One of the first thoughs after watching Ewan’s presentation was about commenting, he sugested that folk could organise commenting on each others students/children.

I’ve though about this on and off as I’d like to increase the comments my guys get.

One way would be to get my class to comment on other blogs, but this is a wee bit difficult to organise, we have two network pcs in the class and no lab. With a lab we could have reading and comment sessions omn other blogs, organisation is a bit hard without a bunch of pcs. I’ve also had problems commenting on some blogs we can read at school, but the comment run on site we cannot access through our filters.

I occassionally comment on other primary blogs on a what goes around comes around, sort of way. I started the Primary School Blogs suprglu to try and up my comment rate, but suprglu limits the number of feeds and quite a few primary blogs I’ve found disallow comments.

It might be an idea to start some sort of informal group of teachers who would regularly comment on other class blogs, in an informal but commited sort of way.

I am not sure how many Primary Teachers read this, but if you are up for some sort of Primary Blog Comment Exchange leave a comment here or drop me a mail, there is probably a sensible way to organise this so an idea for that would be appreciated. I’d be happy to host a list of folk / class blogs if that would help.

How much of a Blog Expert are You?

Via The J-Walk Blog.

Five out of ten for me.

Podcast resources and Educator’s tips seem to be full of useful stuff, from the Podcast directory for educators site.

I’ve been hampered from keeping up with news by a really terrible adsl problem at home, my connection to the net has been down for hours at a time every day this week, often in the early evening when I do most browsing.

Will limited time I’ve been mostly Flagging interesting stuff in Vienna, then to avoid actually reading and thinking about this I wrote a wee appleScript to produce a set of links from the posts in Vienna’s currently selected folder. you can’t set the folder via appleScript so I need to select the Marked Articles folder manually and then run the script, this is the result today this:

Becomes this:

Daily Update — January 4, 2006 Wednesday, January 4, 2006 13:34:14

Ewan @ Jordanhill Saturday, January 14, 2006 14:36:55

A good blogging day! Friday, January 6, 2006 00:59:51

The quest continues Wednesday, January 4, 2006 21:17:26

Education Session at PodcasterCon Tuesday, January 3, 2006 11:32:59

easy wikis for educators – pbwiki Friday, December 2, 2005 20:26:04

Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn?t Live Without Friday, December 30, 2005 08:48:40

A Fantastic Conference Saturday, January 14, 2006 14:30:55

Online Games in Education — This Year Could be the Big One Tuesday, January 3, 2006 17:02:33

2006 Online Edublogger Conference: Learning Is Conversation Thursday, January 12, 2006 22:05:41

Jordanhill University of Strathclyde Gig Friday, January 13, 2006 14:00:10

AbiWord Tuesday, October 11, 2005 04:12:15

Hillary Meeler featured in Education World! Wednesday, January 4, 2006 22:39:43

Some great posts in there, locally David and Ewan have been increasing the numbr of Scots Education bloggers, in some cases by offering a mars bar.

If you use vienna you might find a use for this applescript: (or be able to improve it, I would like it sorted by date)

tell application "Vienna"
	set quote to ASCII character 34
	set theLinks to ""
	set theFolder to the current folder
	set max to count of articles of theFolder
	repeat with i from max to 0 by -1
		set theLinks to theLinks & return & "<a href=" & quote & the link of article i of theFolder & quote & ">" & the title of article i of theFolder & "</a> " & the date of article i of theFolder
		
	end repeat
end tell
tell application "Tex-Edit Plus"
	make new document
	set the contents of window 1 to theLinks
	activate
end tell

Or you might be able to improve it, as my appleScript is very much self taught, I would be nice to post it automatically to the blog rather than open in Tex-edit plus first, although it could go straight to the clipboard.

Google Earth UK Primary Curriculum – Lessons and Resources

I got a comment from Tom who has set this up. Google Earth obviously has some great potential. I can’t use it in School yet because it is not on the Networked machines. I don’t think our machine meet the System memory (RAM): 128MB minimum requirements either.

Posted via appleScript

So I’ve been playing with AppleScript and blogging today.

After reading Lazy Mac OS X: Weblog links sidebar and http://www.livejournal.com/doc/server/ljp.csp.blogger.html

The Blogger API does not support the use of post titles (subjects). To set a title for your post include the title wrapped in <title> tags in your post body.

I can post to this pivot blog and a wordpress one: My Vienna Links via appleScript.

AppleScript can collect various information to post (eg the Vienna Links, latest iTunes or anything else AppleScript can get.)

Not much use in school as we don’t have macs on the network, but if I was in a school with macs I’d really be investigating this, it would be fairy simple to make a SuperCard project to collect info and post to a blog, or just make a very simple interface for children to blog with.

I am pointing the the MetaWeblogAPI Service in both pivot and wordpress but using the Blogger API, which seems simpler than the MetaWeblogAPI, but I guess if you were serious about this you would use the metaWeblog API or the Movable Type API

I mentioned I had tried the Beta.

Just downloaded the final from ‘Get Google Earth‘

And I though that my terms planning was well under way.

How blogs can make the link and Podcasting: a case study both on an education guardian.co.uk/ micro site quote me. Hopefully this should increase the number of comments the children’s blogs are getting. It certainly cheers me up a bit, valadation for afar, just like comments on the children’s blogs.

When I am not eating, drinking, visiting updating webpages or walking along the canal in the mirk, I have be mostly browsing and avoiding writing 7 things(I’ll try this soon David).

Interesting stuff I’ve found:

retrievr – search by sketch via Tim Lauer

Weblogg-ed Tech Tools For Learning links to a nice pdf.

Tools for the TEKS: podcasting intro

another podcasting intro

A ton of posts at: 2 Cents Worth almost made me comment, but I am too far into the holidays to think that much.

And I have managed to switch my browser habit to a Vienna one for reading blogs.

All this means I am avoiding a wee bit of assessment I have to do before Monday.

Found a few Sandaig mentions too:

Sandaig got a mention in the “Podcasts for Educators” Weblog Highlights from 2005 where they play a snippet from our podcast along with some other school podcasts.

Anne Davis: What’s going on inside your head? says I seem to be spending a lot of time in Scotland lately. Really good things are happening there. which should be encouraging for us scot-edu-blog folk.