iPodagogy

Staff blog for the Gracemount High School iPod project.

http://ghsipods.blogspot.com/

via Ewan‘s side bar.

Feeling green.

Trying to add the feed for ToProbationAndBeyond to the Scottish Education Blogs SuprGul feed and I get this:

I am finding my lilina test a lot more useful than Suprglu

I guess Suprglu is really designed for pulling a few feeds from the different services of one person rather than a mini aggregator.

If you try my lilina let me know if it works for you.

Great comment on Getting Heard by a teacher on the benefits of blogging

Getting Heard is an exciting project by Anne Davis linked from Anne’s post Turned a corner! where she talks about inappropriate comments on student Keithel’s Blog.

Keithel’s Blog turns out to be very interesting but one of the comments I read was way over my line.

Secondary school is obviously a different environment than primary, I wouldn’t even start a conversation with children on some of this stuff in my class (We do talk about comments). I am rethinking my position on moderation, again.

At the moment I pre moderate the posts by my class, not heavily, just a quick spell and sense check, for the same reasons as I would make suggestions and corrections to a piece of work that was going on the wall.

I post moderate comments, (I’ve very rarely had to remove anything, mostly spam) we want to encourage comments which moderation might discourage. I check comments several times a day, but if we started getting the kind of comment Keithel received I’d move to pre-moderating comments pretty quickly.

The whole idea of opening a primary classroom to the world is powerful and scary, I really want blogs to be in my classroom for all the reasons in the comment lined above, to keep using them I need to keep them a safe place for 10 year olds. If blogs are going to spread to other classrooms and maybe teachers who don’t spend the early hours reading blogs they need to be demonstrably safe places.

This is a wee demo

Looks like the Poetry Pizzeria which hosts the Keepers Project had a face lift and more project could be in the pipeline. I’ll look forward to the new ones, our Keepers poem for National Poetry Day October 2005 is one of the most rewarding thing we have done online so far.

At the Naace conference last week a few folk mentioned using an iRiver iFP 790 to record podcasts. i think they are out of production, amazon uk has a second hand one for £60.

I was pleasantly surprised to find them at my local argos for £39.99.

First test the recording seems pretty good even without an external mic. Interface is pretty poor compared to an ipod, way too small.

Found the software for mac too: iRiver Music Manager for Mac. For some reason the iRiver does not mount as a disk.

I am not sure the Scottish Education Blogs on Suprglu is all that useful. Seems to list all the entries for one day from one blog at once, so a prolific blogger pushes everyone else off the front page. Worse it doesn’t seem to handle typepad feeds like:

http://pienews.blogs.com/pieblog/index.rdf

properly, giving all the entries the date of the latest one. I am not sure if it handles the atom feeds in a better way.

so I am testing lilina

s a simple but powerful news aggregator written in PHP. No database is needed, RSS/ATOM parsing is done by the excelent MagpieRSS library (it is included, no additional installation needed). It features feed auto-discovery and an easy-to-use interface.

This seems a handier way to look at the scot-ed-blogs, I am testing these scot-edu-blog feeds, on a box in my living room at the moment(this may not be accessible from everywhere). I don’t think lilina will do anything interesting with flickr feeds, but seems a quick and simple way to set up an aggregator.

Back in September some of he children in primary six posted an entry on a new popular hobby. There was a wee spelling mistake on the post, but it was a common one. This has lead google to rank the entry on the first page leading to 54 comments on the post! I am not putting the title in here for fear of something similar happening.

I mentioned a poem read by Peter Ford in Ewan‘s podcast. it turns out is is by Taylor Mali (via Ewan’s post):

What Teachers Make

If you are a teacher that should have made you feel a bit better.

Poem in MP3 Format and in Real Media format.

edublogsPodcast 5: Peter Ford at ECML Ewan podcasts Peter Ford’s workshop. Took me 3 journeys to listen to the whole lot (over an hour long). Just when I was thinking listening to podcasts of presentations took to much time and were of poor quality, this changes my mind.

I was laughing like a manic at Peter’s poem of what the teacher replies to the lawyer. Got some strange looks walking along the road. Apart for the fun the podcast is full of great stuff affirming teachers and blogging.

The big problem with podcasts of this length is that you can’t quite remember all the good bits well enough to quote, but Ewan blogged them for us:

Peter Ford at Weblogs in Education, ECML, Graz

Lots of other interesting reports from Ewan to day and more podcasts.

Peter Ford is of course the organiser of the The Keepers Poetry Project and Ewan is the midwife of our offshoot The Dream Dragon.