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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SimplePie

SimplePie is a very fast and easy-to-use class, written in PHP, for reading RSS and Atom syndication feeds. By keeping it simple, and focusing on what?s important, we?ve built a pretty sweet little API. SimplePie?s focus has been two-fold: speed and ease of use, and has been very successful on both fronts.

I’ve tried quite a few on and offline aggregation systems, SimplePie allows you to aggregate and order entries in multiple blogs, as long as the feeds have dated items using the Multifeeds package. see SimplePie: Weblog » Sorting multiple feeds by time and date for details.
I like on of their taglines:

Feed parsing for the rest of us
So fast and easy you’d think we stole it from Apple

Here is a quick aggregation of some scots-edu-bloggers.
This is on my old G3 so don’t expect speed, compare to my lilina test on the same box.

Given time I am quite interested in making something useful for one of these aggregators the way to go would probably be to build the html regularly with a cron job so that the browser would just load a fast static page.

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Blogged from tm

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I’ve been testing SimplePie a bit more:
An Aggregation of some scots-edu-bloggers. This is now a static page, updated every hour, or by refreshing.
This speeds up the loading of the page. Refresed from a cron job.
I’ve found some feeds don’t seem to work, e.g. David‘s first feedburner feed doesn’t work with SiplePie, but this one: EdCompCast: a podcast friendly feed does. I can’t get Digital Katies to work either.
But apart from that I am quite happy at the moment.

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Blogged from tm

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After watching the video, reading quite a few blog posts, especially Bob’s Sharepoint explanation I’ve having a quick look or three at the portal.

Somewhat limited by the Monday to Thursday school only access, I’ve still not got to grips with it.

There has been some interesting discussion on Ewan’s and John’s blogs.

Kind of boils down to: ‘do we need glow if we have Web 2.0?’ John and Ewan seem to be saying we need both (and a pile of other stuff too).

I am sure they are right (both posts are well worth reading more than once).

The only thing I can really say is that glow feels different than most of the web 2 stuff I’ve played with over the last few years. Glow doesn’t feel playful. I think I might need a manual. I’ve picked up a dozen blogging systems, a handful of wikis, flickr, del.ico.us etc and never felt lost. Glow feels more hierarchical , professional and business like.

It will be interesting to see how this develops, with only so much time available, will both cultures thrive?

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Today when teaching the other primary six class ict in the media room we tried a wee experiment, instead of uploading an image and writing text we uploaded an image and recorded a short mp3 about what the children had learned: Black and White Grid Art .

Pivot allows you to upload files and then let the browser open them in a new window.

I though that a flash player embedded in an entry might be a little nicer, so I took an existing Pivot extension snippet Flash and modified it a bit to use a wee flash mp3 player I knocked up previously:

I am not too sure how robust this will be, I can’t really remember my original flash code and modified it in a hurry, the snippet relies on my poor at best php and probably would affront anyone with some php knowledge. I’ve only tested it in Safari so far, I’ll check this on the school pcs tomorrow and would appreciate a comment if you don’t see a flash player in this entry.

But if I can get this to work reliably I’ve got a useful tool which doesn’t require any external services. (I need to make the flash file look a bit nicer too.

All the children will need to do is upload a file and then change this:

[[download:test.p3:icon::]]

to

[[flashmp3:test.p3]]

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A week or two ago I set up a new set of blogs, one for each of the children in my class: Primary Six SJ. They are now open for business. We have managed a few posts and some of the children have a fair handle on how it works other don’t yet.

We have our ‘week’ in the media room this week, the class is timetabled for ict for an hour each morning Monday to Thursday, Monday didn’t happen because of a whole school event, Tuesday I bit off more that we could chew asking the children to do far to much. in one session, some confusion resulted. Today we had more success, a simpler task and about half the class finished in time to upload their work to their blogs.

Already some of the class are asking if they can post to their blogs from home, and I’ve told them soon. A bit more discussion and a rule card to take away and then I’ll let them loose. They are also asking about customising their header graphic so we need to work on that too.

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I spent a bit of time yesterday working through a few tutorials at gotoAndLearn.com building a flash video player.

My previous attempts with encoding quicktime for flash with Flash 8 Video Encoder had resulted in flash files larger and of poorer quality than the original. This time I just used the flash export in Quicktime Player pro with better results, I don’t know enough about the various parameters to use Flash 8 Video Encoder.app effectively. The QT exported files sometime come out a bit bigger and sometimes smaller but not as much bigger as my efforts with the Flash Video Encoder. I guess I still need some lessons in encoding video…

I then altered the video player a bit so that it will not load the flash movie until clicked and loads a jpg preview, the locations of both movie and preview can be passed to the player making it fairly simple to use the player for multiple files in a blog.

I’ve not decided if I should go for quicktime or flash for Sandaig Television, but it is nice to have options.

The above examples are sections of a movie created by my primary six class last session.

We can even give you a snippit to embed the video in your own blog just like YouTube:

embed

I think.

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aniBOOMLOGO Via TechCrunch, aniBOOM Flash video site for original animated short films with a $25,000 competition, a lot of things that would be interesting to would be animators in schools, but I doubt it will get through the filters, worth a look from home though. Easy to embed a video in a blog too. TechCrunch have embedded one that would probably not be suitable for the classroom. here is one that is:

The site layout doesn’t quite workout in Safari, but it looks fine in firefox.
AniBOMM had a pile of RSS feeds too eg: Most Recent

Blogged from tm

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I’ve set up a blog for video content Sandaig Television using some old content from the site to test things out. using a local install of the popup2go scripts from embed the video!.

This seem to work ok from home on my mac and partially from school (we sometimes get an authentication dialog with QT content). I’ve put the videos on my dot mac account space to save a bit of bandwidth on our host’s server (the next few podcasts will go there too).

If you have a look and there are any problems please let me know.

I was hoping to use some sort of Flash player, but both YouTube and Google Video do not work on the school network.

I had a wee try at converting quicktime to flash at home but I could not manage to keep the quality up and the size down. If anyone knows a good recipe, I’d be interested.

For quicktime I am using the H.263 compression rather than H.264 as h.264 didn’t play on the school machines. I’ve figured this out by trial an error rather than any reading or actual information, so again any info appreciated.

I’ve a few small child lead video projects running at the moment but it will be a while before they are finished and added to the blog. We might do some more mini movies like Gears and Flick Flacks in the meantime if any possibilities come up.

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Via OK, Let?s Knock martinlutherking.org Down a Few Pegs, Shall We? seems like a good idea (pass it on).

Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Copy the stuff below:

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ubuntu screenI am looking for a wee bit of help.
Over the past year or two, I’ve installed various linux distributions, played with them briefly and uninstalled them. Usually I’ve given up at the point I’ve tried to get a wifi card to work.
A couple of months ago I had a partitioning accident on my pc laptop losing all my windows stuff. As I don’t have disks for the machine I decided to install Ubuntu and have a play. Ubuntu installed easily and picked up my wifi card straight away, I didn’t really do much except browse the web a bit and check out a few apps. Ubuntu looked as if is pretty straighforward for basic office and web tools.
A bit later when I was getting ready to go to Be Very afraid I though it might be a good idea to have a second laptop in case the iBook had a problem. In the event it would have been helpful to have another machine with us.
So I dug out the pc and set about installing Audacity. I’ve installed Audacity a few times on macs and pcs and never had any bother. At the time it wasn’t available in the Add/Remove programs list in ubuntu so I downloaded a package and tried to install that. This told me that various files were needed and not on the machine so it was off to google to download some more stuff. eventually I got audacity installed and plugged in my mic for a quick test: nothing. A quick trip to the sound control panel didn’t make much sense to me.
Googling lead me to this sort of thing and this: USB mic on Linux – Audacity Wiki.
Not the most user friendly of instructions for those of us shy of shell commands.
A month later and I am trying again, updateed ubuntuOne suggestion was to download the latest version of audacity and build it. I’ve done this a few times on my mac from the commandline without bother, but attempting this in ubuntu lead to messages about not finding a compiler…
For this to work for busy teachers it has got to be a bit easier. Having said that I’d like to use the pc, and a lot of ubuntu looks nice, so if anyone knows of a simple way to get a usb mike working let me know. I can manage a few shell commands on my mac, but no more than a few at one time.