Month: January 2012

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It’s also highly important that students are offering feedback to their peers, and reacting to that feedback in a way that models good constructive criticism and improving upon ones work. Opening up students work to the web means that it’s not just the teacher that’s responsible for leaving the feedback and providing that extrinsic motivation for continued growth; it’s now on the shoulders of everyone in your learning community to help one another in a much more public and open way.

via techsavvyed.net

A great post: Four Recursive Practices for Teaching and Learning | The Tech Savvy Educator based on the No Digital Facelifts: Thinking the Unthinkable About Open Educational Experiences – YouTube video.
Lots of food for Formative Assessment thinking.
There is a lot of other great stuff in the post, best to read it all.

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The second assignment for Spring DS106 was to read this: A Personal Cyberinfrastructure and watch this: “No More Digital Facelifts: Thinking the Unthinkable About Open Educational Experiences.” and blog a response.

There is a requirement to read and watch both carefully but as I am taking this course a a college dropin I didn’t feel the need to take much care;-)

This is one of those videos/podcasts/blogposts that fire off lots of thoughts as you watch as it hits a lot of nails right on the head. I’ll only lazily touch on a couple.

The video is worth watching by anyone interested in Web 2.0 so I am imbedding it here:

Sounds Good

First thing I notices was the rhythm and musicality of Gardner Campbell’s voice. I’ve been listen to Tom Wordward’s remix A Bag of Gold « Bionic Teaching and used on Radio Edutalk a few times (that was a great idea). Gardner Campbell is a powerful, humorous speaker.

I guess the audience is familiar with the argument addressed, the tension between LMSs and the open web in US higher education. I an not but it sounds like the same sort of argument we have had in UK education between NLEs and WEB 2.0/google/open technologies, between systems set up for teaching and learning and more open and general software that can be bent to teaching and learning. Gardner Campbell defends the open with great humour and the marvellous bag of gold metaphor.

A Personal Cyberinfrastructure

In part Campbell is suggesting Students control their own domain, decide what sort of social software to install and manage it from themselves. As someone who has been doing this sort of thing for a while (here on this blog, personal wiki and a bunch of other stuff) I cn see where he is coming from and love the enthusiasm. I do wonder if it is for everybody. I am fairly relaxed about backing up, losing stuff and the like. I also host with someone who I know well and who has dug me out of a hole or two in my time.

If a student sets up, say, wordpress on their on domain they need to make sure they keep wordpress and any plugins up to date to avoid any wee hacking problems (FAQ My site was hacked « WordPress Codex) that can happen. You also might have to worry a bit about being fireballed or slashdotted if you ever write something the rest of the world want to read (More likely you will be hacked).

These are risks I am happy to take, given my host and the fact that I like playing with this stuff and don’t mind the time spent. If you value your time it might be preferable to head over to wordpress.com. (NB I am just using WP as an example, this blog is not a wp one, it runs off pivotx).

This leads into the though that there would need to be a fair bit of understanding by teachers and time for development if this was extended back into primary & secondary education. There is a lot of positivity about blogging in schools at the moment, this recent wave crested by Mr. Mitchell at Heathfield CPS Blogs in England (see the Heathfield in the News section) and a ton of blog work by the Glow Scotland team. I hope there is an understanding of the amount of knowledge and skill that goes into a good school blogging site, the time and energy needed to keep it going (a lot of support by Creative Blogs. in Heathfield’s case along with Mr Mitchell’s obvious energy and dedication). The pile of abandoned one, two and three post blogs out there suggests it might not be.

43 Minutes In

There is a question from the audience suggesting that this could be started earlier, this goes right primary school territory

there is an authentic version of any concept that can be taught to any child who can read and write. You pitch it to the appropriate level of development and then you keep coming back to it spiralling upwards and upwards and until that magic handoff moment… 45:46

The last section is really powerful pushing the need for teachers to help pupils make the decisions and on how using these techs in school could flow into higher education.

narrating curating & sharing

What learners should be doing.

Danger Edupunk

I have to be careful or it is down the youtube rabbit hole of edupunk videos, mostly of Gardner Campbell debating with Jin Groom, beware the related video…

Standard YouTube License

Be nice if this was a creative commons video.

If I had a bit more time & skill I’d like to popcorn this it would be a great one to some twitter video mashup, perhaps a hashtag could add the tweets as timed comments…

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Assignment 2 – The Sight of Sound – #edtechcca2

For this assignment, combine audio effects into a soundscape to represent a place or an event. This assignment may not be suitable for all educational areas, so please feel free to create a soundscape for a scene from a favourite book or a poem, or come up with another idea.

The Real Work – Gary Snyder


All licensed under the Attribution License.

Took me a while to figure out a text. Limited my searching to Freesound to save time. Downloaded a bunch of files and loaded them into audacity. Just sliced, changed the volume, and made some fades. This is a good fun assignment that I’d really like to try in a classroom. Would need plenty of time as I guess this is the best part of 3 hours play for me. A fair bit of this was being distracted on freesound.

The Real Work Audacity

Time Saving Attribution

The only tip I can offer is only tangentially linked to the task and mac only. To gather the links for attribution I open the links in a set of tabs in Safari and then run a wee AppleScript this puts a list of html links to each tab on my clipboard, paste into TextMate and wrap in li tags. (I use FastScripts for running applescripts).

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As a huge Google fan, I am disappointed that you will be closing Picnik. It has been a life saver for my creativity, since I don’t know, nor want to learn, Photoshop, to do the amazing things I can do in Picnik. It was simple. User friendly. And education-friendly.

As a middle school teacher, it’s sad to see such a service disappear. I don’t believe there are any other photo editing websites that exist with the ease and the options that students can use, and get professional-looking results.

via blog.picnik.com

One of the 1,474 comments (by Evan, no link) on the announcement that picnik is closing and some of the features are being added to google plus.

All the comments I read were negative.

I found picnik useful a few years ago and build it into my flickr CC search toy.
I’ve used if occasionally in schools and build an online ‘glow’ task on its back. As I’ve never paid a penny for it I can’t really complain but it will be missed.

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The iTunes U app handles a lot of this. It’s half an LMS—the good half. It handles the distribution of information and course content but it makes no attempt to verify the learner’s progress. That’s rightly a teacher’s job, not a machine’s job. Education is not a production line and our children should not be reduced to Stakhanovite drones working through machine-driven education.

Historically, it has been difficult to get access to publishing through iTunes U. The system was set up to allow a small number of universities and other large institutions to publish content to the store. One of the biggest procedural changes to the system is that individual K-12 schools will now be able to publish courses to iTunes U. In a world where teachers have iBooks Author on their Macs and iPads in their classrooms, easy access to a publishing platform like iTunes U is the missing third leg of the stool.

With iTunes U, Apple has solved the problem of communicating the learning journey. It’s no longer “read this PDF, then watch these videos.” Courses can now contain audio, video, documents, links to iOS apps and iBooks. There’s deep integration between iBooks and iTunes U through which notes and highlights from a book can be reviewed in the iTunes U app. This may be an effective way for smaller schools to provide an LMS without having to subscribe to a commercial service like Blackboard or handle the installation of an open source LMS like Moodle.

via macworld.com

Apple’s announcements further iPad revolution in education | Macworld Fraser Speirs via Twitter / @gordonmckinlay: I agree with @fraserspeirs ….

Scottish Primary schools are not textbook heavy, iTunes U might be a lot more useful than iBooks as a TextBook replacement.

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Make two signs or symbols using a graphics tool of your choice. The first sign should be for your own department or course, the second sign should be for another educational department or course. Use only pictures, no words. Use only simple abstracted shapes, no photographs.

Assignment 1 – Signs & Symbols –#edtechcca1

I have made a fair number of web graphics & icons in my time but it has always been pretty haphazard and I’ve never been particularly pleased with the result. I do not think of myself as a particularly visual person.

Earlier in the week I’d read other participants blogs, Helen Morgan, an Art Photo and graphics teacher explained her working method and Colin posted An insight into his creative process as he started the assignment.

I don’t have a department, I work at The ICT & Technical Services Centre in North Lanarkshire, AKA the Computer Centre. By the time I started this Leigh Johnston whose department sounds like it covers the same area had blogged his assignment Assignment 1- #edtechcca1 which gave me some ideas.

Idea 1

Helen and Colin reinforce the idea of brainstorming and prep and both start by sketching (Helen on her iPad) and note taking. I don’t think sketching would help me much and I rarely write with a pen or pencil. I did the same thing as I do with pupils when they do not recognise a word, google images. I find this easier to get children to guess the meaning of a word than a word search. My mental list of words included, North Lanarkshire, Computer, Centre, media, ipad, cloud, network, files, podcast. network reminded me of a the images produced by Webpages as graphs – an HTML DOM Visualizer Applet and I thought of a computer networked to circles in the NLC logo colours, Helen & Leigh’s preliminary ideas reminded me of the NounProject, using that as reference I tried in Fireworks, to draw a laptop sitting inside 3 circles with lines connecting.

In NLC schools we use FirstClass as a email and communication tools so I decided to take the icon for that as inspiration for 3 figures inside the laptop, hopefully indicating community and support. I drew one with simple shapes, then tried to suggest a circle by duplicating and using the distort and skew tools.

Next I though I might use the circles as repenting aspects of the Computer Centre: a cloud, for the network again influenced by the fact I spent yesterday setting up iPads; media, a sort of copy of the media button found in iWorks and iLife mac apps; and files and folders. All were drawn with shapes and lines, the 2 that have multiple objects I added a white glow to separate the layers. After about an hour os so I ended up with this:

Computer Center

Computer Center 64

I was pleased that the gif came in at around the 12k mark but once I made an icon of this(64 pixels square < 4kb), I realised that it is far to complicated to communicate anything and decided to simplify, the quickest way to do this was to get rid of the footery stuff:

Computer Center Simple

Computer Center Simple 128Computer Center Simple 64 Computer Center Simple 64

Afterthoughts: Design

I know nothing about the principles of design, spacing, colour shapes and layout. I know I’ll never manage to read, understand and remember a lot of information on the subject, but I am sure I would be helped by reading a basic short guide. Preferably online and about a page of text.

Afterthoughts: Fireworks

I love Fireworks, I have a copy of Fireworks 8 which I got with a Macromedia Education Bundle a number of years ago. I’ve also got a CS3 version at work. I use it a lot, but in a pretty simple fashion. To do the above I use very few of fireWorks features: Ellipse Tool, Round Rect tool, line tool, align palette, Scale Skew and distort tools. Grid on. I worked in a few documents all 800 x 800 pixels and zoom a lot. I group and drag layers forwards and backwards. That is about it.

Doing the assignment I wanted to be able to do a couple of things I could not do:

  • I used mostly rounded rectangles, I adjusted the corners by hand, then duplicated to get the same corner on another shape, I’d like to know how to numerically adjust the corners?
  • I tried to get the 3 figures looking as if they were part of a circle. I used the skew and distort tools by hand. I assume there is a much better way to do this?
  • I drew the clouds with several circles, to cut off the bottom I grouped and converted to a bitmap then used the select tool. I think there is a better ay of doing this, but do not know it. I want to avoid the convert to bitmap bit.
  • As I mentioned above I used a glow effect to make layers the same colour stand out, I really wanted just to add a outline to a group of objects?

Afterthought: Part 2

Edutalk Fist new

I forgot I should have made a second image. I though I might redo the Radio Edutalk icon. I really like the idea of this, it was originally created for a TeachMeet presentation. It plays on the idea of EDUtalk as guerrilla podcasting. It is a bit rough round the edges, down to my lack of vector skills. So I grabbed a couple of icons from the NounProject to work with.

The first problem was these opened in illustrator, which I cannot drive, after a few minutes I though the learning curve might be a bit much so just copied and pasted from there into Fireworks. A quick select and rotate gave me this icon. I am quite happy with it and it is cleaner round the edges than the old one. I am going to play a bit more, trying to bring a broadcast or RSS element into the picture, but that is for another day.

Microphone by The Noun Project , from The Noun Project collection, Creative Commons – Attribution (CC BY 3.0)
Protest by Edward Boatman, Jay Demory, Tristan Sokol, Shirlee Berman and Doug Hurdelbrink from The Noun Project collection. published under a Public Domain Mark

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The daily create from today/yesterday was Create an audio of two sounds not normally heard together. I took two sounds that I had recorded for the UK Sound Map on Audio Boo. The result is:

While I don’t think the result is particularly creative or interesting I though the workflow was worth recording.

  1. Easiest way to download the mp3s from AudioBoo was to switch to the RSS feed in safari and right click the MP3 link and choose save as.
  2. Open One file in audacity.
  3. Import other file with File -> Import ->Audio…
  4. Fade out the first sound, as the second was so quiet in comparison I just left it in place. Deleted the section of the first track after the fade.

Busker to Beach Audacity 440

Bonus Image Merge

As Both AudioBoo, the source of the sounds and SoundCloud, where we were to publish the results, allow you to add a photo I thought it might be interesting to create an image fade to go with the audio.

Here is the recipe I used:

Opacity Gradient

  1. Open first AudioBoo page in Safari, view the larger image.
  2. Drag image onto FireWorks on the dock.
  3. Open second image and drag onto the first image in fireWorks
  4. Drag a rect in fireworks over the second image.
  5. Make it white and give it an opacity gradient.
  6. Select the gradient Layer & the Image below.
  7. Modify Menu->Mask -> Group as Mask
  8. Adjust the opacity of the masked image so that the image below shines through.

Busker to Beach Firworks 440

The whole process was pretty quick which is quite important as I try to keep up with the daily create.

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Teachers Doing

TeachMeet has been shortlisted for a Naace ICT Impact Awards. This is in the Collaborative group project, In recognition of the way this radical form of CPD is transformative.

For one reason or another my name has been attached as representative. Obviously I can take no credit for TeachMeet or its impact, by dint of the fact that I’ve been in the fringes of TeachMeet since its inception I can, with a ton of help make some sort of representative.

My history with TeachMeet is long but not deep: I’ve attended a fair number, in the flesh and virtually; I’ve presented at a few; compared one; provided a bit of casual tech support and blogged a bit.

After TeachMeet was shortlisted I received this email:

All shortlisted nominees are being invited to submit a short edited video (of no more than 3 minutes) – perhaps working with their pupils or colleagues – which demonstrates the impact of the work that you’ve done. Please note that entries will be judged on the basis of impact rather than video quality.

I am quite relieved the TeachMeet’s impact will judged on my video editing, but realise that I am not capable of demonstrating the impact of TeachMeet.

I though the best way to do this would be to crowdsource the video. Given the rather short time frame for a collaborative project (All videos must be submitted to Naace by Friday 3rd February 2012) I think it best to keep it reasonably simple.

Last night at BETT2012 I didn’t even make TeachMeet due to my travel arrangements. I quick recoded a audioBoo and tweeted a request to the organisers to play it. The audio briefly explains my idea:

Impact of TeachMeet (mp3)

My idea is this: TeachMeeters send me some images, text, slides, cartoons, audio snippets or even micro videos showing the impact of TeachMeet. I mash them up into a 3 minute video.

We have 3 minutes to fill, so you should probably keep audio and video shortish. I’ll feel free to chop up anything sent.

Please focus on the impact

How to contribute

  • Send me the media
  • Send me a link to the media
  • Tweet a string of text with the hashtag #TeachMeetImpact
  • Leave a comment here with a link or text

Tweets with #TeachMeetImpact will be grabbed by ifttt and saved on my delicious account.

You can send me a link via email if you know my email, DM me if you want that. or just DM me the link or tweet and tag it #TeachMeetImpact

Send me the media via email (DM me if you want that).

I am john johnston (johnjohnston) on Twitter

Given the time frame I’ll need to get started ASAP. Please forward this post on to as many teachmeeters as you know, (I don’t usually ask for publicity or blog posts but given TeachMeet has grown way beyond my network I need a bit of help)

Ollie Best cpd