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 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.

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SupportBlogging! has been set up to provide an opportunity for students, teachers, administrators, parents, and others to help promote an understanding of the benefits of educational blogging.

Interesting Wiki, well worth a visit. It hopes to balance some of the negativity aimed at social networks. Email list too: http://groups.google.com/group/supportblogging.

I am really beginning find wikispaces.com wikis useful via there RSS feeds. I can watch the changes at scotedublogs without leaving the comfort of my feed reader.

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I always wondered about these, mostly because I’ve never had a result that pleased me when doing the test. An interesting wee bit in the http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/ Wrongly labelled by Frank Coffield who say:

Next time you see a learning styles questionnaire, burn it

and goes on to report on some research on learning styles:

Our reports reviewed, systematically, 13 models of learning styles and concluded that this area of research is theoretically incoherent and conceptually confused. I listed in the reports 30 dichotomies, such as “activists” versus “reflectors”, “globalists” versus “analysts”, and “left brainers” versus “right brainers”. We should stop using these terms. There’s no scientific justification for them. You can check that. Shake your head gently. Does the left hemisphere of your brain move independently from the right? Or do they seem connected?

and

Students need knowledgeable, vocationally qualified and caring teachers, who can enter into a dialogue with them about how to become better learners, as well as what it means to be a painter or nursery nurse.

My own view of learning styles has alway been, some sorts of learning needs a particular learning style so we better have more that one we can use. And if we label a child a this learner or that learner is that any better than any other sort of labeling? Technorati Tags: ,

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teachmeetbbb.jpg A while back I produced an aggregator for Tagged: elive2006 pulling together del.icio.us, technorati and flickr tags. I’ve spiced it up a little now switch from using the flickr RSS feed to using the Flickr api with phpFlickr.

This has been a lot of fun Flickr has incredible educational potential (check out David‘s recent posts) and the apis along with phpFlickr make using it a treat.

As of now there is not much at Tagged: teachmeet06 (this will change as more things get tagged teachmeet06), but the Tagged: elive2006 will give more of an idea of what is going on.

I used the Lightbox JS v2.0 javascript to display the images nicely when the wee ones are clicked.

It is amazing how you can pull all this stuff (rss, api, javascript…) without knowing a lot about any of them, just borrowing freely available tools.

Performance of the above pages may not be great, they are served from my livingroom not exactly Hitchhikr, but I am learning.

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Tomorrow, Wednesday 12th July, a group of students from Grange Academy in Kilmarnock will set off on a journey of a lifetime. Their destination? Kunming in China, where they’ll be learning Mandarin Chinese and taking part in a range of cultural and educational activities which will allow them to experience China first hand.

One to watch: the Grange in China blog

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via Tim Lauer: Flickr Export creator Fraser Speirs has a job teaching at Cedars School of Excellence just down the road. He is blogging at Teaching 2.0. A very interesting addition to the Scots Edu-blog world!

I’ve used the old free version of Flickr Export for a while and a useful appleScript for posting to del.icio.us by Mr Speirs so look forward to reading his blog.

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I,ve been reading CogDogBlog for a while but I must have missed More Than Cat Diaries: Publishing With Weblogs which was a presentation for the New Media Consortium 2005 Summer Conference.At communicate06 Peter Ford used wordpress as a presentation tool, but the Cat Diaries takes this a lot further, the Blogger Presenter Slide shows how, css magic.Technorati Tags: , , , ,

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After seeing David‘s Ardrossan Childhood Memory Map using flickr and seeing his flickr inspiration I’ve been working on my Google Maps Experiment again, this one is a memory map of our holiday last year. It would have been a bit more interesting if my LaCie external drive with all my photos had not died.

Or look at a larger version.

I had a try with the maps at school, but my javascript skills (well lack of skill) had ensured that it only worked on safari and firefox. I’ve now fixed it so that it works on IE (and therefore in school). I need to clean up the editing interface (and remove a ton of debugging alerts) but I hope to do that over the next few weeks. You can still try it out if you like.

The LaCie mentioned above was my backup drive for space reasons I had moved my iPhoto library onto it too.

BTW if you’ve not looked at David’s Flickr Posts (and this one and more) you should, a huge set of ideas and resources.

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