Got a recent mac that supports the Quartz Composer engine (not my G4 but a macbook is fine)?
Then hit this link on Jonathan’s Blog!
Well it surprised me.
Category Archives: wwwd
Nokia or iPod?
Adam has noticed the the ‘product placement’ in Finland!
He is wondering about the law, but I am more amazed by how far our image of children has changed.
Do I need a tumblelog?
Or some sort of micro/mini blog that lets you add just a bit more than del.icio.us to a link…
Interesting things I’ve noticed today:
Mr W sent me an invite to skitch, which looks like an interesting ‘add notes and shapes to an image and upload it’ sort of application. You can upload to my skitch or flickr among other places or use it with Comic life from the same developer.
Thanks Neil.
I’ve not really seen a need to use twitter as it would seem more useful to say consultants and conference dwellers than teachers, but I noticed a couple of interesting posts Christopher D. Sessums :: Twitter Me This: Brainstorming Potential Educational Uses for Twitter and ELT notes: This Twittering Life which are food for thought.
Kind of links to the ideas hovering around David Warlick‘s posts: A Bucket of Drops?. and It Isn?t Easy which join up in my mind at least. The possibilities of the new technology are accelerating away from what actually goes on in the classroom. There are some interesting comments in the It Isn?t Easy post, including one about an unnamed blogging guru giving an admiring teacher an unasked for autograph, which made me laugh out loud.
Exciting for me Pivot X2.0 screenshots., I use pivot to run this and the other Sandaig blogs, looks like they have a lot of nice new features in the works.
So i probably don’t need a micro blog for these notes to myself, just keep a textmate window open all day and add to it.
The Start of the holidays
Straight from school on friday to the pub, for a bit to eat, a few Guinness and to talk a fair bit of nonsense.
Steam was let off the world put to rights and a few farewells said.
The way staffing in schools goes at the moment you spend a lot of time saying goodbye.
The next day I got down playing with phpFlickr here, increasing my admiration for both flickr‘s api and phpFlickr. It is a great pity that flickr is not available in many schools (it is worth repeating this frequently I think).
I finally bit the bullet and bought a pro account on flickr, nice seeing the old photos reappear safe and sound and the badge on my other blog is refilled.
Due to rain, I’ve spent a bit of time today tidying my desk at home and planning the geeky bit of my holidays.
A few weeks ago Carol Fuller (Sandaig’s fairy blogmother) invited me onto facebook, which I hope to explore and blog about. Through it I’ve discovered mojungle a mobloging sort of application which seems nice. I’ve also found that flickr is getting on better with my phone so I hope to try some moblogging experiments perhaps combined with the aforementioned phpFlickr. I’ve embedded my flickr tagged moblog and mojungle on my moblog.
I didn’t use the third glow pilot as much as I did the second, but I need to blog a bit about glow I think.
I am also going to spend a bit of time with SuperCard and update some of my projects.
Other than that I hope to get down to the beach, climb a few wee hills and resurrect my tai chi practise all once the rain stops.
Session over
Although I am ready for my holidays rather a lot of interesting things have appeared on the horizon in the last couple of weeks.
On the software front I finally got round to using scratch with the children, samorost is inviting and we tried out slideshare. As usual I underestimated the amount of time I’d have to teach in the last couple of weeks of term and suddenly we have no time left!
A couple of weeks ago our pcs were refreshed and this should really make a big difference to using ict in the school, the old ones were getting really slow. At the start of this week I had another flurry of excitement when our class in a box box arrived, the laptops to go with it have not got here yet but hopefully this is going to be a great resource to use ict flexibly across the curriculum next session.
My job next year is going to be rather different than what I’ve been doing this year.
This year I’ve been teaching with ict across the stages using our new media room, unfortunately for me this didn’t really work out as planned, term one the suite was not ready, term 2 went as planned, but staff leaving and a lot of staff absences kept me in class most of term 3, term 4 saw the switch from the mitel managed service to dell and put our network out of action for 4 or 5 weeks.
From my point of view this has been pretty disappointing.
Next session or staffing number change for the worse and I’ll be changing roll.
It looks like I will be spending a fair amount of time on Emotional Literacy, working with children who have problems in this and other areas of their learning. Pretty challenging, especially as a lot of the things I’ve been doing over the last few years have worked best with our more confident and motivated learners, how much blogging, dv, podcasting I will be involved in is in question I think.
I’d be really interested in anyone who has experience in these areas passing on ideas and tips, especially ones involving ict and Web 2.0
I am also looking for a wee summer project, hopefully involving being paid for something I enjoy (edu, blogs, html etc) again ideas gratefully received.
I will be continuing to blog a bit over the holidays as I have a few things to think about that I’ve not had time for.
Have a great summer
Too much to do, too little time…
Yesterday we got a new set of pcs at Sandaig,24 desktops and a pile of laptops, one per full-time equivalent member of staff.
We decided to deploy all of the desktops in our media room leaving the laptops for classroom use. Hopefully we will also have a class in the box of wireless laptops as a pilot very soon.
Even a committed mac-fan-boy like myself could not help but have a big smile on my face by the time I had finished securing the pcs on Tuesday evening.
Compared to our old kit these are lovely machines, decent sized screens and you can’t see the screen redraw in the old snail like fashion we are used too. XP is a lot nicer than win 2000 too
I had children testing the machines constantly today and so far it has been great. Children are able to have more than one app open without everything slowing down and really start to work properly.
Unfortunately it is nearly the end of the session (I am not sure I really typed that) and there will not be much time to exploit the new kit until next session. Due to various factors I am not completely sure what stage I am teaching next session so I am not too sure in which way I’ll tap into ict yet.
While the suite was out of action and there is a slight relaxing of the curriculum as the holidays approach I took the opportunity to let my class have a go with scratch. I downloaded it in the Spring break but have not really tried it out. I have it installed on a few non networked macbooks so it was idea for the network downtime on Tuesday.
I got a couple of early finishers to work through the getting started guide and as they had no problems I grouped the class into threes and let them loose on the same guide.
This starting children on an application you have not used yourself might seem a little irresponsible but I though I had enough knowledge of beginning programming (ifs and repeat) to figure it out on the fly.
If hoots of laughter are a sign of active learning then scratch is a winner, the children had a great time exploring.
We had a quick show at the end and I was delighted to see that all the groups had managed most of the first tutorial and taken there animation in different directions, using different aspects of scratch. The guide introduced ‘repeat forever’ loops but some of the children managed to use conditional if/then type constructs and other interesting features.
Some of this was using the million monkeys approach, but I can already see scratch is a wonderful engaging resource and I hope to be using it a lot more.
So we have 7 more days to go before the summer holidays and although I am really looking forward to the break and sharing in the general staff exhaustion of this time of year, there are also a ton of interesting avenues that I hope to explore next session.
I’ve also been messing about a bit with the new glow pilot, not as much as I did in the spring break (time) but like Gordon I am not finding anyone to chat to.
Usually as the summer approaches I’ve managed to get some sort of summer project together, last year it was the Podcasting Directory other years it has been wee html jobs, flash or the occasional bit of SuperCarding. This year nothing so far, I am not going away on holiday this year and am open to suggestions or offers. I am not really wanting to spend the whole summer slaving away but a wee bit of extra interesting work would be nice.
Getting Comfortable with Gaming?
Three years ago I noticed a Strange ‘Game’, (the game is no longer at the url links from that post).
I played the game for a few minutes and got nowhere, it looked lovely so I just linkdumped it for my class and forgot about it.
Recently I’ve saw mention of it (on KimP’s Blog and Ewan’s) so I looked again. It still looked cool and I still got not very far.
This afternoon, I was delaying going to music (my least favourite bit of the curriculum) so I fired up Samorost on to the wall and gathered the children round.
They had a ball, giving me advice and solving the puzzles to work through the game. As a class they took about the same time as Ewan and a lot faster than Derek
I realise that there are lot of areas (as well as music) that I don’t get. I recall getting the first version of Myst along with HyperCard 2.3 and not getting that at all, I spent a wee bit of time wandering in an aimless fashion then a good deal more time gently hacking into the game to check out it’s Hypercard roots.
Anyway there is not much time left this session and we are getting a refresh of hardware tomorrow which might slow thing up, but I hope to get my class to follow the AllStars progress using Samorost and perhaps replicate some of their activities> I might get to see what I can get out of this type of gaming. Moving a little way out of my comfort zone.
(Note to self Samorost2, thanks Ewan).
Looks like we are in – Voices Of The World
I’ve joined in on behalf of my class/school Voices Of The World In Europe!
Looks like there is room for folk outside Europe.
Masterclass (no more)
Yesterday I went to Glasgow’s Concluding Masterclass Conference. As usual with these meetings I really enjoyed meeting and chatting to other ict enthusiasts from Glasgow schools. As far as I know few Glasgow teachers have joined the edu blog world so I often know more about other athorities than I do about my own! I am not implying that glasgow don’t send out information or share practise but more that if it dosen’t have an rss feed I often miss it
It is sad to think this will be the last time for this gathering.
Neil McDonald who led the Glasgow Masterclass team and Glasgow’s ICT programs announced that he is leaving the authority. Between Masterclass and Neil I have had a great deal of support over the last few years and will certainly miss both. Neil has always made it easy for masterclassers to put together a proposal for funding with the minimum of form filling and always answered overlong emails from me promptly even when I imagine he had more important things on his laden plate.
At the conference in the morning we heard reports of various interesting projects, my pal Marlyn Ross is supporting a team of cross sector E-Specialists Teachers, which sound like it is having a serious impact. One of her specialists D. McAleer (sorry I can’t recall the first name, David?) gave a wonderful talk about how he is a smartboard convert, taking us through his progress and finishing with a biology lesson. His presentation was funny and informative and I guess his classes are great fun.
We also heard about Shawlands Learning community Digital imaging project, again cross sector working with pre 5 to primary and primary to secondary transitions, the secondary pupils making a dvd to help primary pupils moving into secondary and primary 6 pupils working with pre five children in creative ways. Input from video professional seems to have helped. Jacque Crooks and a pile of confident children from the Shawlands Learning community presented.
We also heard of the Lourdes Mothership project and interesting online community including pupil produced radio and content and after school online help from staff. Unfortunatly it looks like the url works from within the Glasgow network only at the moment as I’d love to take a closer look.
Before lunch Mari Dougan of LTS gave a review of Masterclass and and update on glow (I just noticed that glow is the first hit for glow – Google Search).
After lunch various folk were presenting about their Masterclass projects, unfortunately I didn’t get to see any of them as I was presenting about Web 2.0 at Sandaig.
Hopefully I got across the main thrust of my argument. that blogging etc. is just a wee extension of normal classroom practise, display, assemblies, production of class newspapers ect. has always been at the heart of primary teaching, we just have a bigger wall display now.
As well as show some of the fun we have had blogging and podcasting over the last few years I talked about my approach to blogging and pointed to ScotEdublogs as a good place to start thinking about blogging. In a nutshell, I think you should start by reading blogs for a while, go on to commenting and then start whole class blogging, suing that to set the tone and expectations. From there the possibilities are endless.
It looks like I am going to be expanding on this theme at The Scottish Learning Festival (SETT) this year: Audience, Purpose and Conversation: the World Wide Display Wall. Now masterclass has closed I needed an excuse to get to SETT especially as there will be another edition of Teachmeet, presenting was the only surefire way I could think of.
Note: it is not all over for Masterclass the community lives online and is open to all
toondoo
Toondoo is a pretty amazing online cartoon strip creator. Primary Six SJ have been finding it easy to create cartoons and publish them on their blogs. It looks like Toondoo does a pretty good job of getting the ‘toons onto the blogs without slowing the page load up.
The strip creation is by drag and drop, there are a great set of characters and you can upload your own images too.
The app is certainly the simplest I’ve seen for children, and they can easily post the ‘toons to their blogs.
Toondoo is an offshoot of jambav which looks like it might have more useful toys and tools. The toondude has his own edublog: ToonDoo as an Educational Tool with a nice set of toons which has given me a good idea for what to do with unfamiliar spelling words next session.