As I wonderd if schools were open this morning I checked the North Lanarkshire Council : Winter schools daily update webpage which was down so turned to nlcwinter (nlcwinter) on Twitter there were no new updates at that time so I tweeted:

johnjohnston
john johnston

@nlcwinter http://www.northlanarkshire.gov.uk/winter is down?
Tue Nov 30 07:14:02 +0000 2010 from web captured: Tue, 30 Nov 10 01:59:51 -0600

Very quickly I got this mention:

Intregued I went to isdown (isdown) on Twitter where the profile weblink lead to this tweet:

GuyKawasaki
Guy Kawasaki

Learning from first hand experience this is an interesting search on Twitter: http://tinyurl.com/57fzra
Sat Nov 22 18:24:21 +0000 2008 from TweetDeck captured: Tue, 30 Nov 10 08:01:21 +0000

I am guessing someone is using something like twitterfeed.com : feed your blog to twitter to auto tweet the rss for the twitter search (probably using advanced to skip too much recusion by getting @isdown’s tweets?)

I’ve used twitterfeed.com to post my blog posts to twitter and for @scotedublogs to tweet all the new ScotEdublogs posts but this takes it a bit further, I guess they use the syntax for not including tweets from @isdown itself.

Anyway an interesting way of using twitter that has me thinking a wee bit. I’ve not tried any simpe twitter stuff since the OAuth authentication came in, might be time to have a wee look at it.

Consolerium games guru Charile Love has come up with a pile of interesting stuff linked to his work and glow. A while back he published a guide to Creating Your Custom Glow Theme which has been very useful for me. Recently he has produce a url shortner for glow Glo.li with a web interface, glow webpart: Making Glow Better with glo.li and wordpress pluging and the Internet Explorer and Firefox Toolbar Alphas (with integrated Glow Search) now in beta all very much worth checking out if you use glow.

URL shortners are not necessarly a good thing I don’t think they have much place on blog posts or web pages. There a a couple of places they are handy, twitter with its 140 char limitation and printed material. Newspapers often use them and I’ve found thenm useful for printend notes. I also imagine they are worth using with children in glow. A typical glow url, say:

https://portal.glowscotland.org.uk/establishments/nationalsite/International%20Children’s%20Games/ICG%20Activities/Lists/Pages/D4.aspx

is not an easy one to put on the board for kids to type;-) http://glo.li/9hzYzG is a lot simpler.

Charlie’s Toolbar has glo.li built in making it really easy to grab a shortened url from any page in fireFox and Internet Explorer. Unfortunatly for me I am pretty welded to the Safari browser so can’t install the toolbar (I guess someone could make an extension for glo.li) but I did already use applescript with tinyurl for shortening links. I am not sure how many other glow users use applescript too but here is how it works:

Gloli

I commented on Charlie’s blog post asking about acces to gloli via the command line and he kindly explained it to me. I wrapped this up into an appleScript which I assign a keyboard shortcut via FastScripts (I’ve blogged about FastScripts before). Now I just press command-alt-control-g to get the url for the current page displated in Safari onto my clipboard ready to paste. I’ve posted the script and how to do this here: glo.li url shortner applescript just incase anyone is interested. The script does include the easiest/lasziest way to strip html I’ve manged to figure out.

If you are a glow user I suggest that you check out Charlie’s blog straight away.

This post is the third in an attempted series about getting started blogging loosely linked to the launch of glow blogs.

Conversation by Rishi Menon
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

I’e always considered blogging to be 3 pronged activity, providing purpose, gaining an audience and starting a conversation. All of these factors can motivate pupils. Blogging can be seen as a ‘real’ activity, writing for a world outside the classroom. It has a real audience who may start a conversation through comments.

Back in the day when I first started blogging at Sandaig there was not a lot of other classroom blogging going on, none at all in Scotland. This gave my class a bit of an advantage in gaining comments and we picked up a few folk who my class felt they had a relationship to. ‘Andy from Aberdeen’ who regularly added a good number of comments to our new blog and after a while Carol Fuller who became our fairy blogmother!

Comments added a lot to our blogging and podcasting in those days. Now with blogs popping up all over the place, the landscape has changed a bit. One one hand there is a bigger potential audience than before but that audience has more choice.

For a teacher who is already active online gaining an audience is not to difficult, they can publish links and requests for comments on their own blog or through twitter. If you get picked up by the right folk you can gather a lot of comments, i recently and responded to a twitter request for comments on a pupil blog as did many others, in a couple of days the pupils 68 word post had 45 comments!

A lot of the new blogs that are popping up now are not necessarily being run by teachers who have spent a lot of time in creating an online network so how do they get comments for their class? I’d suggest a few basic ideas:

  • In the process of explaining blogs to the class visit other blogs and as a class make comments.
  • Once your class are blogging confidently have them individually comment on other blogs.
  • As a teacher visit a couple of class blogs every week, leave a comment or two. Think of this as a sort of cross marking exercise.
  • As a class visit a particular blog regularly, find one that ‘fits’ in with your class and perhaps some sort of regular commenting will build up.
  • If something on another blog stimulates your pupils curiosity , ask questions, try out the activity, blog about it( example).
  • Respond to comments on your own blog. Often this will provide a useful learning activity and some fun.
  • Get in touch with another blogging teacher, do some lightly joined up planning.

In all of this commenting activity leave the url to your blogs in the URL field of the comment form. Teach the children to copy and paste this rather than typing it in, it is easy to make a typo, or put a semi colon instead of a colon and break the link.

Don’t assume that because children find the technology simple that they will write good comments, in the same way as with blog posts, they need advice and modelling. Some teachers might like to provide rules or a check list:

  1. Is the comment relevant? is it worth saying? (just cool is probably not).
  2. Is it generally positive & friendly? I suggest 2 stars and a wish for classmates work.
  3. Would you like a comment like this?
  4. Is the spelling and punctuation a good reflection on the commenter?

Anne Davis provides some comment starters: EduBlog Insights » Blog Archive » Thinking about the teaching of writing which are well worth sharing with pupils, I think I used to have them displayed on the wall.

If you are looking for somewhere to find blogs ScotEduBlogs aggregates blogs from across Scotland.
Glow blog list can be found for each local authority, for example the url for North Lanarkshire is: https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/nl/ each of the other LAs has its own initials at the end of the url (full list).
Further Afield Tom Barrett has be collecting primary class blogs on delicious which provides a great list.

If you know of other ways to encourage commenting you could leave me a comment;-)

A while back I blogged about a simple iPod touch/iPhone web app I was working on for creating images with lunes tamped on them (iPod Touch Poems). Over the last week or two I’ve seen a couple of classes using it:

Both classes had a little problem with the app working properly when add to the iPod Touch home screen. It seems that:

<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes" />

Had crept back into the html. I’d found earlier that if this is present it stops he download of an image, and hence the poem, to an iPhone or iPod Touch’s Photos.

Please let me know if you use the lunes app and any problems (or success) you have. leave a comment here or tweet @johnjohnston.

 

Technologies for Learning Workshop

Yesterday I attend the Technologies for Learning Workshop which was intended to

form part of the initial exploration work contributing to the potential development of a Scottish Government Technologies for Learning Strategy.

The invite came out of the blue a couple of weeks ago and I was unsure what to expect. As I approached the venue Twitter let me know that I would see quite a few folk from the ScotEdublog world and when I arrived It looked like a TeachMeet crowd. The event was nicely organised by the IFF folk who started off three main segments of the day. The discussion was more wide-ranging than I expected and there was less nitty gritty about the workings and interface of glow than I expected and a good deal more looking at larger questions. Thankfully there was not the expectation that conclusions were made as I left with questions rather than answers.

Fearghal Kelly, Technologies for Learning Strategy, Andrea Reid, Trust « Interim reports and Neil Winton, #ediff « If You Don’t Like Change…, have already blogged some reflections and David Gilmour has posted photos of the whiteboards on flickr Technologies for Learning Strategy Workshop

I am certainly the wrong person to try and give an overview of the day. I usually find myself focusing on trees rather than the woods and this workshop was viewing the forrest.

Tweeting

One of the trees was related to both the workshop and the wider online community. Near the end of the day a lady, whose name I didn’t catch but was someone from the government end rather than an educator, expressed doubts to the value of twitter. During the day a lot of tweeting using the #ediff had gone on. It was suggested that this was rude, to the presenters and of little real value, due to the quality of some of the tweets. Con Morris, CPDScotsman, robustly defended twitter explaining how it saved a stream of links, pass references to other participants and allowed people to join in from a distance. There were a few folk who did join in from afar so I think Con proved his point.

I didn’t tweet much during the day, but one I was struck enough by some thing Pat Kane was talking about to fire out a tweet:

johnjohnston
john johnston

@playethic hacking&play good. Facebook&gaming less so #ediff
Fri Oct 15 11:59:03 +0000 2010 from Twitter for iPad captured: Sat, 16 Oct 10 14:40:29 +0100

Pat caught my attention by talking about the difference between facebook (“relentless processes of inclusion, exclusion and meritocratic struggle”) and the hacker culture (“subverting technology till it breaks, so that better tech can be built”) which he compared with the difference between gaming and playing. Quotes from Pat Kane’s CalMerc column at Thoughtland.

This caught my attention because I’d been reading Charlie Love’s post: A social network for Education?. I liked this post so much I’d read it 3 times and nearly printed it out to take to the workshop. I’ve had a long standing dislike/distrust of facebook and a preference for a loose network (delicious, flickr, blogs, RSS) and this post started me thinking that I have missed a lot of goodness that could be gathered from a social network for Education. Pat’s points were a interesting take on this.

I am not reaching any conclusion just mulling over, so was surprised by this tweet from Derek:

@derekrobertson
Derek P Robertson

johnjohnston @playethic Please clarify what you mean by gaming not being good. In what educational context is this being framed? #ediff
Fri Oct 15 11:59:03 +0000 2010 from web captured: Sat, 16 Oct 10 15:47:40 +0100

given Derek’s role as Guardian of Games Based Learning in Scotland I suppose it was easy for him to reach the conclusion that some games bashing was going on.

@derekrobertson
Derek P Robertson

johnjohnston Yes hopefully. Disconcerting to see such tweets from this event. Clarification would be very helpfu as gbl good in Scottish ed 15 Oct

to which I replied:

johnjohnston
john johnston

@derekrobertson sorry to disconcert. Struck me as interesting pt. Game are subset of play?
Fri Oct 15 14:23:10 +0000 2010 from Twitter for iPad captured: Sat, 16 Oct 10 17:27:59 +0100

The conversation then continued through the evening:

theplayethic
pat kane

@ewanmcintosh @johnjohnston @derekrobertson Play‚?Game. Play’s more than contestation/teamwork. It’s mess, mocking, mimicry, free ideation
Fri Oct 15 20:17:56 +0000 2010 from Twitter for iPhone captured: Sat, 16 Oct 10 17:30:00 +0100

@derekrobertson
Derek P Robertson

@theplayethic @ewanmcintosh @johnjohnston Agreed but contestation can be with oneself and not with others – a self-improvement agenda.

and again this morning:

fkelly
Fearghal Kelly

The message I took from it [not sure if intended one] was that we need to think carefully about the learning not just the game? #gbldebate
Sat Oct 16 09:47:16 +0000 2010 from web captured: Sat, 16 Oct 10 17:35:07 +0100

And many more.

Interesting (to me) points about twitter:

  • Even experienced tweeters can misunderstand each other/
  • I probably got a better discussion than I intended by my tweet being seen a critical of games (it was not intended to be).
  • Tweets can really stimulate discussion and thought.
  • As the conversation goes on, loses tags and become more distributed it is harder to follow, I stopped getting included in replies and the gag dropped off.

At the meeting yesterday one of the ideas was to challenge all preconceptions, eg does Scotland need an intranet?, will we need classrooms and more. Having Pat Kane speak and Ewan take part provided some vital/interesting disruption. Challenging games based learning or any other type of learning went with the flow of the day. I can see how it might be if you look at it through a games visor. Pat’s idea of play gives us an ideal of learning that we will almost always fall short of.

Some Gaming Thoughts

A lot of games in school are used for drill & practise and there is a place for that, other uses embed gaming in a more complex learning scene (Endless Ocean using the Wii for example). Derek has provided us with lots of examples of all sorts.

The other aspect of gaming that I’ve found more interesting is game making, this might give more opportunity for Pat’s play than playing games. Derek’s consolerium team have been providing a ton of resources for this It could be seen as hacking (in Pat’s positive sense) which I find compelling. In own learning the things I’ve enjoyed most (? most productive) have been amateur attempts at hacking.

An amateur hack

While thinking about this post I realised that I wanted to quote quite a few tweets. Twitter provides a tool to do this: Blackbird Pie – Twitter Media I was under the (wrong) impression that this used iframes (I was wrong) and the live tweet and I wanted static html, so I made my own I also figured out how to make a javascript bookmarklet for the first time.

To my mind spontaneous self directed play is an ideal to keep in the back of our minds while we do a bit of drill & practice and muddle towards CfE.

Thoughts from the day

Important questions raised:

  1. Do we need an intranet/use google apps
  2. Security (a lot of the current came from LAs) can we have a sliding scale. IMO the recent additions to glow are addressing this
  3. How does Scotland organise training/CPD

Questions I though could have done with more coverage:

There was talk of the need for better broadband across Scotland, but I feel hardware is more of a problem. until recently I would have agreed with the general opinion in the room that we will end up using the pupils own devices, but I’ve recently read: Fraser Speirs – Blog – Run What Ya Brung which raises a lot of questions perhaps the most important being: It (the idea of pupils using their own devices) assumes that teachers will be aware of the differences between devices and able and willing to plan around or overcome them. . I’ve seen examples of ‘byo’ working, but wonder if it is scalable in the light of the varying skills of teachers.

There was the assumption that glow 2 would work better than glow 1, I would have liked to discuss how this would be done. not necessarily in nit picking detail (I’ve done a bit of that ) but on how the nit picking would be organised. with glow one there was no mechanism for feedback to be taken into account quickly, or for detailed beta testing. I hope glow 2 will have perpetual beta built in.

Links

I am afraid the above is a bit of a muddle that does not reflect much of Friday. I’d recommend interested folk to read:

and check the #ediff twitter search.

Update 18 Oct 2010

Talking about it isn’t good enough / But quoting from linking to it at least demonstrates / The virtue of an art that knows its mind. // Seamus Heaney : Squarings (edited for post;))

NB. posted in annoyance!

A while ago I took the time to fill in the survey on the Glow Futures home page, and had a quick look at the forums. Like most other folk in education I am quite busy but intended to add my 2 pence worth. I’ve revisited the site a few times but quite often it loads slowly or just show me a blank page.

Today as I am on holiday I though I’d take the time to add something to the debate. After a frustration half hour I though it worth posting my experience here, as I doubt many folk will have the patience to read about it on the forum if their experience is anything like mine.

On the forum I again found I have to frequently refresh the page after looking at a blank one while browsing the forum. This is quite off putting. I did find a topic that I though I could add to: How can Glow become more appealing?. As I went through the process of posting my post changed to become a log of the process I had to go through to post to the forum (too much recursion?). Here is what I posted:

Alex Duff said:

What needs to change in Glow so that it becomes more appealing to more teachers?

Usability.

Although this forum is not in glow it feels glow like to me:

  1. Arrive on forum page (often need to refresh to see anything)
  2. Click login
  3. Taken to a login page which advises I login via glow
  4. Click glow login button
  5. shibboleth page appears
  6. redirect to glow
  7. login
  8. shibboleth page appears
  9. redirected to my profile
  10. click forum
  11. Read a post & click quote to reply
  12. quote doesn’t appear
  13. Switch browsers and repeat steps 1 to 11

I’ve forgotten what I was going to type.

Admittedly this is a worst case picture, but not unlike the number of clicks needed to do something in glow.

Trying to explain to primary 3 that they need to click and hold the back button to skip past shibboleth so that they can add their purple mash creation to the glow group that they started from is not always easy.

Just resized the text field I am typing in, now can’t scroll field have to use arrow keys to go back up and check what I typed.

On the blog issue I am happy enough with wordpress, I don’t think you can run tumbler on your own server so it could not be part of glow. But everyone will have their favourite blog platform, mine is posterous:-)

This session most of my day to day work has involved glow, I’ve been creating content in glow, training staff and worked in classrooms with glow in demonstration lessons and team teaching. I still love the idea of glow, the conceit (in a good way) of having a national intranet providing a fantastic toolkit for teaching and learning is wonderful indeed. I am quite familiar with a lot of the glow groups tools and have been able to bend them to my needs fairly successfully, I’ve seen teachers create great learning opportunities with glow but…

A lot of folk I talk to have experience with glow similar to mine with the forum, things are hard to use, this will put off the less technophile. If I’d not had a bit of time on my hands I’d have given up on contributing to the future of glow on the forum. As it was due to my difficulty with the usability of the forum my contribution is pretty inarticulate and fragmentary. I wonder how many valuable contributors have been put off?

Tmslf 2010

On Wednesday evening I went along to TeachMeet and the TeachEat that follows. I’ve been lucky enough to have watched TeachMeets evolve (at least in Scotland, not made it out of the country yet) and this was one of the best yet.

As usual the event was organised on a wiki by a bunch of volunteers. The lead organiser this year was David Noble of booruch fame. David, in consultation with others made a couple of changes to the program, in addition to the familiar 7 & 2 minute presentations we had a session of Round table workshops and one of World Cafe discussions. at these points we broke out into groups for various discussions.

On the night

The presentations were all great, covering a wide variety of topics mostly with some sort of ict input. All the ones that discussed ict in the classroom however had an extra dimension the ict was just part, perhaps an enabling part, of the project:

  • Ian Stuart discussed using Google Sketchup with International Connections, but the project included children making traditional drawings as a starting point and the stand out point for me was the way Ian’s pupils exceeded his expectations.
  • Colin Maxwell talked about Charity events for teamworking and citizenship at college level, a great ideas that would equally fit into primary or secondary school. I’d didn’t catch if the video of the zombie walk is available but I hope it is.
  • Margaret Vass spoke of her work with Glow Blogs and ePortfolios, Margaret is probably the most experienced primary blog runner in the country. Her ability to see and explain the good stuff that happens in teaching & learning is brilliant. Her post about the presentation: Glow Blogs and ePortfolios? should be read by anyone wondering if primary blogging is worthwhile.
  • Sean Farrell‘s 2 minutes on ‘Logging into Glow: making it accessible to 5 year olds’ made me wish that more folk from LTS had been in the audience. Glow really needs this and needs it yesterday: simple safe logon for wee ones who find typing a glow username such as gw09johnstonjohn4 and a 8 character password (with one char not aphpanumeric) a bit difficult. From the number of teacher logins I’ve reset password for some of the rest of us could do with this too.

The big problem with the round tables was deciding which one to go to. I choose Jennifer Harvey – Setting up a QR treasure hunt which triangulated well with 2 of my favourite 7 minute presentations David MuirTeachMeet@SLF2010: QR Codes in Education and Jen DeyenbergGPS and Geocaching – #TSMSLF2010. We are lucky to have Jen in Scotland. I am very interested in GPS in and outside education. Both QR codes and geocaching lend themselves to the mixing up of being outdoors and using technology.

Jennifer’s round table proved to be the highlight of my TeachMeet and SLF she had, in 10 minutes, introduced me to some new iphone apps, got a table full of teachmeeters running round the room collecting audio, video and images and in true TeachMeet fashion had changed her gig to incorporate a pice of software she had found the day before. (some of the results: stickybits » barcode » Jenny not singing For the record my first video in this stickybit is useful).

Catching Up with TMSLF2010

David Flashmeet

If you missed TMSLF2010 or you want to remind yourself about it there are several ways to do so:

  • Fergal, who did a great job of keeping the presentations coming, created a posterous site: tmslf2010’s posterous which attendees were asked to populate by mailing post@tmslf2010.posterous.com, so far there are photos from the night, presentations and recording from presenters.
  • I recorded all the presentation audio on my iRiver and am slicing it and posting to EDUtalk (and cross posting to tmslf2010’s posterous), this might take a bit of time.
  • There was a considerable amount of tweeting: Twitter / Search – #tmslf2010
  • David Muir organised the FlashMeeting and you can watch the recording.

The Future of TeachMeet

The last part of TeachMeet was the World Cafe 9 tables discussing different topics. Again I would have liked to go to several, but went to How can we help TeachMeet evolve? which I was facilitating.

This topic is not oe we could reach many conclusions on. I recorded the audio and posted it to Edutalk: TeachMeet Evolution World Cafe (direct link to audio:
TeachMeet Evolution ). There is a lot of background noise, 8 other World Cafes were going on at the same time.

Some of the points taken given:

  • TeachMeet has always changed/is always changing.
  • teachMeets can be small, someone had one in their living room.
  • TeachMeet needs to be scalable.
  • Local is good.
  • If there is a committee set up to take care of the TeachMeet brand do we have to ask/bid for funds from the committee. This perhaps gives to much power to a group.
  • Sponsors need to get something back. At the moment this is a mention on the wiki and thanks at TM

We had only just started scraping the surface of this when we ran out of time.

The general TeachMeet conversation continued at TeachEat. I was sitting across the table from @eylanezekiel (Head of BrainPOP UK) and we continued to discuss (I don’t think much damage was done) the relationship of TeachMeet to its sponsors. I can’t recall the detail of the discussion well enough to quote them but I was pushed to think about TeachMeet in different ways and try to articulate my perhaps individual position:

  • Personally I think of TeachMeet as a way to recharge my batteries rather than something that needs to grow and expand.
  • I like the unconference principals & ideas.
  • I can also see the value of smaller TeachMeets.
  • I liked the original idea which assumed that everyone who turned up was willing to speak if drawn out of the hat. A nice leveller.
  • I dislike the idea that some folk should keynote without facing the draw.
  • Although I like free beer and nice spaces provided by sponsors I have a knee-jerk reaction agains goodie-bags. I’d be happy with less salubrious venus and paying my way to avoid these.
  • Back to basics might be an idea, just meet up and chat.
  • One size does not fit all we should Let a thousand flowers bloom.
  • Organising TeachMeets is quite a burden and usually falls on mainly one person.
  • @eylanezekiel mentioned that BrainPop had offered to improve on the wiki to make it easier for folk to sign up. While I agree the Wiki is getting a bit of a mess (I deleted dozens of spam pages a while ago), I do not think a particular company should take responsibility for organising TeachMeet. It would be good to have clearer organisation. Perhaps an idea is for the central wiki to list upcoming TeachMeets, but each teachMeet provides a wiki or site to facilitate the organisation. This would allow individual TeachMeets to use a tool provided by say BrainPop or create their own wiki or use another system altogether. TeachMeets would not be limited to one page and would be easier to navigate. The sites could also be a repository for recordings, links to blog posts, resources etc.
  • @eylanezekiel also mentioned the difficulty in try to help with sponsoring TeachMeet when there is not a central body (herding cats was mentioned), again I see this as an advantage. If there is no central body it cannot be taken over by a group or faction.
  • The lack of a central body also should allow for different approaches to take place.
  • Nothing stops anyone running a similar or different event with a similar or different title. They might get a bit of a reaction from the TeachMeet community (whatever that is)

Like TeachMeet as a whole these ideas are well though through but I am betting that is not too important, TeachMeet from the evidence of TMSLF2010 is alive & well. I also bet that I could enjoy and learn from a event that went against all of my preferences.

 

Sugata Mitra Slf10

Just back from this years SLF which proved to be a interesting couple of days.

Arriving on Wednesday, I spent the morning taking a turn round the hall and the serendipitous catching up with various folk to swap information. This is one of the best parts of a large meeting although there were several regular attendees who did not show up and were missed. There was also the usual failures to see folk I was looking for or passing them with a ‘see you shortly’ which was not achieved.

I did get my usual wake up call from Nick Hood (always taking an interesting angle), and Joe Dale put up with my ‘ipod touchs are the best thing since sliced bread’ speech with patience.

I met up with David Noble for a wee bit of last minute planning of our EDUtalk presentation. This was titled:

Sharing Curriculum Change through the EDUtalk Project

Sharing Curriculum Change through the EDUtalk Project was a look at the EDUtalk mobile podcasting project that David and I have been running after last years successful SLFtalk. We are both pleased with the way I went. As part of the presentation we asked the audience to record and post some audio, as we did this I suddenly became rather nervous in case the audience balked, luckily they did not. A fair bit of credit should go to Doug Belshaw who immediately, in a clear voice, started interviewing his neighbours. Hopefully we got across how easy and powerful mo-blogging is and the potential it has for CPD and classroom use.

Hardware & Software

I didn’t see a lot of exciting new things but met with a few of my favourite things and folk on the floor:

  • TTS continue to supply inexpensive and simple to use hardware, TTS: Easi-Speak MP3 Mics look a wee bit plastic, but are being used very effectively in a lot of classrooms. I saw a nice wireless Easi-Scope Microscope and was told a mac driver was in the works for their inexpensive visualiser.
  • I had a brief chat to Alan Yeoman of 2 simple, purple mash is a great addition to glow and I liked the look of a beta of a simple 3d game creator.
  • In innovation alley I had a chat with video conference guru Tom Kane and brief look of some of his recent projects. Tom is an inspiring guy and I think full video conferencing can be a powerful tool in the classroom, Tom helped me have a lot of fun at Sandaig.

Keynote fatigue and its cure

I went to a few of the keynote speeches, I find with successive SLFs I am less and less impressed with most of these, often seem to be about buzzwords wrapped in anecdotal stories and entertaining jokes. Luckily this year I went to the last one, featuring Sugata Mitra talking about his “Hole in the wall” experiments and more. I tweeted:

Http://sugatam.wikispaces.com faith in keynotes restored #slf10 #slf2010

but islayian said it best:

Sorry no tweets I just can’t do this keynote justice #slf10

amd David Muir live blogged it: The Hole In The Wall: Self Organising Systems in Education. I left keynote with lots of interesting questions running round my head. I’ve not watched Sugata Mitra on TED.com but will soon and would recommend anyone who didn’t see the SLF presentation to follow the many links to Sugata Mitra and his work.

I’ve not mentioned TeachMeetSLF2010, again David Muir has blogged it, I will leave it for the next post. It was outstanding in many ways. I’ve started posting audio to EDUtalk tagged tmslf2010.