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traditional long form content: a post with an explicit title and body

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I’ve been aware of Radiowaves for a long time, it was one of the inspirations for Radio Sandaig and started me podcasting. I have not followed the development of the site with a great deal of attention but have been aware that it has been evolving in interesting ways. This is what they say about themselves:

Radiowaves is the social learning environment that provides social media for education. It enables schools to create and safely share videos, podcasts and blogs. With a free Radiowaves website you can easily start school blogging, join national campaigns and develop digital literacy skills.
…
Over 50,000 pupils use Radiowaves regularly to broadcast their school podcasts and videos to friends and family via the safe social network.

I’ve also met Mark Riches CEO at Radiowaves (and founding director of NUMU which looks interesting too) a few times over the years and he talked about RadioWaves on EDUtalk at BETT. At that point he told me that they were working on an iOS app and I asked him to let me know when it came out. On Friday he did. I am really impressed with this free app.

I’ve not really got my head round the Radiowaves site, its features and how teacher and pupils sites work together, but I love the app and though it worth posting some information about it.

You can get a free account at Radiowaves, this allows unlimited blogging for a school but you are limited to 30 minutes of audio and video. I created a free account to test this app. I didn’t read any of the help or explanations either in the app or online, just clicked around.

Makewaves

Makewaves 1

The app is called Makewaves (iTunes link) and is free. It runs on an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad. On the ipad it runs as an iphone sized app but can be used at 2x size to fill the screen.

I really like the look and feel of this application. Simple and straightforward.A lot of recent apps that I’ve downloaded seem to be simpler and cleaner looking, less 3d drop shadows and gradients, more space and less colour.

The app is split into 5 main sections accessed through the toolbar along the bottom:MakeWaves, Buzz, Post, My Stuff and Settings.

The MakeWaves screens shows three streams of posts from the site, primary, secondary and Things to Do. Clicking on thumbnails lets you access the content on the app.

The section I was really interested in was the Post one, but before I went there I need to visit the Settings and add my account details, this was straightforward although I didn’t notice the setting for default item which was story rather than blog. I am still not too sure of the difference between the two.

Makewaves 2

As soon as I saw the Post screen I liked it. 4 simple buttons at the top to upload media, Pictures from the camera roll, video, audio and the camera. The video button lets you choose from the camera roll or take a new video.

In seconds I had taken screenshot, used the Photo button to choose it, written a line of text and posted it.

I followed by testing the audio button, the app lets you record a sound and upload it, again a very straightforward process.

I then tested Video, and used an iPad and iPod Touch as well. All preformed beautifully.

Later on I used 3g to post a short audio file from outside. It worked a treat, uploading quickly.

An interesting feature of the app and radiowaves generally is the teacher approval. I was acting, I think, as both teacher and pupil so had to approve my own posts. The process is pretty simple on the radiowaves site and there is a in app purchase (£1.49) that lets you approve your pupils on the Buzz screen.

The My Stuff screen gives you a view of your stories and blogs, lets yuo know the ones that are still awaiting approval and the work of others in your station. You can also see if anyone liked your work.

The setting screen is straightforward, the place you can log in, easy too to log out and allow the same device to be used by more than one pupil.

I am extremely impressed with this app. It is the first one I have seen that allows posting of images, video and sound. (When I saw the posterous app I immediately put in a feature request for audio recording).

The application, when used on an iphone or ipod touch, is not built for long form blogging, but it is ideal for the much more interesting, in my opinion, mobile and group publishing of rich media. This is done in a way that minimises the technical barriers allowing users to concentrate on digital storytelling.

This could be an amazing tool for trip blogging. It should even be possible to have, say, several ipod touch out on a trip using one iphone’s tethering to allow mobile blogging by a group.

Finally having struggled and mostly failed to find a simple mobile blogging method for glow blogs it would be great to have a similar app in he new glow.

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HyperCard a tool so beautiful it still makes me cry. Although I say “used”… Sam, Richard, Kris and Stephen were our proper programmers… I tended to join in excitedly, but mainly made black & white graphics or icons.

By 1997 we’d made what you’d call a CMS ( Content Management System ) in HyperCard. It made making web sites easy. So easy that school kids did it, in their Mosaic browsers and even won awards. I remember one class project that was a site about World War II, that just grew and grew. You could start to see what all the fuss about HyperText was

from: Prograph – Back in the Day | Tom Smith’s: theOTHERblog Gone so archive link

Tom Smith’s post is mostly about Prograph, which I know nothing about. I still use SuperCard, a HyperCard clone, most days.

HyperCard keeps popping up in unexpected places. It is the reason I got interested in ICT (other than producing worksheets that pupils could actually read in the age of bandas).

The idea of a “Programming for Poets” application is still very attractive. There have been a few tries, TileStack was an attempt to recreate HyperCard online with JavaScript. I still wonder why Apple, 1. abandoned HyperCard and 2. have not made a HyperCard for either OSX or iOS. Maybe this Apple Patents A Tool Allowing Non-Developers To Build Apps | TechCrunch will come to fruition.

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A few days ago I noticed that Alan Levine is mashing up ds106 assignments withThe ds106 Remix Machine. This, briefly, allows you to take an assignment from DS106 and add a filter. Shades of John Davit’s Learning Event Generators.

For example this remix: stop frame photography [remixed]: Uncle Bob — Remix Machine takes this original assignment stop frame photography and adds this remix card:

Uncle bob Remix

Use Existing Media

Remix is using the created media of others – it does not count as a remix if you use your own assignment work. As raw material for your remix, use media from examples created by other ds106 participants for this assignment.

I’ve not ds106ed for a while so, just for fun (is there another reason?), I took one of a series of images from here: ds106: Stop frame photography by Rowan Peter and did this:

Cogmole

Mole photo from Mole Flickr Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

This could be a lot better, but it didn’t take long. I am tempted to dust off a copy of flash and make a wack a ds106 mole game;-).

DS106 has been looking very interesting of late, especially the Kickstarter project which has gathered a pile of money for developing DS106 in lots of interesting ways. (I am in for a t-shirt;-)). This looks like making ds106 increasingly interesting as time goes on.

Next time ds106 runs I am going to give it another shot, set up wordpress blog to make my tagging work a bit better. and have some more fun.

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Flickr cc Picmonkey

Every so often something nice happens:

Which made me look again at the flickr CC search toy. A while back I posted about Picnik closing and then about PicMonkey which is a picnik replacement. The nice folk at PicMonkey let me know that the picmonky API is the same as the picnic one, so I thought I’d swap them out. As you can see from the screenshot, if the images found in the flickr CC search toy allow editing (ie NoDerivs is not in the License) there is a link to edit the picture in PicMonkey. I’ve changed the way this works so that PicMonkey will load the medium sized photo with the attribution stamped on it, rather than the original flickr image. Before I was expecting pupils to be able to add the attribution themselves if editing the picture.

I’ve also added a checkbox to the search form to only search for pictures you can edit.

The code behind this, php and javascript is a very messy affair. I intend to work thorough the whole thing sometime and make it more efficient etc.

If you have ideas of how this could be more useful to primary aged pupils please let me know.

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Last Sunday in the Observer I was reading Why all our kids should be taught how to code and have been following with great interest the boos by Alan O’Donohoe (teknoteacher) Submitted to EDUtalk
I am also interested in the difference between digital literacy/ fluency and coding beautifuly described by Josie Fraser in response to Mr Gove’s surprising enthusiasm for coding SocialTech: Computer Science is not Digital Literacy:

It’s dismaying then, to see in a week where we are seeing a huge move forward in the promotion of technology and a fresh look at how ICT as a subject area is designed and implemented in schools, to see digital literacy being used as an interchangeable term for computer science skills.

With the introduction of iPads into the mix as a really powerful tool for curricular ict. I am also intrigued by the tension between this back to programming and the use of ict to support learning. Brief visits to the primary classes piloting 1-2-1 have been exciting and gone a long way to convincing me that this is an important direction for ict in education.
Although I hope the iPads are only for consumption myth has been put to bed I’ve been wondering if there are ways they can support programming in education. It has often been pointed out that the reluctance of Apple to allow apps that produce executable code will hinder their use for coding.
(As a primary teacher this is well out of my depth or experience but fun as a sort of thought experiment.)
Some of the efforts to enthuse pupils and others in coding have started with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. (Hackasaurus and the like links). I though that might be a good place to start.
photoI’ve blogged before about Textastic – Text, Code and Markup Editor with Syntax Highlighting – FTP, SFTP, Dropbox – for iPad, the web page title says most of it.

a challenge of sorts

I though I’d give it a go and create a page or two with some sort of JavaScript stuff. To keep things nice and simple I thought I’d use the Dropbox functionality to publish the pages created to my Dropbox public folder. In a teaching situation this would avoiding FTP uploading.

templates and images

The first nice thing I noticed was that textastic supplies a few basic html templates which gets you off to a nice start. I created a folder in textastic then some files. Next I clicked on the globe to access my Dropbox. You see a listing of a local folder and one in Dropbox it is simple to transfer files back and forth. You can also pull images in from Dropbox to the textastic folder if you want to added images to your web page. This means a trip to the Dropbox app to add photos to that folder from the iPad photos.
I could not find an app on my iPad that would let me resize images where I could see pixels rather than manipulating with my fingers, but I am sure such an app exists.

auto complete

Textastic supports autocomplete in a TextMate like way type a < and say a p it pops a list of possible tags, selecte one and it is completed. The app then put the cursor in a good position, eg between the opening and closing tag of a paragraph to ready to type in the first parameter of a link. With more complex tags it wil select the first edit then tab through the other section indicated by a wee triangle:


update: the first image I uploaded Looked ok on the iPad but was unreadable on my desktop. I’ve replaced it. Image editing for blogging is a bit of a challenge on the iPad, but I am learning.
It was pretty simple to create a HTML page and link it to a CSS file in the same folder in textastic, easy to publish both to Dropbox. Textastic allows you to locally preview and it is easy enough to switch to Safari too.

JavaScript challenge

Since I know little JavaScript this should be a fairy realistic test of the iPad as a tool to learn coding. I decided to try assignment 3 from Mashups: Remixing the Web a course from New York University. The assignment was to create a lolcats memory game. I decided to make one with Flickr images. There are a few good hints in the assignment but I need to do a few things: look up JavaScript references on the web, preview and debug. Reference was easy to do by switching to safari and searching. Textastic supports preview and firebug. I also turned on the safari debug console. Textastic supports auto complete for JavaScript too.
The result is not a polished or complex piece of work, but I’ve stretched myself a wee bit. And managed to stick to the iPad throughout.

update a couple of tweets from @fraserspeirs who will know a lot more about this than me:


– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Crow Rd,Glasgow,United Kingdom

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Tell a story using nothing but sound effects. There can be no verbal communication, only sound effects. Use at least five different sounds that you find online. The story can be no longer than 90 seconds.

When I was working out what to do with this one I seemed to have missed sound effects and no longer than 90 seconds.

This is an idealised walk combining sounds I’ve recorded over the last year or two when walking, some as audioboos.

Starting with traffic, there is bird song & rooks, footsteps through some wet ground, ducks, footsteps on a rocky path, a raven, a hill burn (small stream) finishing with the sound of one lark. It is mostly pretty quiet. it is also about 5 minutes long.

Five minutes of footsteps and tweets

This is as noted above a lot longer than the 90 seconds limit. While this particular example may not hold a listener for 5 minutes I do think that longer audio without speech has its place. Last year when I went to Field Recording at the Scottish Music Centre I noted:

what I’d take away was the quality of listening shown by the audience & presenters. The time taken. Timothy Cooper’s Blast beach gave plenty of time to look at the images: audio can be slower. I am thinking again about Ian Rawes’ “the ravenous eye and the patient ear”, Tim Nunn’s theatre performances in the dark.

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Last week I was in a class doing another setup a blog/eportfolio session using Glow blogs. The process is a bit long winded due to the way glow blogs are set up. Usually there is little time to do much more than set them up and get the pupils to do a quick test post. I usually just get pupils to use a bit of clipart to show tem how to add an image. O this occasion there was a fair mix of machines and operation systems in the room and not all had clip art. I decided to use A flickr CC search toy to let the pupil download photos with attribution stamped on. This worked fine, but there was a little confusion about naming saved files, the file name suggested is stamp.php.jpg as the images, with attribution, are generated on the fly.

This weekend I had a quick google to see if I could find out how this can be improved. I am now using:

header('Content-Disposition: inline; filename='. $title .'.jpg' );

To give the files a title derived from the flickr image title. I also found I could cause the image to be downloaded by using Content-Disposition: attachment but decided against that at the moment. Now when pupils right click on an image they should see something like this:

Flickrcc File Dialog

Another alternative would be to show the image on a page with instructions on right clicking to get the save dialog. Again I’ve not implemented that either.

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Make a custom map using Google Maps.

Use Google Maps to create your own custom map that includes photographs of places.

I’ve been playing with google maps and the google maps api for a while so was please t osee some familiar territory for this Assignment.

This afternoon Dorothy, my wife, and I took a walk round Ardinning Loch, we do this nearly every week often twice a week in the summer, It is a short walk that is always interesting. Ardinning is a SWT reserve.

I used Trails on my phone to record a kml and gps track. The kml file was imported int oa new google map. I uploaded the photos it was then just a matter of dropping on some pins, filling in a title and pasting in the url to the image file.


View Ardinning in a larger map

Another approach

Over the last few year I’ve played with developing a workflow for creating maps like this using the GoogleMaps API. For this I use SuperCard, a mac scripting application. The project allows me to import a gpx file exported from Trails, get exif data for some pictures, iPhone photos have location data imbedded (It also lets me add locations to other pictures by comparing the time taken with the gps file). It then exports a gpx file which I upload to this website and a php file created a map.

Here is the Ardinning Walk map 120303 Ardinning and a whole set of Mapped Walks. In my opinion this has a few advantages over using google maps, you can embed audio & video, and the popup boxes link in sequence. It is also a faster to produce. Obviously it has the disadvantage of being a wee bit trickier to set up.

I’ve a fair number of blog posts going into this in a bit more detail: tagged googlemaps.

But what is it good for?

I think these sort of maps add another dimension to telling a story or presenting information. helping to tell a story in space as well as time. I can see this being incorporated into all sorts of class room projects, either for mapping learning experiences or creating fictional maps. This one The Kidnapped Trail – Google Maps is a great example of the possibilities.

A little bit of DS106

It loks like I can kill two birds here: Google Maps Story — MISSION: DS106

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Dropmark Gifanimation

Dropmark is a nice way to collect and share stuff, were stuff can be webpages, images, files, text, links etc. Each piece of stuff is thumb-nailed. Clicking on a thumbnail opens it on the screen and you can arrow-key through the collection. collections can be private, public or shared. You can collaborated with others.

You have 250 MB free storage space. There is a safari extension (and firefox add-on) that opens a side bar on a webpage and allows you to drag and drop urls (where the whole page is captured), images or blocks of text. You can drag files from your desktop too.

Clicking on the thumbnail above will take you to a quick example Gif Animation is a mix of images from the web, webpages and files from my desktop. EDUhack is a collection of links.

Video Test is a mix of Vimeo and Youtube videos, dragging the url dropmark thumbnails the videos and clicking on the thumb plays them browsers window size.

Using dropmarks is pretty intuitive, but there are plenty of written and video instructions on Dropmark®.

Finally each collection has an RSS feed which mean you could quickly put together a podcast of disparate materials. and there is an API in the works.