I’ve redecorated a bit. borrowed some javascript to expand and collapse some of the bits on the side. Only tested in safari and firefox mac as I left the pc in school this weekend, if you see this before monday from a pc and it looks wrong let me know (I obviously don’t mean wrong from the design sense, just if something is blasted off the screen).

After the wonderful response to Andy’s shout for help I’ve set up a page on the scotedublogs wiki: CommentsForKidz

The idea is, if you want some comments on your class/school blog you stick a link on the page and comment on other blogs listed there. I mumbled about this before, but I think it is an idea who’s time has now come to Scotland.

I have been quite jealous of the use of BubbleShare on the Interactive Chatting Teddies blog, but it is blocked at school at the moment. I’ve not asked for it to be unblocked, but I am trying a couple of homespun alternatives.

1. Photos in iPhoto, record audio in Garage band and add to iTunes, export Quicktime move from iPhoto with the audio as the ‘music’ : Amy and Bradley – country in the city

2. Record audio in Audacity, import photos and audio to flash file, children can create slideshow with crude effects: Daniel and Nicole – country in the city/

At the moment, the second has the best possibilities, more for the children to do, and smaller file size. I helped with the saving of audio and importing to flash, but given a bit of practice the children could do most of that, they organised the images and tweened them in flash this time. the flash file is also smaller than the quicktime one, though that may be down to my ignorance of QT.

Both files are a bit big to incorporate in a blog, but it might be possible to have some sort of flash file that would dynamically load images and sound just like bubble share. Is this worthwhile, giving pupils a voice, or just toys for this boy?

Grazr above is reading in an opml I exported from Vienna, my desktop feedreader.

Make me realise, 1. I need to tidy up Vienna and 2. I should know a bit about OPML.

Loosely connected blue-sky

I (or the guinness) was talking to Will about some sort of feed that would connect a podcast with a set of audio comments, noting the time on the original podcast where the comments are, you could then jump to the interesting/contensious point on the podcast. This would need a networked mp3 player with an interesting interface and a load of bandwidth. Podcasts would then become browse-able in the same way as blogs. The mp3 player would of course record, upload and link your comments.

I’ve just listen to the BBC Radio Scotland Podcasters show which featured

Radio Sandaig. The children sounded great, confident and articulate.

Unfortunately (for me) they had cut out my explanations. I can’t say I blame them, but I though I had addressed a couple of points in the show.

Muriel Gray was asking about the benefits of podcasting and it might have been nice if the educational benefits (talking, listening, writing, working together and a big chunk of A Curriculum for Excellence) had been spelled out rather than left to the audience to deduce for themselves.

Near the end of the programme Muriel says ‘I am still not convinced that it is not just boys and their toys’ the group she talked to at Sandaig was more girls than boys, one of my aims this year was to increase the number of boys taking part!

Some of the other podcasters (Daily Source Code , tartanpodcast etc) made great points in favour of podcasting generally.

If you missed the show you can listen on line, for a while at least.

At the Masterclass New Technology we should people how to upload files to the Internet Archive via a web browser using windows. It is quite a clunky process.

Much easier is to use the CcPublisher

ccPublisher is a tool that does two things: it will help you tag your audio and video files with information about your license and it allows you to upload Creative Commons-licensed audio and video works to the Internet Archive for free hosting. You also have the option of publishing the licensed and tagged audio works on your own site.

I made a movie of using the tool to ccpublisher_mac1.mov upload a mp3 Quicktime file 3.3 MB stored on the Internet Archive

This looks really well put together May 9th Edublogs Workshop Handout from bits & bytes blog, via edublogs.org

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