I’ll tweek away at the template and css, but I now have a much cleaner starting point to start from.

Another thing that seems to be fixed by the clean install is the MetaWeblog API which I had managed to break in the move here so I am now back to blogging with TextMate which I am delighted about (or will be if this post works when I hit ?-?-p).

All I need now is a bit of time to tweek and some more to actually blog, for today this will depend on the weather.

Blogged from tm

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I usually think I can google with the best of them but I am coming round to thinking twitter is quicker!

Yesterday I was working on a wee document on how asus netbooks running linux could be used in class. (I hope to add some more stuff to Doug’s google presentation soon). The webcan can record video nicely, but the files are .ogg ones. On the machine i was using there was no video editing software so I was thinking of moving the video onto a mac to edit. I started googling ogg to mov and the like but didn’t find a result. I figured the ffmpegx might do the trick, but installing that app is not straightforward. So I tweeted: anyone know how to convert ogg video on a mac. can only get VLC to view simple solution prefered at 3:32 PM. By 3:34 PM rogbi200 had tweeted @johnjohnston http://handbrake.fr will convert most things!, followed by one from atstewart and two from jimhenderson.

Handbrake works a treat, is easy to install.

Today, still working on the asus, transferring screen-shots via pen drive to a mac for documentation, I could not see how to eject the disk, right click had no eject. I tweeted atstewart and twowhizzy replied. Again I had spent a few minutes googling. Again twitter was quicker.

My tongue is in my cheek of course, I’ve probably run dozens of google searches over the last two days which have got me what I wanted, twitter seems a good option when you can’t find what you want.

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wallace monument

I spent Thursday and Friday at the Stirling Management Centre learning about Glow Learn. This is just my first reaction to the training, my own opinion which will probably change once I’ve had a chance to discuss and think a bit more.

Back in Glasgow I had been a Glow mentor but as the Glow roll out hadn’t started before I left my experience limited to a couple of pilots when I spent a fair bit of time testing glow. I’ve never used glow in a teaching situation and it now feels peculiar that I will not be doing so.

In North Lanarkshire we have just started rolling out glow accounts to mentors and only had our mentor training a couple of weeks ago so it is a bit of a jump going straight into glow learn. The in-school mentors will have a wee while longer before they get to the Learn training but it might have been better if we could have had a bit of time to embed glow before getting into learn, unfortunately this is not possible.

Most of the time over the two days was spent in a mix of instruction and practical activity. The group I was in was lead by Karen-Ann MacAlpine, Ian Hoffman, Lorna Murray all of RM Glow Team, Lorna is the RM contact for North Lanarkshire. The pacing and delivery of the material was excellent, lots of time to practice and chat and ask questions.

Pictures from Glow Learn Training are on the New North Lanarkshire Glow Blog which is being developed by the Glow Development officers.

Glow Learn is a VLE (virtual learning environment) within glow. I’ve never taught with a vle and have only come across them by accessing a Moodle course or two. Glow learn allows teachers to gather objective and learning resources together into courses, present them to pupils and follow those pupils tracks recording and assessing their progress.

Glow learn also allows the organising an sharing of resources and courses with other glow users. It allows teacher to search for courses and resources and use these.

Finally it allows the courses created to be added to a Glow group in a learning space sitting along site discussion boards and other resources.

The practical job of all of this organisation, sharing and presentation is necessarily complex. Even after two days I was struggling to hold a consistent overview of how all the bits fitted together in my head.

The learn section allows you to collect resources of several types, files, links and tests. You can make your own or search for them in resources that are available above you in the hierarchy, that is, resources at the national level or your school level are available to you. Resources (and courses) created can pushed up the hierarchy to make the available for more users. The organisation of this becomes interesting when you start to think about who has permission to edit resources and how that will effect other users. Various safeguards are in place to prevent other teachers changing courses.

Once you have created some resources and added them to a course you can add students/pupils and assign them work. Glow learn is flexible enough to allow work by pupils to be a quiz/test answered online or submission of any sort of file. I like the idea of allowing pupils to answer or record their learning in different ways.

It seems that glow learn is adaptable enough to use in different ways, you could just create the resources and use that as a whole class teaching tool, or you could have a class access differentiated resources and complete assignments online.

Back in glow itself glow learn resources can be presented through a learning space which in this case is a specialised web-part that can be added to a glow page. Although this looks like a good idea it also adds to a teachers workload as pupils need to be added to both the course in glow learn and the learning space.

GLOW learn has loads of potential to widen the curriculum subjects offered in many schools - especially at advanced higher

Good Things About Glow Learn:

  • Potential of Creating Courses for reuse.
  • Sharing and using other courses.
  • Collaborative building of courses and schemes of work.
  • Widen range of children’s work & Choices.
  • Combine with other resources in Glow, discussions, video conferences etc.

Possible Drawbacks

  • Fairly steep learning curve.
  • Some of Glow’s GUI is confusing, I think learn is better than glow itself in this respect.

The advantages that glow learn has over other online tools such as blogs and wiki are the potential for sharing of resources with other Scottish teachers, the archiving and tracking of pupil learning over the pupils whole career. This will depend on the willingness of Local Authorities and teachers to share and on their skill in describing and tagging their resources.

It is early days for glow learn and I understand that it is still in development,the team spoke about the fact that they did not know how the VLE was going to be used and how it would develop in practise. This could be a very positive thing if glow learn will be actively developed to accommodate the users.

As some of us come late to the glow party there are already signs of glow 2, I noticed this tweet from Laurie O’Donnell:

“@JConnell @jayerichards Just like Glow 1 the plan for Glow 2 is go public with a draft spec and seek suggestions to make it better.”

Although I made a fair number of suggestions for the improvement of glow one during the pilot I am only now figuring out what could be the best thing about glow 2.0, keep it in beta.

Instead of designing a spec which is fixed in stone I hope glow 2 like most of the Web 2.0 applications we now use will be in perpetual beta. Think about how much the google services have changed in the last few years, look at posterous adding features as users suggest them, keeping ease of use at the top of the agenda. The definition of Perpetual beta at Wikipedia would be a good starting place for glow 2.

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sandaig home

This post consists of some notes and information to go along with a short chat I will be having with folk at the North Lanarkshire business meeting in Modern Languages at the invite of Robert Dalzell QIO International Education.

Disclaimer, a quick scan of this blog will prove that I’ve not mastered my first language never mind a second. I have no real knowledge of MFL except that I read quite a few MLF blogs and I have talked to MFL teachers before.
Not much of this post is specfic to MFL but hopefully the examples I give on the day will be of practical use to the audience.

Why Blogs?:

  • Easy low bar technology:
    If you can type you can blog. Recent blogging systems deal with text, and multi-media is a very simple and straightforward way. Low cost or free. Modern blogs handle media and organisation automatically in ways that used to be open only to skilled web developers.
  • Community & audience:
    There is already a widespread network of educational blogging you can join. For pupils blogging can make learning real and purposeful.
  • Dissemination & Aggregation:
    Through RSS (really simple syndication) it is easy to keep up with a large number of blogs and easy for your blog to be widely read.

Further reading on OpenSourceCPD:

Ways to use blogs in education::

  • CPD
    Blogging has become a powerful tool for professional development for many teachers and educators worldwide. By reading blogs you can keep up with some of the latest ideas in education and join in discussions of these ideas.
    I’ve put together some ideas about this at OpenSourceCPD- Reading Blogs as CPD and there are some links to mfl teachers blogs below.
  • Teacher to Pupil:
    Teachers can publish homework, revision, extra material. This can be text, files such as pdfs, audio (podcasting) or video.
  • Pupil Publishing:
    (This is my favourite bit) A static website involves a fair bit of work and distances children from the publishing process. Weblogs allow children to become more directly involved in the publishing process without delving into time consuming html skills.
    Allow children to ‘write the web’ as opposed to reading it.

    It is another wall display

    To give the children a wider (one of the widest) audience for some of their work, increase their sense of ownership and responsibility of their work and gain feedback and co-operation from others. Working in small groups on a shared text/media encourages peer feedback and co-operation.

    Hopefully it should inform parents and even allow children to understand aspects of class life. Scanning down the blog show a surprisingly wide variety of activities recently covered.

    For many children working on the computer still has motivational value and this is surely increased by the fact that we are publishing for the world.

    Many types of media; images, comics, audio, video, animation can be used by pupils as well as text. Starting Blogging in the Classroom

Further Reading:
Blogs tagged MFL on ScotEduBlogs:


LTS: MFLE – Information, support, ideas and resources for modern languages teaching

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Friday afternoon I saw this tweet: Twitter / tombarrett: “Three Interesting Ways to … from Tom Barrett and popped over to the google presentation on using your Pocket Video Camera in the Classroom. At that point there were three ways and a few folk in the chat. I got an invite from Tom and when I got home I added a slide, by that time there were four ideas so mine made five, I added another later in the evening. By this morning there are nineteen ideas in the slide deck and there have always been a few folk viewing the presentation when I’ve checked it. As I get ready to post this there are 21 ideas. There has also be a ton of tweets linking to the presentation.

Tom has a wonderful ability to get these things rolling through his extensive twitter network. The shared google presentation idea is a great idea, Tom has used it before: Thirty-Eight Interesting Ways (and tips) to use your Interactive Whiteboard and a couple on google earth, as has Doug Belshaw with Interesting Ways to use Netbooks in the Classroom.

What is about these efforts is the amount of collaboration that they attract, much more tha, for example my own efforts. I think part of the secret is probably the low bar to add to the resource. I guess it took me about 2 or 3 minutes to add the first of my slides and about 90 seconds for the second. This is a lot more reasonable than expecting folk to create a wiki page and fill it up. Google Slides are pretty straightforward, no need to read the docs, the technology is pretty transparent. The other part of the secret is, of course, Tom’s excellent use of twitter and the respect he has earned from educators around the world, I can’t wait for his next idea.

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When I heard I was going to be working in north Lanarkshire one of the first things I did was to check ScotEduBlog’s list of blogs to see if there was much blogging activity going on, I found one: Our Lady’s High School.

in the few months I’ve been there I’ve heard of many more, but the other week I overheard my colleague Ian unblocking a blog, this turns out to be Mr Mallon’s Video and audio media part of Mr Mallon’s Physics Site which has a great url http://helpmyphysics.co.uk/. The site contains a pile of resources for physics and science including a podcast and video recordings by pupils. I has a listen to a podcast and pinged a mail to David Noble for the Podcast Directory his review says:

Very professional production from this North Lanarkshire teacher. Mr Mallon mixes a range of topics and approaches with humour and educational songs. Links to fun and helpful resources to enhance learning are provided.

I discovered a few more blogs this week when Robert Dalzell a North Lanarkshire QIO mailed me to ask if I’d have a word at the Modern Languages business meeting about blogs and blogging. He already has an example blog up and pointed me to euroblog from Coltness and Modern Languages @ Dalziel. I’ll be looking forward to getting into my comfort zone (not the mfl bit obviously) and talking about blogs.

If there are any other North Lanarkshire blogs out there please let me know.

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Wu wei – No action
Originally uploaded by ????

I’ve been a fan of posterous since it started and have been amazed how the service has added features as quickly as they have been suggested. A couple of days ago the announced public group sites with post by moderation. This allow you to open up a blog to posts by anyone, but you get to moderate the posts.

I imagine you could use a group posterous for a inter school poetry blog (for example) between schools allowing children to concentrate on their writing and the evaluation of their partners.
Or a a zero setup class blog if your pupils have separate email addresses.

Posterous of course is blogging by email, with zero setup. Posterous takes just about any sort of media and deals with it in a sensible way. Posterous also sends you posts to other places (twitter, flickr, blogs etc) automatically if you want.

Garry Tan one of posterous’ cofounders had set up a public blog Posterous Recipes for Recipes and I though I’d give it a spin. All I needed to do was to drag a couple of photos from iPhoto onto the mail icon on my Mac’s dock, up popped a mail window with the photos attached, I put in the address post@recipes.posterous.com and clicked send, it was that simple. No resizing of photos, posterous presents them beautifully without out me having to think about them.

Posting my recipe, Posterous recognised my email and linked my recipe to my own posterous. And as I posted to post@ rather than posterous@ it picked up my settings and tweeted for me and posted the photos to flickr too!

Although the main way of accessing Posterous is via email, the web interface if beautiful for example, commenting in posterous is a very sweet, no opening the post in a new window, just an ajax reveal of the comment box: simple and clean without confusion.

The guys at posterous are incredibly responsive, I’ve mailed and tweeted them a few time and always had replies within hours, give the time difference this is really impressive. They are improving posterous almost all of the time; on one occasion in response to a blog post elsewhere, taking suggestions, acting on them and reporting all in the comments!

The fact posterous deals with blogging sorts of media without the user having to think. This echoes a Chinese philosophical phrase act without doing; ? ? ?; wei wu wei (wei wu wei: “action without action” or “effortless doing”).

This reminds me of When the technology gets boring, then things get interesting socially, a quote I saw in a comment on Ewan‘s blog, originally from Clay Shirky. Elsewhere (I think) Ewan talked about email as an example of this. With posterous you can use email, a tech you can use without thought, so that you can concentrate on what you are posting, the teach not the tech (Ewan again). Or for pupils the learning not the ict skills.

Last week I had some Glow training, I am starting to get quite excited about the possibilities of pupils using Glow. The potential is there, but the tech needs to become less obvious. Posting video to glow involves using a browser, then an ftp client, and then back to a browser. Coincidentally the previous night I was testing a flip video camera and popped the result onto posterous by simply dragging the file onto my mail app, filling in the to address and hitting send.

The Flip camera and posterous are both effortless technology, in education both could help by lowering the bar so that learners can concentrate on the learning and not get caught up in the tech. Glow has incredible ambition and potential I hope it becomes an effortless tool in the same way posterous and the flip camera are.