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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Radiosandaig 144

A couple of weeks ago I was delighted to get a series of email from some ex-pupils. They were back at Sandaig Primary for some work experience. These pupils had been part of the original Radio Sandaig team and two of used the nom de guerre’s of ‘Thelma and Louise’ when they visited, kidnapped Sandy the Otter and took him to the Be Very Afraid event at Bafta in London. (details at Radio Sandaig @ Be Very Afraid).

As part of their work experience the pupils were tasked (tasked themselves?) with restarting Radio Sandaig and helping with blogging at Sandaig Otters. They had a few questions about GarageBand, I think they used Audacity, and suchlike.

The fruit of their hard work (or fun?) has now been published on Radio Sandaig with some new young voices taking over. I feel slightly jealous that I am not part of Radio Sandaig any more and delighted that it has kicked off again.

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Thanks to Katie Barrowman from LTS for the Marretech files from the Glow Meet. The video from the Glow Meet was a lot better than the FlashMeet, there is a section in the middle that is missing as the network went down. The edit is basic but hopefully this will be of interest.

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On Tuesday I was at TeachMeet Falkirk_09, we had a great night. As usual I was amazed at the amount of work put in by the organisers lead by Margaret Vass and folk from Falkirk.

This time I had the honour of MCing the meet. This was particularly nice as I was not involved in all of the hard work. It did mean that I didn’t really fully concentrate on what the presenters were saying, as I was trying to thing about what I was doing and saying. I did gain a lot of great ideas form the presenters and am currently working my way through the FlashMeeting audio. It is hard to pick out any particular presentations, but for me, Nick‘s Webcam desktop visualiser (pictured above) embodies the DIY aspects to TeachMeet.

Margaret had asked me to talk a wee bit about how TeachMeet started, on listening to the meet I realise that I might not have been to clear or informative, concentrating more on the fun and Guinness rather that the principles. I hope to remedy that in a blog post soon.

In the run up to Falkirk there was some discussion about the ‘rules’ of TeachMeet and they were tweeked a little. As I prepared to talk about the history of TeachMeet I realised that the rules are not really rules. There is a perception that these are fixed, but over the early TeachMeets at least they changed to fit the event. A while back John Connell posted Time For A TeachMeet Alternative? and generated a lot of discussion (Be sure to read TeachMeet Alternatives: follow up on John’s blog too). As TeachMeets are organised by whoever has the energy and good will it doesn’t really matter if you don’t like the format: you can change it. The power of TeachMeets is not, for me, the format but the proof that people can organise and share in a way that is not top down.

As is now customery with TeachMeets the meet rippled out:

I hope that most of the presenters will post details, or links to their presentations. I also am hoping that a few folk might use edutalk to podcast a reflection or review of the event.

I am going to go and post these links to the wiki, please do the same for any others or leave a comment (or tweet me) here and I’ll do it.

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Recently I’ve been doing a bit of stop motion animation, cpd for staff and in the classroom. Using a variety of software: SAM animation, FrameByFrame and I Can Animate. Recently I spotted iMotion for the iPhone. This app makes stop motion and time laps videos on your iphone. It will export via email or to your photo library. It seems to work fine on an iPhone g3 without the S.

T“>

The app can record on click or automatically at intervals, I’ve tried both and it seems easier to use auto. It is quite hard to keep the iPhone still when clicking. setting it to 10 second delay gives you time to move your cast about. A good mount for the iPhone would help. Maybe a gorrilapod?

iMotion give you options to save in different sizes: 80 x 170, 160 x 214 or 320 x 247 and exports to mp4 or a set of images. There is an option to publish on the iMotion blog where you can see some more examples.

While I would not think of getting iPhones to use in class just for the ability to animate, it could be a useful feature if you are already using iPhones in class. especially at the price of 59p

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4edutalk screen

After the success of SLFtalk David and I have been chatting about how to take the idea forward. It seemed a good idea to continue to provide educators the opportunity to post short podcasts with as low a technical barrier as possible. David has pushed this on by getting the edutalk.info domain name and applying it to a new posterous site we have spent a bit of time preparing the site, writing instructions et and yesterday David posted a long tweet:

The EDUtalk project launches with a brief Flashmeeting on Monday at 8.30pm. Following on from the success of SLFtalk, EDUtalk is a space for educators to publish digital audio content via mobile devices. DM me or @johnjohnston for the Flashmeeting URL and please follow @EDUtalkr

David also tweeted:

EDUtalk launches on Monday with FMeet + competition. It’s a space for educators to publish audio using mobile tech (like SLFtalk) @EDUtalkr

So it looks like we are ready to. The idea follows the SLFtalk pattern, folk can record and send audio by a variety of methods to the site; audioBoo, gabcast, mailing mp3s direct from a phone or iPhone. Instructions are on the site, liked from the sidebar. This time we have added Skype recordings with Pamela into the mix and ipadio. Quite a few people asked for ipadio support in SLFtalk but it was not possible at that time.

Ipadio Icon

Last week I did a bit of testing with ipadio and found it didn’t have a RSS feed for specific tags (this is how we push audioBoo onto the site), but I did get a nice welcome email for ipdaio. I replied to this suggesting the feature, and within a day or two the developers had added it! You can now record an ipadio phlog tag it EDUtalk and it will turn up on edutalk.info. As with posterous helping out by adding to their API I continue to be very pleasantly surprised with how developers provide us with free products and then alter them on request.

I’ve also improved my system for creating posts from audioBoo and ipadio, by changing the html a bit we now ebed the audioBoo and ipadio players and by using feedburner the audio will be in the RSS feed.

I am very excited about the project, listening to the audio from SLFtalk provided a different dimension to reading blogs or watch video recordings. I hope other people are too. Anyone interested is invited to the flashmeeting (Just DM me or David for a link) and to start submitting audio next week you ght even win a prize.

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A short while ago I wrote about using JavaScript in glow: Glow Kludges and noted that Fraser Davidson had briefly showed me his use of XSL in glow. I had hoped to catch up with Fraser to find out more about this, but have not managed to yet. He had mentioned that it should be possible to combine Javascript with the pages produced from xml (say a rss feed) and styled with XSL.

This weekend I was looking at this again, due to the horrible weather, and started googling XSL, while I’ve not got a real(any) understand of XSL I have managed to do my usual copy, paste & mangle and got some interesting results. I was able to take various rss feeds, format them with XSL and then insert media players with JavaScript. I don’t really know enough to understand this, but have made a wee screencast to some of the things I’ve been playing with.

One tip I do have for editing xml and xsl in glow is not to use the glow interface, just set links to your XML (and optionally XSL) in the XML webpart. These file then can be edited and updated without going into the glow ‘modify shared page stuff’ trying to edit the xml or xsl in Safari or firefox in a tiny text box is a pain.

I’d be interested in working with other glow folk to see where this could go, I wonder if a national group could be set up for discussion and testing.

It does make me wonder why these potentially powerful techniques have not been explained or documented by LTS or RM they would have answered many of the folk who were disappointed by lack of RSS support in glow.

The screencast is pretty rough, more of a thinking aloud one while looking at the screen than a planned out video, but I’d be keen to know what you think about this.

Original video replaced by vimeo copy (11.07.2011)

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Glow will soon support user blogs and wikis, allowing pupils and classes to create web pages and online diaries to showcase their work to other schools across Scotland. Promoting individualised learning and collaboration, this will be the first time Scotland has had access to a national education blog and wiki service.

via ltsblogs.org.uk

This sounds like the best glow news I have heard

Posted via web from enviable stuff

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Slftalk Screen

I’ve had a bit of time to think about David Noble and my experiment at the Scottish Learning festival. I blogged about the preparation and have been thinking about the actual event for a while.

SLFtalk was an experiment for using posterous to aggregate short audio reports from mobile devices at the Scottish Learning festival.

Over the 2 days of the festival and with a couple of late entries we had 29 posts to SLFtalk from a dozen people. There was a wide range of type of poster and content. We had fairly recently qualified classroom teachers and HMI. The content went from recording of segments of seminars through interviews to reflection. Many of the posts have had more than 400 views. Most of the hits came from the time of the festival and just after.

We had offered several routes into audio publishing and most were used:

  • 15 boos tagged slftalk using audioboo by 5 people
  • 12 files posted directly to posterous by 6 people
  • 2 recordings made on the gabcast.com channel by 2 folk

Obviously all of the the audioboos were made using an iPhone, the posts to posterous were made with several different devices; iphones, a HTC Touch Diamond and desktops.

For myself I intended to use the iPhome Voice Memos app, and just email it in. But I ran over the 2 minutes limit for mailing memos so ended up transferring the audio to my macbook, converting to mp3 (cutting down file size) and posting via email. I think I was the only person using a computer rather than a phone.

No one took us up on the offer to borrow mp4 recorders, Joe Dale did use his iRiver to chat to me at the end of the 2 days and later sent me the file to post to the site.

I think it was well worth offering multiple ways of posting, although audioboo was the most popular, if we had just used that several contributors could not join in.

Technically everything seem to work out fine, the main thing I would change is the way the gabcasts and audioboos were posted to the site. basically I just used the posterous API to send the url of the audio to posterous. This meant that the recording were not enclosed in the RSS feed. I have made a few tests and worked out a workaround, if an actual html link in sent to posterous, eg <a href="path_to_audio_file">Listen</a> and we use feedburner to provide the RSS, feedburner will produce an rss feed with all of the enclosures. The file would also play on an iphone.

From a organisational and technical point of view I really enjoyed working with David on this wee project, but the thing I enjoyed most was listening to the audio, given the background noise and less than ideal recording conditions I was surprised at how engaging they were, there is something special about listening to the human voice with all the extra information the signal carries over reading a text.

I think we may have discovered an interesting an powerful addition to our community communication toolkit and hope this concept can be taken forward and more widely used. I would be interested in hearing more from others who used or listen to the podcasts and getting ideas of how to improve the system.

Posted via email from John’s posterous

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Commentcompare

There has been a fair bit of comment recently on how twitter is taking over from blogging and commenting on blogs. My own blog has never had a high number of comments, but the number has dropped. Recently I’ve noticed that posts are tweeted and retweeted, but not commented on.

Every so often I try to up my own commenting, without posting ‘me too’ or suchlike and to keep track of the comments I make. In the past I’ve used coComment, but found it did not always work for me and sometimes reports posts have new comments when they do not. I’ve also just bookmarked the posts I comment on in my browser, but that gets a bit messy and is not portable.

So I’ve come up with the following solution, it uses AppleScript so is a mac only method, but I am sure someone could do, or has done the same sort of thing with greasemonkey for firefox.

It consists of two simple scripts, the first based on one called @review (I think) that I downloaded a few years ago and can’t find a reference to credit. This script takes the current url in Safari and posts it to delicious tagging it with @comment and making it private. The private part is to stop the links showing up in my RSS feed with my other links. The script: @comment.scpt.html is pretty simple, and uses the delicious API.

The second script just retrieves the last 10 links from my delicious tagged @comment, opens a new window in Safari and tabs for each of the links. Again a simple enough script: opencomments.scpt.html. It relies on the private RSS feed supplied by delicious, you can copy yours from the delicious page listing links:

Deliciousrsslinks

Fastscript Grab

I run both of these scripts from FastScripts. FastScripts is a replacement for the mac’s Script menu. It lists scripts, current application at the top, and allows you to add keyboard shortcuts. So my @comment script is invoked with control-alt-command-c which is easy to hit. I just post a comment and hit the key combination, growl notification is built into the script and lets me know if the submission to delicious was successful.

The scripts can be copied and pasted into the Script Editor if you want to use them, all you need to do is add your username and password to both and get the private delicious RSS feed url.

I would be interested in finding other ways of keeping track of conversations, so please let me know if you have a good way.