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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iPad stand by tim_d
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License

I was pretty impressed with the iPad 2 which was launched this week. Some nice new features and the speed bumps especially in JavaScript sound good.

I’ve continued to test an iPad and this week I spent a wee bit of time using it to access glow. I’ve talked to a few pupils who access glow at home using an ipod touch, and have occasionally used my iPhone, but find it a bit of a strain on the eyes (The pupils I’ve talked to don’t seem to have the same problem).

On an iPad Glow works pretty well. The iPads limitation on now allowing file (picture) uploads in the browser is a bit of a draw back but a lot of the other feature are fine. Editing webparts works as well as it does on Safari on a mac. The text editor continues to frustrate me but I am resigned to avoiding it use by now.

I successfully posted to my glow blog: iPad Glow blogging without trouble. Again I could not upload photos, but it is easy to workaround using flickr, I used my flickr CC search toy which did the job and sorted the attribution.

The WYSIWYG editor did not work, but I was please to see that the html editor respected line breaks, adding paragraphs. typing <p> with an iPad is a bit slow.

I also tried using the iPad to edit a wiki page. Again WYSIWYG was turned off and this time there was no auto paragraphing. Again I could paste in the embed code for a flickr photo. The font size was a wee bit small for me, but would be fine for most youngsters.

What it would be nice to see would be support for the MetaWeblog API in glow blogs, this would allow the use of various apps to post to a glow blog. I guess it is hard to enable this due to the way glow accounts are matched to wordpress ones through shibboleth, if RM can manage this it would be make glow blogs a powerful tool for mobile learning.

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Tweets 666

I am having the devil of a job keeping up with things recently. My RSS reader is bloated and twitter is streaming past far too quickly for me to keep up. I am not spending enough time on twitter to keep up with the folk I know best and have just grasped at a couple of things in the flow that look really interesting.

purpos/ed

purpos/ed is:

a non-partisan, location-independent organization aiming to kickstart a debate around the question: What’s the purpose of education? With a 3-year plan, a series of campaigns, and a weekly newsletter we aim to empower people to get involved and make a difference in their neighbourhood, area and country.

and has started with a stream of 500 word blogs posts form all sorts of educators as of now there are 16 posts with more to come. Lots of interesting food for thought and I’ve not manage to read even half of the 8000 words published so far. The posts are published on the users own blogs, which is in some ways a pity as we cant read them all on one RSS feed (AFAIK).

Primary Blogging on the BBC

I caught this just after it had been on TV. some great publicity for blogging in the primary school. I should have noticed this as I have followed the blog provider John Sutton (hgjohn) on Twitter for a long time. luckly the video is on youtube and the event is well covered in The day the nation took notice of Primary Blogging!. I hope that title is true. Various folk have been pushing blogging in the classroom for a long time now, it would be nice for it to hit the consciousness of more teachers.

I wonder what else I’ve been missing…

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Republished due to a wee bit of bother with the backend of my blog.

At the weekend Robert added a new feature to ScotsEduBlogs: ScotEduBlogs Professional

ScotsEduBlogs exists to help educational bloggers across Scotland to find each other and to talk to each other.

It has been created by members of the blogging community, and is kept up-to-date by its users (that means you!), who can add blogs and tag blogs.

It also allows anyone to keep up with what is being said across all Scottish educational blogs at a glance.

You alway could subscribe to a set of blogs via ScotsEduBlogs RSS feature, for example ScotEduBlogs tagged glowscotland or physics but these are RSS feeds. Now there is a page for professional blog posts, separate from class, pupil or teaching blogs. This could be used for cpd or just to keep an eye on other teacher/consultant/whatever blogs. If you visit SEB less frequently you will be able to see the ‘professional’ posts less chance of them being buried by class blog posts.

Recently with twitter coming to the fore as a way of keeping up with online community there have been new Scots Educational bloggers who have not added their blog to SEB now might be a good time to do so. If you do and you consider yourself an educational professional be sure to tag your blog Professional.

Sebbloglisting

Glow Blogs

There has been an influx of new blogs since glow has added blogging to its toolset. Unfortunately the glow blogs rss feeds do not play nicely with ScotEdublogs. They don’t play with glows own xml web part either.

There is a workaround, if you use FeedBurner to republish your RSS feed you can use that feed in ScotEdublogs. Feedburner is a google service now, you need to have a gmail account. You visit Feedburner sign in and fill in your RSS feed address.

Feedburner 1

Your RSS url will be the url of your blog with /feed tacked on the end, for example my test glow blog’s url is:

https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/nl/JohnJohnston/

So its RSS feed is

https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/nl/JohnJohnston/feed/

After I put it into Feedburner I get a feedburner URL for the feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/org/NCnY

This last I can use to add my Blog to ScotEduBlogs:

add_a_blog

If you are a ScotsEduBlogger please think about adding your blog to ScotsEduBlogs and remember to tag it Professional if that cap fits.

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Glow has added wikis to it list of features.

What is a wiki? (from wikipedia):

A wiki is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. The collaborative encyclopaedia Wikipedia is one of the best-known wikis.

Examples of wikis edited by pupils( not glow ones):

  1. australiatopic
  2. A Broken World
  3. Year 7 Mathex
  4. Sandaig Primary Wiki

Background on using wikis, blog posts by Neil Winton (Perth Acedemy):

  1. SLF08 – Wikis Part 1
  2. SLF08 – Wikis Part 2

Example of wikis used by teachers to share resources ( not glow ones):

Sample Glow Wiki with information on wikis which you are free to edit (glow logon required)

Wiki category of Glow Help blog

The Glow folk have started a Scotland Schools Wiki

“Over time we hope that this wiki will build into a ‘Domesday Book’ of schools in Scotland in the 21st century.”

Any glow user can add pages for their school and edit pages

Nice things about wikis:

  • collaboration
  • tracking of edits you can see you did what
  • easy to roll back to previous version is someone makes a mistake.

Best thing about glow wikis: Much easier than glow pages to edit, think a Text Editor that works.

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Climate Change: information and resources for primary schools in Scotland a new site from LTS which looks great.

The purpose of this online resource is to provide practitioners from early level onwards with high-quality, accurate and topical resources to help them teach about climate change within Curriculum for Excellence.

Information, new and resources. The resources include creative commons images and lots of video with embed codes:

The videos can be viewed online or downloaded in different formats. Linked to the Sustainable Development Glow Group the resources don’t seem to require a glow login.

The only thing I couldn’t find was information to credit the Creative Commons Images as requested on the site. The images are great and could be used for discussion, stimulation and illustration not only of weather topics but for creative writing.

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rusty chain by shoothead
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

It has been a relatively long time since I posted here so I though I’d share some interesting looking things:

HiJack

is a hardware/software platform for creating cubic-inch sensor peripherals for the mobile phone. HiJack devices harvest power and use bandwidth from the mobile phone’s headset interface. The HiJack platform enables a new class of small and cheap phone-centric sensor peripherals that support plug-and-play operation. HiJack has been tested with the iPhone 3G/3GS/4G, iPod Touch, and iPad devices.

So it looks like this could be useful for all sorts of data collection on an iPod Touch or iPad.

29/365 (IPAD) by Jesus Belzunce
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

Fraser Speirs – Blog – How the iPad Wants to be Used Fraiser speaks with a ton of authority:

The iPad is an intensely personal device. In its design intent it is, truly, much more like a “big iPhone” than a “small laptop”. The iPad isn’t something you pass around. It’s not really designed to be a “resource” that many people take advantage of. It’s designed to be owned, configured to your taste, invested in and curated.

and I suspect he has hit this and many other nails on the head, but perhaps there are other models of use that are worth exploring. Certainly the iPad I am testing at work is an easy thing for my wife or daughter to grab for a quick wikipedia search. iPads also seem to me quite happy to be used for communal reading/watching. Given current economic climates I think we need to keep looking at these devices even if we are not in a position to implement cultural and institutional change. Although the optimal use of iPads may be as a personal device we need to keep our eyes open for other possibilities.

Locally the Glencairn iPod touch trial from last session got a nice write up in Nice touch: iPod device educates pupils subtly – Primary – TES Connect Update 2018 broken link, but found here.

I like the look of the iRig Mic which was posted to the UK ADE mail list. Not for sale yet.

I now seem to have downloaded well over 300 apps for iphone/ipod touch/iPad and need t ostart really thinking about what I want to carry in my pocket. But I just keep seeing things I want to try. The latest iPad App I’ve downloaded in Logo Draw. A free, add supported app for simple Logo programming on the iPad.

Logo Draw

I’ve always had a soft spot for Logo, even trying to make my own teaching toy. This one seems pretty straightforward, the sort of thing I can imagine a small group of children working on?