Category Archives: wwwd

Mostly stuff to do with the classroom & Teaching and learning. Posts that fit with the site’s description: “Teaching, ict, and suchlike”

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EdTechRoundup is a new podcast from an open group of UK educators which I have become involved in.

EdTechRoundup is a place where a group of UK-based educators come together for discussion and collaboration around the use of technology in education. We believe in pedagogically-sound uses of educational technology, but don?t believe in ramming Web 2.0 (or anything else for that matter) down people?s throats?

The first podcast is out. This one sees David Noble and Sinclair Mackenzie at the controls with input from Joe Dale.

They discuss tools for the classroom including ClassTools.net: Flash Templates for Educators and the problems of online content being blocked in schools. Joe Dale provides his top 5 reasons to use blogs in class or school.

The dual presenter with input from a guest is going to be the pattern for the show with a different set of presenters taking over for each show. A fair number of UK educators are involved (see the edtechroundup » Contact Details page) and the podcast is open to anyone to join in. In good social media fashion the podcast has been organised on a wiki and a series of FlashMeetings. The Meetings are announced on the wiki so it is easy to join in.

Apart for planning the podcast the meetings have been good fun and a lot of interesting areas of tech and social media discussed. If the first show and these discussions are anything to go by EdTechRoundup should be a good feed to add to iTunes or other podcatcher.

Tom Barrett and myself will be hosting the next podcast which should be out in a couple of weeks.

Blogged from tm

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I think I only managed one blog post over the christmas holidays. I did tumble 8 times, post half a dozen links to del.ic.io.us and do a fair bit of tweeting.
I didn’t read my RSS reader at all. I was a bit busy putting together a non-educational site, incorporating flickr, youtube and blog streams, I wish I could use video and flickr on our school site in the same way.

Last night I opened my reader and basically just marked all as read, I didn’t feel too bad as twitter had been giving me as much reading as I could deal with, lots of links for various edu (and other) bloggers and of course I subscribe to tweets from Scotedublogs which kept me up-to-date with my fellow Scots. I don’t know that I’d like to rely on twitter all of the time but it gave an interesting tilt to things and another tilt back tonight when I opened Vienna.

There seems to have been and explosion of twitter tools and addons using the and one nice one is Twitter Stats this is a perl script which you can run from the terminal in OS X and a numbers template to paste the results into after the perl script copies them to the clipboard, here are my twitter stats:

twitter_stats

Coincidentally today my class were doing a little charting of there own surveying the communication tech they have at home as far as I recall this show a huge increase since last year.

Blogged from tm

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As the year draws to a close I’ve been egoistically surfing my own blog to see what I got up to over the last year or so. Last December I collected some of the posts I’d made over the year, and I am doing so again, although I’ll limit myself to one post this time. It is an interesting exercise and one I’d recommend to other teacher bloggers. One of the nice things about blogging with a class is looking back over the previous entries and noting that you have done quite a lot.

I started making a month by month list same as last year, but it is maybe more interesting to group some of my old post thematically.

Blogging (and social media) tools

This year I branched off and tried some other blog tools:

Twitter Icon The microblogging tool twitter is pretty interesting. I signed up and though about uses an mashups in August. Had some fun in October. More seriously I’ve set up twitter accounts to use with twitterfeed.com: ScotEdublogs on twitter which tweets links to all the ScotEdublog’s posts and one teachmeet07 which collects posts from technorati tagged teachmeet07. There are a lot of very interesting twitter mashups (collected at Twitter Fan Wiki ), I’ve played with the twitter API (in an amateurish way) and it is pretty nice.

Tumbler Icon Tumblr I thought about it and then got a Tumbelog I’ve really been enjoying tumblr which is a great way to quickly blog about something in a more visually appealing way that twitter. I also got a kick out of refashioning my del.icio.us links into a kind of tumblelog: A Tasty Tumble (sort of).

These alternative type of blogs (harking back to the original style of weblog, e.g. robot wisdom, broken link, see the robot wisdom weblog or How Jorn Barger Invented Blogging | First Site Guide hat-tip to Ogi) are pretty handy tools for storing or sharing ideas and links.

del.icio.us for structural storage, twitter for chatter and tumblr for sharing and storing text images, video and links in a very accessible way (I love the Archive).

A couple of days ago I found kwout (Through a tweet and a post, see the post) which is a brilliant addition to tumblr (or other webpages/blogs). Kwout lets you take a screen shot of a webpage and clip and post it to your blog/tumble, it also creates an image map producing links for the links on the original page in effect letting you embed a bit of a webpage in your blog.

I am looking forward to using these tool in the coming year and seeing how they develop and how they might be mashedup.

2007 was of course the year when the ScotsEduBloggers started facingbooking, I tagged along but am not convinced that it is the place for me (I I still didn’t really get it in October).

Tools for School

I looked at toondoo which is a fantastic tool, and used it with my class but there are to many sweary words in the cartoons and comments to keep using it.
We joined Voices Of The World. VOTW kepts us busy trying new tools in class. Voki in September’s Task,was difficult as was October’s Task using Animoto. I had already played with animoto and decided it was lacking in creativity. The October Task proved me wrong the tool matched the task well. The problem with these tools was that we can’t use them in school, the flash upload is based on the RTMP protocol and that is stopped by the network in school. I had also tested voicethread during the summer and though it had great potential for use in class, but it didn’t work on the school network either.

Comic Life Thumb

The problem of using new social media tools in the class room should not be underestimated, time invested in testing at home often backfires on school networks and network admins can pull or change access.

For this reason I tend to favour keeping things desktop based then publishing to the blog. This year I’ve started using garageband, made a lot of use of comic life on Sandaig Otters and developing ways of posting wee movies made with iMovie.
I puttogether a simple page to produce code for posting movies to the blogs: weemovies, it will also let Sandaig Pupils upload movies to the site and produce code for the blog.
I also like the opportunity of using home made hacks that allow me rather than the pupils some creativity.

Mashups

Googlemaps Thumb

I played with the google and flickr APIs quite a bit this year: My Maps, lickr maps mashing and some GPS questions and Maps Again. I have all my geotagged flickr photos on a map and have started mapping the voices of the world participants: Where are the Voices of the World.

I also enjoyed playing with rss and the del.icio.us API. I messed about with the twitter API too, automating posting and tried to sort followers and following.

Moaning

I did a fair bit of this for example: This week we have been mostly 403ed, moblogging as a solution to technical problems and Errors & Frustrations.

ScotEdublogs

I posted about SEB nearly every month:Scotedublogs – A New Hub for Scottish Educational Blogs or have a look at the my scotedublogs tag cloud!
ScotEduBlogs news: index is as near to a homepage as I have and a constant source of good thing. The mix of Scots Education blogging, from movers and shakers to infants in primary schools (movers and shakers too) never stops educating and entertaining me. I am really looking forward to seeing ScotEduBlogs expand over the next year.

Conclusions?

Bin

Having taken the bet part of a week to get this post into its current form I should have come to some sort of conclusion.

Well I seem to have had a lot of fun playing with the toys, frustration with things beyond my control (along with some within it) and kept up with lots of friends.

I imagine that next year will bring more of the same, and I am afraid that the frustrations will keep these tools out of the hands of children in a lot of classes. I count myself as quite savvy for a teacher but still bumped my head more than is good for it this year.

While I am typing this two things I read struck home:

  1. Nick Hood commenting on Ewan‘s post and warning that glow is still a long way from being a mainstay in the classroom. Until it is (and I hope afterwards) we need better access in our classrooms. If the children had the same sort of tools and toys we enjoyed at TeachMeet07 and are enjoyed by educators across the continents, what would happen?
  2. Tom Barrett’s post on enjoying the thinking time that holiday’s bring, to exploit the social web, it might be that teachers need a bit more thinking time?

Happy New Year

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sandaig_image_background_youtube
sandaig image myspace background

A while back I was involved in a discussion about copyright on John Connell’s blog, I’ve just had another though about teaching copyright.

I occasionally look through the stats for the school website and see were links etc are coming from. today I noticed some connections to youtube and myspace. I followed a couple up and found that they were using images from Sandaig blogs as background images. My first though was to be a bit annoyed about the use of our bandwidth. Then I started to wonder how the children would react. How would they feel about their images being used on someone else’s site without attribution. I don’t know if I’ll get a chance to discuss this with the class (my p6 from last year), but it might be an interesting example to spark some discussion.

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I just discovered The Whiteboard Blog which looks like a very useful source of information for folk with smartboards.

I read about it in my RSS reader vienna. One of the RSS feds I subscribe to is the feed for del.icio.us/for/troutcolor, del.icio.us links tagged for:troutcolor. These are thinks that people have though I would be interested in. In this case it was sent by John Sutton of creative ict .

Much appreciated, as are the other links John has sent me. I am not user how many folk use this function of del.icio.us, I occasionally send out links like this, but probably should do so more. It is pretty simple, as you tag a link you just use the tag for colon username format to send the links to whoever you think would like it.

I must admit I never notice the links for me when I visit the del.icio.us site, but once the fact the links are sent out from del.icio.us in aRSS feed makes the difference.

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T“>

embed

I’ve been thinking bit more about getting children to make and publish wee movies. I was working with a couple of children on one recently and thinking about making a simple system for blogging them. I’ve used the Anarchy Media Player on our wordpress blogs (Test Movie) and on Edublogs blogs, Edublogs does not implement the rather nice feature of Anarchy where a image file with the same name as the movie plus the extension is used as a splash. I don’t think I could use Anarchy without breaking some older stuff here, so need another solution.

This got me thinking as did embedthevideo.com – Video Pop-Up Link Maker which I’ve used on the Sandaig Blogs before.

I wanted something like both, a splash screen without a popup. Quicktime movies can be embedded in html with a link to another movie that will load in the same place when the first movie is clicked. I’ve knocked up a quick and crude webpage that takes a movie and an image and produces the html fragment to use quicktime to load the image and play the movie when the image is clicked.

The movie above is a screencast of the webpage in use producing the html that show the movie.

The setup also allows Sandaig pupils to upload images and movies and optionally produces an embed link to the tool to allow others to then embed the movie (I do not suppose that anyone will want to do that but it was interesting to play with.)

So the weemovies page would allow anyone to produce the html fragment if they know the url of a movie. The script is not very portable or flexible, but I hope it will be useful. We have got a wee movie in production which should see the light of day next week.

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SEB Stats 1.12.07
Fairly unrelated image.

My blogging here seems to be grinding to a once a week post again. There just doesn’t seem to be enough hours in the day. I am still struggling to embed blogging into my class this year, the children are no where near as independent bloggers as the ones last year there were 38 posts from 01 Nov – 30 Nov 2006 , this year 17 in 01 Nov – 30 Nov 2007 . I was also setting up individual blogs for my class at this time last year, I’ll not be doing that for this years.
There was a bigger emphasis on writing last November, this year more comic Life, movie and photos.

I have been joined by two other members of staff who are blogging fairly regularly with their classes, one in the lower school Otter Cubs and one of the primary seven teachers. The setting up of the individual blogs for one of the primary seven classes was probably a bit too hopeful, but I am hoping the wordpress mu install will be useful later on.

Synagogue 07 Copy 1

In my own class I have mostly been blogging comics and things that need a bit more teacher help (comics are made on non networked computers, children need help/time to move and resize files, movies need export settings etc), but are visual, exciting and don’t involve too much writing. This years class is bigger than last year, has a much wider range of abilities, 2:1 boys to girl ratio and are more challenging to organise generally. They don’t take to whole class blogging very well so the process of teaching them to blog individually is taking longer.

You would think that after 4 years blogging with children I’d have figured all this out, what is interesting is that the goalposts are never fixed in teaching and the groud is constantly shifting.

This lack of blogging on my part has not stopped me planning several magnificent and ground breaking posts in my mind. My book marks and feed reader is full of flagged posts I wanted to write and more importantly think about.

For example I’ve read David‘s post EdCompBlog: Fear of falure at least 5 times with a pile of stuff bubbling up in my mind. I think part of the answer to David’s question is to do with time. In a comment Ewan mentions that he finds managers more open

to take risk. Where the group is student teachers or teaching staff, there is no desire to take risk (for fear of failure and all the managerial pressure that comes with that)

(As an aside I’d say that I find teacher lead risk taking more interesting that top down initiatives.)
The pressures are illustrated by John Connell‘s post Subverting Scotland?s Simplified Curriculum and the feeling I get from talking to my fellow teachers; more and more initiatives that have to be carried out.

Anyway, Next week I am going to be attempting to get a rota of a subset of my class blogging on a more frequent basis. Maybe a wee push on the Book Review blog would help too.

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Gower Bell telephone

© National Museums Scotland. Licensor www.scran.ac.uk.

I am delighted to have noticed that the wonderful folk at scran have improved their blog this facility.

I noticed this a while back, but at that time it just supported scribble and elgg, I suggested this could be extended to a flickr like blog this, or even giving an html fragment. It now does, and I am testing it out.

Here is an interface screenshot:

I had a wee bit of difficulty with some of the links, but it looks like this could be a great tool of children to write blog posts about the images on scran.

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Pmwiki 32

I’ve spent sometime messing around with PmWiki

PmWiki is written in PHP and distributed under the General Public License. It is designed to be simple to install, customize, and maintain for a variety of applications.

PmWiki seems very east to install, only requires php, no database is needed and is easily skin-able. here is my test install.

One nice idea behind pmWiki is that the core is kept small and lots of features are available as add-ons. For example, I’ve tested the quicktime recipe and the rss one. There are a pile of interesting looking recipes on the PmWiki Cookbook.

I am thinking of installing this on the Sandaig Website firstly as a tool for myself, but perhaps as an alternative way for pupils to contribute to the website. I am not too sure how they would get on with wiki style markup, but I am sure they could manage the simpler stuff. I need to play around with the configuration and user authentication before I think about that.

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iMovie 7

I read quite a lot about the new(ish) version of iMovie, a lot of it negative, for example this Wired.com article lists the things that the previous versions did that iMovie 7 (which ships as part of iLive ’08). Apple seem to understand that no everyone is happy, the new version does not overwrite iMovie HD 6, and you can download iMovie HD 6 if you have the iLife ’08 version.

I had not really given this much thought, most of the dv editing my pupils have done is with older versions of iMovie (version 2!) or iMovie HD 6 (see Sandaig Television for examples). So I though we would just stick to the old version. I did install iLife ’08 on one macbook and had a quick look at it. As many have noted the new version is radically different; no timeline, little audio control and no plugin support! We didn’t use any plugins, but had messed about with audio and I saw the timeline as the ‘main idea‘ in iMovie.

This quick look left me with the idea that I would stick to 6 in class. I then though about the way we have started to use video on the Sandaig Otters blog, posting very short clips taken with digital still cameras as an alternative way to post science reports, e.g. Gears, the children took the movies and then I would quickly edit them together with Quicktime pro.

Imovieclips

Last week we were working on our electricity topic on Resistance and when recording the experiment, a few children used comic life and a couple recorded a few seconds of movie with a still camera, instead of me editing the movie I gave Jack a shot of using iMovie. The new version is perfect for this sort of activity, links with iPhoto, grabs the clips, and allows you to very quickly crop and drag and drop them into a movie, titles are a snip and we could add some garageband music easily. Jack put this 16 second clip together in about half an hour: variable resistor. more over I was able to ‘teach‘ him how do do it without having used the new version for more than a few minutes.

Given the time constraints of the curriculum, it is hard to fit in much dv work, I’ve been thinking more and more of using wee movies of this sort as an alternative way of presenting information, the new version of iMovie enables the children to be more involved in this process that using Quicktime pro. hopefully I’ll be able to do a little more of this over this term, but I think the new version of iMovie is a nice addition to our blogging toolbox while being glad the old version is there if we do a more complex video project.