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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I was talking to a colleague in another primary school recently. They mentioned that a cpd opportunity in blogging had been offered round in their staff-room, the reaction from the staff was along the lines of that is all very well but we have real work like spelling to get through.
I am a wee bit worried about this, and unfortunately I doubt the message is going to get through very quickly via cpd. A/the problem is that folk seem to think blogging is out with the normal day to day curriculum when it could be an enhancement to it.

A less than best practice example: this week I did a couple of sessions of McRone cover in our two primary seven classes. As it was only the second week of term, I just did my own thing rather than follow the class routine. I decided to do a wee poetry lesson using a basic template to get the class started blogging. The lesson turned out to be about a lot more than blogging. We started by reviewing nouns, verbs and adjectives and introduced antonyms, we discussed powerful vs weak words, the importance of audience and getting our spelling right.
The children wrote poems and blogged some of them on Sandaig Poets, things got a bit frantic and some spelling mistakes were made, eek! Poems were blogged, and over the next couple of days, thanks to Ewan‘s linkage, and comments from Bob, Andy, Neil and Steve, the children’s interest was maintained.

I popped back into one of the classes later in the week (my own macrone) for a follow up. We discussed spelling mistakes, slang, text messaging, audience and the ideas given by the comments, some of which served to increase the class vocabulary. We went on to cover internet safety, audience again and a few other things.

The time spent by pupils on the computers was about 10 minutes each. Most of the work involved, discussion and writing, the odd picture was drawn, nothing out of the ordinary.
Blogging provided some extras (audience,context and purpose) for real work.

After reading Gordon’s post Too much hassle I think the problem is that some teacher do not realise that it is not really much hassle to dip a toe in the web 2.0, but we need to give enough time, training and practice to let them know that. Same as any other aspect of teaching and learning really.

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Our ICT suite started to come together today, we got a phone call yesterday to tell us to expect deliveries.

Suitprogress 1
The classroom assistants did a great clean up
Suite Hugh
Hugh helped stacking the furniture
Suite Boxes
Quite a lot of boxes
Suite Plaster
And by the end of the day the plaster had been done

We are expecting the decorators on Monday and the guys to put the furniture together on Wednesday

For me the icing on the cake arrived just after the plasterers:

Macmini

I am really looking forward to getting down to work with the suite and the mini suite of 4 mac minis. A few children were working with my iBook today to produce a comic life of two, which have been published on Sandaig Otters, I am hoping to that this sort of activity a lot further as the session progresses.

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I am just testing an AppleScript from Adam Burt which takes a screenshot of google earth and posts it to a blog via ecto. does lots of tagging and produces metadata too. Designed for blojsom I’ve tweaked the html a bit for pivot.
Details and download of the script from Google Earth Geo-Blog Snapshot – ecto Script plug-in.
I know little about google Earth, but I know there are a few folk out there who might like this.
Geo-Blog entry screenshot of location -4.322157262071,55.878416254973,0

meta-longitude=-4.322157262071
meta-latitude=55.878416254973
meta-altitude=0
meta-range=156.059623386301
meta-tilt=0.0
meta-heading=5.009656812371E-14
meta-coordinates=-4.322157262071,55.878416254973,0

technorati tags

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Image uploaded with AppleScript

Recently I’ve been testing alternative ways to post to the blog with the metaWeBlog API via AppleScript, Flock,Performancing, Ecto and TextMate.
It took me a while to get TextMate working and AppleScript worked for everything but posting images.
I got a ton of help on the pivot forum from hansfn, who was very patient with me, and spent a good while reading docs and googling, but I could not get AppleScript to upload images.
Last night I posted a comment on Tom Smith’s Blog this morning a script arrived in my inbox that worked perfectly.
It is always a great pleasure when this happens, people who you do not know giving up time to help out a stranger.

Blogged from tm

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Tim Lauer is Moving to Drupal. The setup sounds great:

For example each of our 4th and 5th grade teachers will have a blog which she will use to post assignments and announcements to students. Each 4th and 5th grade student will have a Drupal based blog that will live behind our firewall.

and

While we plan to introduce this to the students as a way to manage their work, we also will begin to introduce the idea that their class blog is a place for them to do other things besides just respond to assignments. We will also enable the images module so that they can use their Drupal blog as a place to organize images associated with their work. Using RSS we will create a master feed of all images and create a Flickr type collection of images that they can share and discuss with their classmates.

Sound just great. I am wondering if Drupal is suitable for hosted sites, how hard it is to setup etc, etc.

Blogged from tm

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Over the last few week I’ve been blogging happily from TextMate and feeling quite pleased with myself. I even wrote a crude command from the blogging bundle to convert a set of selected words to technorati tags. Unfortunately I didn’t check it out properly and the links produced were broken. So this morning I fixed it and used textMate to retrive the posts fix the links and repost them, not noticing until I had finished that that set the date to todays. I’ve reordered them now, but it looks like I went mad blogging today.
This is my code, it is important to note I know nothing at all about shell scripting so just used google to figue out what to use:

echo  "<p class="ttags">"

tt="<a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/thetag/" rel="tag" target="_blank">thetag</a>"

str=$TM_SELECTED_TEXT

for word in $str; do echo ${tt//thetag/$word}; done

echo "</p>"

Hopefully the next paragraph will show it works:

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This looks like it is going to be great:
K12 Online 2006 Conference?

the first annual K12 Online 2006 convention for teachers, administrators and educators around the world interested in the use of Web 2.0 tools in classrooms and professional practice. This year?s conference is scheduled to be held over two weeks, Oct. 23-27 and Oct. 30- Nov. 3 with the theme Unleashing the Potential.

Organised by Darren Kuropatwa, Sheryl Nusbaum-Beach, Will Richardson. Just misses our October week holiday, which is probably a good thing from my family’s point of view.

Blogged from tm