Year: 2011

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90 percent of people in their studies don’t know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page! I probably use that trick 20 times per day and yet the vast majority of people don’t use it at all.

“90 percent of the US Internet population does not know that. This is on a sample size of thousands,” Russell said.

via theatlantic.com

Alexis Madrigal – Technology – The Atlantic spotted on swissmiss | Digital Literacy

Training teachers I find there are still some who do not know about this (or ⌘ + C for copy, ⌘ + v paste etc). I am not sure how this has slipped past NOF, cpd etc but is it going to be hard for the Minister’s vision to come true without these sorts of simple skills becoming more widespread?

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We still live in a world where more teachers do not use ICT as an integral part of their classroom practice than do. Barriers to use include the rigid timetable of secondary schools, the lack of computers or other devices in most classrooms and the failure in many cases to link ICT to relevant CPD The goal for hardware should never be “One Computer per Child” but should be “Access when Required”. Good open access wifi throughout the school buildings coupled with allowing pupils to use their own devices, smartphones, tablets, netbooks or whatever would at least partially overcome that barrier.

via fkelly.co.uk

Incisive & concise. The only bit I wonder about is the byo, not sure how the staff who lack skills would cope with multiple devices, OSs etc. Sometime taking a class through a glow activity using 2 different browsers can cause confusion.

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We know a lot of you were perfectly happy with Posterous and wouldn’t want us to change a thing. Rest assured, with Posterous Spaces you can keep doing everything you’ve been doing with yesterday’s service. Plus we’ve added many cool new features to enjoy

via blog.posterous.com

I like this way of updating. The up and coming Glow update will not be as smooth but I hope the new glow service will be both flexible, able to add new features and evolutionary rather than revolutionary in the future.

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Turn off, be quiet and think. It’s OK, I promise

via 52tiger.net

This is a great post. I guess we are a long way from stopping pupils being bored in school. I do wonder if the new curriculum is building in any quite time. I recently talked to a teacher trialing nintendo DSi in class and was surprised to hear the idea that a spell of maths on the DSi gave the children a quiet spell in the midst of their active maths. I know my mind works differently when I am cut off and value those times. Back in my childhood I am sure my mind ran riot during quiet times in my learning as we cranked through a repetitive task be it a big page of fractions or binka.

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I want to tell them that the iPad is not the future of education, it’s the present of education. If we consign the iPad to the realms of the future, then we are implicitly saying that it’s not for right here, right now, today. We’re saying that we can postpone the task of seriously engaging with the educational and social impact of ubiquity of Internet-connected computing.

via speirs.org

I am wondering about the graph of computer to pupil ratios, pulled in by freedom of information requests (see Fraser’s post)

But there are lots of different reasons for reading this post by @fraserspeirs.

I am with him all the way on the need for more hardware for pupils in our schools, still wondering where it will come from and how long it would take us to turn round our eduTanker if someone comes up with a radical model.

I am also wondering with Adrewburrett: even if it were 1:1 would the majority of pupils still use the tech meaningfully if teachers lacked skills?.

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Just one video on The Kid Should See This.

via thekidshouldseethis.com

There’s just so much science, nature, music, arts, technology, storytelling and assorted good stuff out there that my kids (and maybe your kids) haven’t seen. It’s most likely not stuff that was made for them…

But we don’t underestimate kids around here.

Off the grid-for-little-kids videos and other smart stuff collected by Rion Nakaya and her three year old co-curator.

from: The Kid Should See This.

via Swissmiss The Kid Should See This

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An introduction to Apple’s Hypercard. Guests include Apple Fellow and Hypercard creator Bill Atkinson, Hypercard senior engineer Dan Winkler, author of “The Complete Hypercard Handbook” Danny Goodman, and Robert Stein, Publisher of Voyager Company. Demonstrations include Hypercard 1.0, Complete Car Cost Guide, Focal Point, Laserstacks, and National Galllery of Art. Originally broadcast in 1987.

via archive.org

HyperCard: One of my favourite things.

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Piratebox Teackmeet

I am wondering if folk would donate a few quid for a TeachMeet PirateBox?

29 August: I just got to £60 in promises. I’ve ordered the Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH wireless router. now hoping that I can get it working;-)

I’d noticed Alan Levine blogging about StoryBox and even donated a file in after this post: StoryBox Wants YOU – CogDogBlog.

More recently I saw it on Doug Belshaw’s Synechism Ltd. – User Outcomes Weekly – #11 (A weekly must read), where I commented wonder if a piratebox of some sort would be a useful addition to TeachMeets and the like? Doug had also linked to the PirateBox site where I read more about it and followed some links.

PirateBox is a self-contained mobile communication and file sharing device. Simply turn it on to transform any space into a free and open communications and file sharing network.

and

The PirateBox solves a technical/social problem by providing people in the same physical space with an easy way to anonymously communicate and exchange files. This obviously has larger cultural and political implications thus the PirateBox also serves as an artistic provocation.

Obviously TeachMeets do not need the subversion of tracking and preservation of user privacy that a PirateBox offers. Nor would sharing of copyrighted material be desirable, but It might be fun to have a PirateBox at TeachMeets.

It would allow folk to share files with others at the meet. If it was a traveling project, the box could go from TeachMeet to TeachMeet spreading files as it went. This would provide a sponsor-less goodie bag. Folk would be free to share what they liked, perhaps presenters would share presentations, digital musicians give away background music etc.

Obviously lots of the TeachMeet crowd already share many things online, A TM PirateBox would be a fun side project that might add to the buzz during a TeachMeet and be a concrete way of connecting different events.

A proposal

Having looked at the PirateBox DIY it looks like the cheapest way to make one is to use a Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH wireless router which costs about £70. There are a few other bits and pieces needed but the cost is negligible.

I’d like to put one together, take it to TeachMeet SLF11 and then post it off to another TeachMeet. Unfortunately I don’t have £70 Is there enough folk interested in putting in a fiver to make a box and set it adrift?

If you are interested then DM tweet @johnjohnston, leave a comment here or make contact in another way, if I get a dozen people up for it I’ll send then a link to paypal me a fiver. As a PirateBox utilizes Free, Libre and Open Source software (FLOSS) I don’t think this is one for commercial sponsorship. If you do contribute you will get a warm fuzzy feeling and your name on the PirateBox.

Pledged so far: £60

29 August: I just got to £60 in promises. I’ve ordered the Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH wireless router. now hoping that I can get it working;-)

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I’ve been interested in combining maps and media for a while now. Here is a recap of some of the methods I’ve been using. I’ve not often had the chance to do this sort of thing in a teaching situation but continue to believe that mapping media would be a valuable way to record experiences for pupils and a nice slant on digital storytelling.

Last Sunday I had a walk to Benvane & Ben Ledi recorded the gpx with the iPhone Trails app (one of my top 10 apps) took photos, video and some panoramas. Here are the three ways I’ve been developing of displaying them on the web. None of these are good as examples of story telling as I am still thinking about the workflow and tech.

Photos on the map

Benvamemap

I’ve built up a fair collection of these over the last few years. this one only uses iPhone photos which means I can skip the stage of matching photos to the gpx file. When I started doing these google maps API was at version 1, I move to 2 and now am behind version 3.

This is the most conventional story combining an image with text in a liner fashion along the track.

Video Mapping

Videoandmap

Benvane and Ben Ledi video map

I just blogged about this in the previous post

I am hoping that this can produce a more contemplative result.

Although I’ve only just worked out how to do this the workflow is a lot simpler than the photo maps. I’ve developed a mac application (using SuperCard) to make these. All I need to do is to drag some iphone videos out of iPhoto onto the application and it creates the smaller versions of the video and the HTML to display them along side the maps

I you have a mac and would be interested in trying the app, let me know.

Panoramas in Place

Panomapthumb

Benvane Panos

This is the most recent development, after tweeting about the Video Maps @drewburrett suggested using photosynth for the iPhone to take pano photos and do something similar. I’ve not got a workflow for creating these and don’t think I’ve got the display method right yet but I am quite excited about working out different ways to present pano photos.

As I said I’ve been messing with maps and media for a long time (2006 example) I’ve blogged about it a fair bit, pretty much in a vacuum. I’d be really interested in finding some folk to play along with or a school interested in trying out some of this stuff.

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Investigating new ways to credentialize learning

With the upcoming release of Mozilla’s Open Badges framework this group is an opportunity for educators and interested parties to discuss the various ways such badges could be used in educational contexts.

via p2pu.org

Proposed: Semester of Learning: Open Badges and assessment | dougbelshaw.com/blog and organised by Doug @dajbelshaw this course has a ton of interesting information and links about using Open Badges in education. Weekly (Saturday 8pm! I am not going to make that, but I am enjoying following up lots of stuff including:

etc!
I wonder if anyone at Glow Futures is following this? Could be interesting integrating this with the developing glow e-portfolios.