http://edu.blogs.com/ great blog from Musselburgh Grammar School’s Ewan McIntosh.

I started trying to puttogether something of an introduction to blogging for Edict today, but of course ended up reading blogs. Ewan’s lead me to David Muir‘s blog and to thinking about del.icio.us again, if I am going to write this I am going have to get disconnected.

Radio Sandaig

Our most ambitious project yet. Interviews with children and teachers, News from the school and our Holland trip, ending with a suprise musical item.

Lucy and megan from primary six carried out the bulk of the work, supplimented by News from Emma B and Darren, some Holland reports from various primary sixes and a musical item from primary seven.

We are begining to get the idea with podcasting I think, just need a bit of practice with the software to get the sound quality right. I’ve not really spent much time with audacity, which we use to edit the sound files, so I can’t teach more than the basics.

We have been learning as we go along.

The Children have done most of the scripting, recording and editing, I’ve been trying to keep in the background.

I am not sure if this is the best way to go about it, it might be better to have a more hands on approach. Hopefully next session we can expand the program a bit to include a regular programme and include more children.

Just before we went to Holland, (see the next entry) we tried to have a video conference with some children from De Rank. The were going to be the the Hague with various important people present.

Primary Six practised hard all week. We were trying to get round the language/accent problems by having our presentation simple with a fair bit of artwork and slides on the white board. Our presentation was on our plans for the Holland trip.

Unfortunately after half a dozen rehearsals, the connection did not work.

This is probably the biggest drawback of technology.

Having said that, I suppose the children are getting better and better with presenting, great improvements in use of voice and audience awareness.

This year we blogged our trip: Netherlands 2005

The response from parents has been tremendous, over 60 comments in a week.

The tech and work flow was far from ideal, but well worth the effort.

Workflow went like this, each day we took a bunch of photos. On the bus the children wrote notes in their diaries and I created galleries of the pictures on a laptop. I then typed up some of the notes.

Back at the hotel I took the words and web pages on a pen drive to the manager’s computer, uploaded the galleries and used the types notes to paste into the blog along with links to the photos.

A bit frantic as there was little time to work online.

We had also hoped to podcast but I had really overestimated the time available and underestimated the time needed.

This is a test of the enclosure facility in pivot. If it works we can hopefully podcast next week.

Yesterday I was talking about what we have been doing with our blog to the Glasgow Masterclass group. It seemed to go ok. My fairly brief notes have a gfew good links.

A while back primary six produced some Keepers Poems in response to the The Keepers Poetry Project

We have now started making some of these into flash movies, combining sound text and pictures:

Keepers Movies

The children have been creating the movies in Flash and I though it was worthwhile noting the workflow.

1. The children wrote the original poems on paper as part of their language work.
2. They illustrated them again on paper.
3. These were scanned by a couple of children to jpeg files.
4. We moved the files to another machine on a pen drive and the children resized and saved their images as gif files.
5. The children then recorded the poems on our iPod using a Belkin iPod Voice Recorder, we are doing these a few at a time on a Tuesday morning, the children pop into the music room when it is not being used.
6. At lunchtime on the Tuesday I collect a few children’s sound and image files and copy them onto the computers that have Flash. (the sounds can be edited and exported to MP3s quickly in Audacity.
7. Tuesday afternoon the children create the files.
8. They make a new flash file and place the image on the first layer.
9. They then create another layer, import their sound file and place it on the second layer. They have to add frames to show the whole sound track.
10. They add a third layer for the text. They add a text box with the first line of the poem on the first frame of the text layer. By playing the movie in flash they can see which frame the next lines starts on (in the sound clip), there they add a new keyframe and change the text to the next line of the poem.
11. This is repeated for the third line of the poem. On the last frame they add another keyframe and change the text to the whole poem.
12. I then add a stop() action to that keyframe, the children place a button on the frame and I add a script to go back to the first frame and play.

We have now done this on two Tuesdays the children from the first day supporting the ones on the second. I hope the whole class will have created a movie by the end of this term.

Hopefully they children are learning a bit about layers and frames in the process.