Month: December 2015

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On Wednesday I made my last EDUtalk broadcast of the year. It turned out to be a remarkable show.

Radio #EDUtalk Ania Rolinska, Bill Guariento and Nazmi Al-Masri – EAST Project – engineering students collaborating across borders Gaza to Glasgow | EDUtalk

The guests were talking about the EAST Project | engineering students collaborating across borders. This involved students from Glasgow University and the Islamnic University of Gazza.

I don’t think I did a very good job of interviewing the participants, I did not really manage to bring out the scope and depth and particularly the organisation of the project but I don’t think that mattered. What was important were their statements about the impacts on the students in all sorts of areas.

This quote from the project about page:

The contacts via synchronous and asynchronous learning environments will of course be valuable in terms of language practice for both groups of students, but team-working, project participation, communication, problem-solving, digital literacies are all transferable skills that will also be enhanced.

Sums up some of the benefits of the project, but you need to hear it from those involved to get a feel for the level of engagement from the learners in the project. Have a listen on #EDUtalk.

We are now starting to organise shows for the new year, if you are interested in being a guest on Radio #EDUtalk please get in touch.

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From my Pinboard

  • Tips for Screencasting – BrettTerpstra.com I’ve been doing a fair bit of screencasting for Glow Blogs Help over the last while. I am very much a quick & dirty screencaster, one take and light editing. These are a great set of tips for getting better screencasts. The tips are universal but Brett uses ScreenFlow which is my favourite screencasting tool too.
  • Big Schools’ Birdwatch

    Join in with our survey from 4 January-12 February 2016. Count birds with your class and tell us what you see. We’ll send you a free ID poster!

    Looks like this could be a nice classroom/plaground activity to start the year with.

  • Create cognitive plugins for Minecraft with Bluemix, Docker, and Watson ~ Stephen Downes

    So here’s the concept: you can put the intelligence of a large artificial intelligence like IBM’s Watson into characters or objects that inhabit a virtual world like Minecraft. This is not theory; this 4-part tutorial provides detailed instructions on how to do exactly that.

    Quite mindblowing!

Featured image, public domain: Minimalist Chain | Flickr – Photo Sharing!

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https://www.jukedeck.com lets you

Create unique music for your videos in seconds

could be used for podcasts and the like too. A free account allows you download 5 tracks a month under

A royalty-free licence for commercial or non-commercial use by an individual or a business with fewer than 10 employees

This could be a useful alternative to making your own tunes or using Kevin Macleod for creative projects, video and audio in the classroom.

The site generates music based on a few choices, genre, feeling and length. The site says:

Every track is unique, so there’s no danger of your music popping up somewhere else.

Here is one I got by choosing Folk -> Uplifting -> 1:30 minute long.

And used the Make it Christmassy button.

Featured image public domain: Jukebox Wurlitzer on Flickr

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A while back I bookmarked How to Revive The Levelator in El Capitan on TidBITS and followed the instructions to get this essential piece of podcasting software to work again after updating my mac to El Capitan.

This week TidBITS had the news: The Levelator 2.1.2 Works in El Capitan announcing a new version.

The Levelator is

a free app that ensures audio files use a consistent loudness, something that’s often hard to achieve with group podcasts and between episodes.

I find it very useful for Radio Edutalk episodes where we record over Skype.

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#Autumn #autumnleaves

I’ve not really checked out the new features of WordPress 4.4 in any depth but this new feature looks interesting. Just pasting a url to another WordPress blog post into the editor creates an embedded ‘card’ with some details.

I could imagine this would make a nice way of linking to pupil or class blog posts in a school blog. Hopefully we will not wait too long before Glow Blogs get to WordPress version 4.4.

I’d have like it even more if the embed above had picked up the featured image for the post. Update, I think there is something unexpected going on with this post, either from the styles here or on the embedded post. looking at the source, there does seem to be an image in there! More investigation tomorrow. Update 2: the thumbnail shows up for me now!