A quick test of the new metaweblog.php.pivot forum for more informationTechnorati Tags: Performancing, metaweblog

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I am trying Flock again, since a new version of the metaweblog file
I got on thepivot forum

technorati tags:flock, pivot, metaweblog

I’ve just checked out Glow which is the new name for SSND. There is a Glow: the movie (19 minutes) to introduce teachers to SSDN Glow. Some interesting stuff wrapped in a ‘wee drama’. took a bit too long to get it’s message across. There is a transcript too:

GLORIA

Who are you?

A glowing hand reaches in and beats her to it. Gloria looks up to see the GATEKEEPER – a handsome man in a white suit who appears to glow. She jumps back in shock.

hmm.

I think we could have a laugh watching it in an inservice.

Strangely enough the Mac Version QuickTime movie: Glow: the movie (high speed) didn’t work on my my mac, just opened QT player which showed an endless connecting message. The Windows Media video: Glow: the movie opened fine using Quicktime in safari (I’ve got flip4Mac installed) .

If this is what we are going to get it looks pretty ambitious with a good toolset. All sorts of collaborating and content.

I was please to see a wee RSS icon floating by on the screen, I wonder if glow will allow the publishing and pulling of rss to the www or just within glow.

 

Also the words after school club video podcasting on another screen.

The mention of ‘glowgraphics’ (I think) sounded interesting as does the Intellectual property page at LTS.

The ssdn would seem to solve (in school at least) the bandwidth problem, but I wonder how powerful a class pc needs to be to see mutli user video chat?

I also worry about the idea of pupils connecting from home, the digital divide is still a problem in some areas of Scotland.

In the example the wee girl was online in her bedroom out of the parental line of sight, maybe she should have had a bed made up in the living room and her dad could have kept an eye on her while he did the ironing

I am also curious to see how open to the rest of the world the ssdn glow will be, will we be able to pull in content from outside glow, rss, flickr photos etc? Will we need to? If it is closed will it make Scotland insular, or could we bring in international partners?

Andrew is blogging glow too.

technorati tags glow ssdn creativecommons

Via EduBlog Insights: Eduflickr.com a proposal to get round the fact that flickr is blocked in many schools. Sounds great. I was chatting to Ewan the other day and proposed that someone might just pull down filter and repurpose all the creative commons photos on flickr, this is a bit more practical.

technorati tags EduBlogInsights techlearning flickr creativecommons

There is a new version of blogger out in Beta: http://beta.blogger.com/.

I grabbed an account and there seems to be quite a few useful features

Got a couple of minor issues so far.

One is that quotes in the comments seem to be escaped, I think i could fix that with this patch from the pivot forum but it seems easier to wait until pivot 1.30.2 is out.

The second problem was pointed out by Andrew Brown, pivot now has stronger spam protection, and redirects possible spammers to http://spammerbegone.com which is possible not the best place for children who forget to answer the silly question to be directed.

I’ve fixed that by setting the redirect to http://127.0.0.1/ which should be less offensive.

I had a quick trawl through the spam log to see if I could find Andrew’s message, I didn’t but I could see 12 spam messages trapped in the last half hour.

I know that I’ve had a lot more at times, but I wonder what this says about site stats, do they include all the spam messages. If you think your blog is getting 100s of hits a day they might be the wrong flavour of hits?

I just updated to Pivot 1.30.1. Seem to go ok, if anything weird happens I hope it turns up before next Monday, when the children come back.

I’ve added trackbacks to this sub-weblog and hopeful all the new anti spam stuff will do its job.

I popped into school last week to move some computers that were clogging up the staff room to an open area.

Today I went back and it looks like their new home will be ready for the week after next when the children will be back:

This is a first for our school, up until now we have had 2 internet computers in each class. This session we will have one computer in each class and the rest in our new lab.

I am not sure if they will all be connected for the start of term, but I am hoping to be finding out the difference between working in a lab as opposed to the classroom will mean getting a lot more done.

The school is like a building site at the moment as it is getting prepared for an increase in numbers as the school across the road has closed.

The work looks as it is well on schedule, and I am almost looking forward to going back to work

I glanced up and it is the 9th of August. Nearly time to go back to school.

Apart from a bit of gardening, walking and the odd glass of red everything else is unfinished. I’ve feel like I’ve been working away on lots of fronts with plenty of blue sky fun, but no end result.

Poor old Rommy Robot lies untouched.

I’ve failed to install mySQL on my old G3 many many times. This was particularly weird as I had done it before.

I played with the google api Google Maps API and have nearly got something useful, I need someone to explain how to convert whatever the squares on a OS map are to latitude and longitude.

I messed about with RSS, tags and the Flicker API tags learning a bit more about del.icio.us, Technorati and coComment.

I did a bit more with the Flickr API and have a potentially useful couple of tools Flickr Creative commons search and Flickr Creative commons search if Flickr is freed from websense.

My idea with the RSS feeds and the APIs was to create some sort of research starter for children blogging, a quick way for them to get links, images and conections on a particular topic but there is a long way to go on that one. I did learn a fair bit about copying JavaScript and API examples.

I messed around with WordPress and started setting up some blogs for the Bannerman New Learning Community Primaries, more about this later. Downloaded and installed a fair number of themes and just started scratching around the surface of WordPress, lots to learn.

I read a lot of blogs, wrote some comments, grabbed links.

I didn’t use flash to make a new toy for the children at school, either a bubbleshare clone or a flickr style notes thing, both of which I thought about when I found out flash now can handle file uploads.

Anyway, I am going to pop into school tomorrow and see how the new computer room is getting on. Time to leave the chair behind.