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It has taken me a while to get round to the second post based on a morning at Glencairn primary working on the ipod touch project. In fact the pupils have beat me to it: Comic Twist.

After syncing the ipods I did a wee bit of work with the class on their new apps.

The first app was Comic Twist which allows you to create comics with up to 3 panes a little like Comic Touch, the Comic Life for the ipod/phone. I went for comic touch as it is cheaper that Comic Touch and does 3 panes in a comic.

The second app is i think going to be a great one, it has been sitting in front of my nose for quite while, firstClass. FirstClass is the email and communication systems used in North Lanarkshire Education and I have been rather slow to realise its potential for all sort of things. It is a great way to have discussions, share files etc. I’ve used the mobile client on my iPhone a lot mostly for email, it is amazingly quick even in an area with a very poor mobile connection.

I just had not thought of using it with pupils. The weekend before the iPod touch conference it suddenly dawned on me that we could use it to pass files around the classroom, messaging etc. At the conference the children from the Friezland iPod Project were using firstClass in this way. So when I got to return to Glencairn I synced the iPods with new software and showed the pupils their new firstClass account. We are only using one account for all the ipods to share but the children could easily upload images (created with comic touch) and join in a discussion. The images and discussions can of course be accessed on a desktop or via the web. This makes it very easy to get text images and files onto and off the iPods. We could add movies to a file store in firstClass on the desktop and access it on the touches. We even quickly tested exporting a keynote presentation that some pupils were working on and uploading it, it worked a treat.

Click on the thumbnails to see bigger versions of desktop and iPod views.


I think FirstClass is going to be very useful for working with iPod touches in the classroom.

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Parasync

This is the first of a few posts based on my morning today at Glencairn primary helping with their ipod touch project.

I started syncing and adding a few apps to the iPods. When I had originally set up the ipods with apps it took an age, syncing them two by two to my macbook and I was not looking forward to repeating the exercise. In the meantimne I’ve become a middle man between the Consolarium and a north Lanarkshire school to trial Taptale, this involves LTS lending the school sone ipod touches and a parasync. While we are waiting to get that project up and running I borrowed the parasync to update the Glencairn iPods. It took about 20 minutes to sync all of the iPods. The only glitch was the fact that I had turned of installing apps in the iPods restrictions. Once I had reset them all the update went flawlessly.

A parasync costs about £800 which is probably outside most school budgets in current times, but when weighed agains the time that it takes to sync 20 ipods two by two it is to my mind worth considering. It might be worth several schools owning one together using it for major updates and just recharging the ipods with 4-Port USB Chargers.

I was delighted to see that most of the children had personalised their ‘screensavers’ with drawings, photos and even lunes!

More about the apps I’ve added to the touches soon.

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Recently I’ve been thinking about ipod touches quite a bit. As well as giving some support to the Glencairn ipod project and being the middle man for a wee Consolarium trial of TapTale which will start soon, I am just back from Oldham and Blackpool CLC’s iPodTouch Conference.

The conference was a great success and there is a lot of interesting chatter on the ning site and on Twitter #ipod2010

Last weekend I started playing with an idea for a wee web app. The idea is to provide an interface for searching flickr and creating images combining flickr photos and text. Using only photos that can be adapted and incorporating attribution.

shark_touch_poem

As a sort of proof of concept I made a web app that makes lunes. A Lune is a fixed-form variant haiku created for the English language. It has three words on the first line, five on the second and three on the third. I’ve used lune writing as a classroom activity on several occasions, they are simple and fun to write. (Lune (poetry) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

The web app works like this:

Touch Poem Screens

  1. Pupils load the webpage int oSafari on their ipods and type in a search.
  2. The app retrieves and displays a list of creative commons photos that you are allowed to make derivations of.
  3. Pupils select a photo by clicking on it. This opens the photo with a 3 line form over it.
  4. Pupils type in poem and click Go.
  5. The image and text is sent to the server where it is stamped with the text and attribution and sent back to browser.
  6. Pupil presses on image, save dialog opens and image can be saved to photos.

I am using the phpFlickr to search and GD to stamp the photos

I tried the app out with the Glencairn primary six class on tuesday, we then bumped the photos to my phone, transferred them to a mac and added voice in iMovie: Animal Lunes, all in 90 minutes.

I though the app ran fairly smoothly except for quotes ’ which came back escaped with a slash ’, some text ran off the pictures and the problem with not being able to fix spelling mistakes. I should be able to fix the escapes and hopefully alter the font size to suit the picture width.

Of course the whole thing was put together in an afternoon, the code is rough and the interface rougher. The plan might be to make it a bit more ajaxy and add a few different poem types, proper haiku, kennngs, Cinquains etc. I am wondering if it would be worthwhile developing? Is it too much of a one off to be really useful? I’d love to know what you think?

You can see the webpage in a quick and dirty Lunes Simulator or directly Flickr Lunes.

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Bumping

I’ve just organised (in a loose sense) an iPod touch pilot at Glencairn Primary School. At the North Lanarkshire ICT & Technical Services Centre we have an an ICT Box Scheme – Hi-Tech Kit on Short Term Loan and had originally got 22 iPod touches as part of the scheme. Although schools regularly borrow the other kit on the page no one had asked for the touches, so we decide to do a slightly more formal pilot and asked for classes to volunteer. We wanted a primary class with ? 20 pupils so that the children could feel some sort of ownership for the devices. We had a few volunteers and drew Glencairn out of the hat. The pilot will run from now until Summer.

Last week I spent a couple of days trying to choose some apps, and ended up with 50 odd and a pile of podcasts. Here are the apps: 3D Brain, Angle, Art Envi, Basic Math, Brain Toot Lite, Brain Tuner, Brain Tutor, Bump, CM_, ColorTalk Free,Comic Touch Lite, CountriesLE, Dictionary, Documents, EU, EuropeanCapitals, EuroTalk, FlagsWorld, Flickr, FlingFree, FlipBook Lite, Fliq Notes, French LITE, Google Earth, HistoryMaps, Hubble, iBearFlagsEU, Icon Memos, iSpy, iTalk Lite, iThesaurus, Kaloki Free, Martian, MATHO, Maths, miTables Lite, Muscle Head and Neck, NASA, Newbie Lt, Pix Remix Lt, PopMath Lite, Quick Graph, SculptMaster D FREE, SimpleDraw, Skeleton Head and Neck, Sketch Pad, Sketchmania, Slideshow, Stars, TCT Lite, TimesTables Free, touchPhysics Lite, UpThere, Whiteboard & Wikipanion. I just copied the file names from the finder and remove the file extension and version numbers so the names may not be exactly the same as the app names.

The podcasts:

The ipods all sync onto one mac and the idea is that we will not add any more apps and the children will not be able to update the ipods, they will be able to transfer images to classroom computers. I was surprised that this allows you to buy apps and add them to all of the ipods.

On Friday I visited the school and handed over the touches to the pupils. I was surprised at how many of them had touches at home, over half a dozen out of 19. We went through some stuff to introduce the children to the the basics. I used a document camera to project one touch to the class smartboard and that seemed to work fine. After we let the pupils explore the ipods and play with a couple of games we introduced some apps. We typed a sentence into the notes app and figured out how to copy and paste. Next we checked out the Calculator and Dictionaries. Then we created Martians with the Make a Martian app and use Bump to share them between phones.

The classroom has an airport base station (one of the older grey ones) and I was please at how quickly the children could exchange images using bump over wifi. I hope this can become the basis for some collaborative work, groups collecting images or screenshots annotating them with Comic Touch Lite and bumping them. eventually they may be able to use some sort of slideshow app to put the images together.

The possibilities for using the touches seem endless and we explained to the children that they were more likely to see how to use the touches to help their learning as we were.

The hour and a bit I had in the class went by far to quickly and i feel a wee bit of jealousy for Ms Moonie.

We have started a blog Glencairn iPod for the class to report their adventures and assess the devices and I’ll have to go back in a couple of weeks to explain how that will work (that is my excuse anyway).

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SconicPics is an iPhone/ipod touch application that allows you to create custom slideshow movies. The movies are made from still photos which you can add from the photo library or take with the iPhone’s camera. You can then narrate a voice over and create and enhanced m4v video with chapters.

In this example I’ve just used some pictures from classrooms I’ve been teaching in recently. It only took a few minutes to create and I am sure taking a little more time would have produced a more professional result and few plosives. I exported the 4v to reduce the size which removed the chapters too.

This looks like it could be a useful app in a classroom equipped with iphones or iPod touches. With touches pupils could use images downloaded from webpages or screenshots.

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A couple of days ago I had to cancel my intended trip to BETT. I’ve not been since the famous Glasgow Jumbo junket, as the papers called it, when to celebrate the new city wide network glasgow flew (not in jumbos as it happens) its ICT coordinators down to BETT. Needless to say I do not regard BETT as a junket, but an cpd opportunity. The CPD quotient of conferences and trade shows, has to my mind, increase a lot over the last few years, mainly due to TeachMeet and other self organised meetings of partitioners. I think you gain more for a coffee with an enthusiastic teacher than many a seminar.

I had hoped to do a little bit of evangelising for EDUtalk at BETT and join in TeachMeet Takeover to do so. Unfortunately I can’t do that.

I mailed Tom Barret to let him know that I would not be speaking and he offered me the opportunity to gust blog on his site. This is a really generous offer give the size of Tom’s network and following. In the unlikely event that you have not read Tom’s blog I suggest that you head over there as soon as possible. Tom produces a stream of detailed posts of how he introduces new tech and ideas to his primary classroom.

Anyway I blogged EDUtalk at BETT 2010 on Tom’s blog on Monday and put out an EDUtalk phlog today EDUtalk365 #13 – EDUtalk @BETT calling for contributions to our ‘open mic‘ podcast over the next couple of days. I look forward to hearing some interesting audio. If your are going to BETT please pick up your phone.

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I’ve had this installed for a few days now, but the flurry of snow tweets (the #uksnow Map 2.0 is looking great) reminded me to try the live streaming from my iPhone to USTREAM.

I must say I was surprised at how well it went. This was using a wireless connection and a G3 not G3s iPhone. I think the quality is not too bad especially after I turned the phone the right way up. A stand would have helped rather than a pile of videos(sic), dvds and books. The twitter integration is good too.

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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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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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Adecon 09

At the weekend I was down at the ADE conference in Liverpool. I drove (was driven down) on Saturday morning with Ian and Ann, colleagues from North Lan.

Saturday kicked off with an intro by Jim Elder, a side screen was displaying Adecon09 – twazzup and we were encouraged to tweet during the conference. Jim handed over to apple’s John Hickey do gave the Key Education Message from Apple. He touched on a lot of things, the challenges and changes facing Education, not surprisingly his slides were minimal and powerful/ He touched on the fact that many aspects of apple design were driven or suited to the Education market before going on to talk about he changes in Education, and the need for thinking ahead and being ready for change. The demand for skills has changes, learners now need creativity and innovation and to be able to communicate and collaborate.

John spoke about the skills and standards of young people showing a 10 year old video blogger with bags of confidence and editing skills. He spoke about how you people understand elements of video editing and demnmand a certain standard from themselves. I am not sure this holds for all the learners I know, just as a good reader may not be a writer, a consumer of film may not know or understand much about editing. Some of the tweeters were sad that books were losing out as a source of information. I was struck with the parallels with what Derek Robertson spoke about at the Scottish Learning Festival (blogged) and I am still of the opinion that there is a place for all types of communication.

After lunch we broke into ‘stage’ groups to discuss the mornings presentations and look at the ADE online community. Later in the afternoon there was the “The Golden Nugget” session, we again broke into groups and everyone had a chance to talk about some piece of tech or learning for 3 minutes, the groups voted and the best were shown to the whole conference, a light-hearted vote lead to he winner getting a new nano. My group saw some nice things, geo tagging from Adam Burt, comic life as frames for picture in picture movies, and a lovely wee tip for getting 4 frame animated gifs out of Photobooth. I talked about SLFtalk and posterous which Ian described as very interesting but completely incomprehensible, so I guess I might have gone a little quickly. The overall winner showed an iphone game SmackTalk which seemed to make a gunnipig talk:

SmackTalk! is a voice-altering app that features an animated guinea pig, puppy, kitten, and chihuahua that repeat what you say in high-pitched Squeaky voices, or low-pitched Freaky voices

I’ve been gathering links to some of the nuggets from other rooms from the twitter feed, but I hope someone in each room collected them and will share it.

Although the competition was good fun I am not sure if I like that or the splitting up of the groups to different rooms as much as all in together. I am sure I’ve missed some great ideas.

This is a twitter search to get all the links: #adecon09 since:2009-10-02 until:2009-10-05 filter:links – Twitter Search from the conference tweets.

Saturday evening was dinner and karaoke, hard to speak, but I had a few interesting discussions, including one with arch geotagger Adam Burt who kindly handed me som interesting apple scripts.

On Sunday John Hickey was back on stage, now talking about Snow Leopard Server. This was really interesting, I’ve recently started using Leopard Wiki server (here and ICT & TS Podcast) and was keen to find out what was new. Quite a lot as it turns out.

Wiki Server 2 has had quite a few features added, it is now optimised for iphone/touch which fits well with the mobile anywhere/anytime learning message we are getting. The other big feature is the addition of QuickLook. If you have a mac with leopard or snow leopard you are probably used to Quicklook, select a file in the finder and hit the spacebar, you get a preview of the document, many formats are supported including MS doc, powerpoint, movie, audio, images and most apple app files. When this was announce I though it would just be some sort of lightbox effect for images, but was surprised to find out it will let users with a recent browser preview all sorts of files including MS documents even if they do not have a copy of the application need to open the file.

Podcast Producer 2, podcast producer is a server setup to process media and post it to podcasts on a wiki server in all sorts of interesting ways. It can add an introduction to movies, process media for different platforms, submit to itunes and more. Mac come with an application Podcast Capture for submitting, or recording and submitting, media to Podcast Producer. Podcast Capture now has a web version allowing Windows pcs to submit podcasts to the server.. Podcast Producer is controlled by xml workflows, I did a bit of editing and modifying these at a very simple level and struggled quite a bit. Podcast Producer 2 now comes with a Visual workflow creator, no more xml.

Acuade 09

Finally we heard from Bill Rankin and George Saltsman of Abilene Christian University in Texas. They took us through some changes in learning and distribution of information, Miles Berry summarised nicely on twitter:

#adecon09 Problem in the middle ages was accessing information, problem in the print age was finding information. Problem now filtering?

They then explained that ACU provides iphone or ipod touch to all freshmans in 2009. iPhone_first – Abilene Christian University. They had a lot of analysis to show the positive effects of the devices so far and showed their mobile platform: ACU provides iphone or ipod touch to all freshmans 2009. They provide a web based app: ACU

This was a really exciting presentation and I’ve not really started to digest all of the information of which there is a lot online: ACU Connected: Mobile Learning. I believe that the slides, which were beautiful as well as informative will be made available.

That pretty much wrapped up the conference, the major drawback being the fact that I didn’t have enough conversations, looking back over the twitter stream I realise I missed a lot of chances, next time I’ll take another body;-).

As well as twittering I published ADE Conference photos, Ade conference 1 (audio) and ADEcon09 Sunday (audio too) on my posterous. Im using adecon09 as a tag on Delicious, hopefully others will too. I am following the tags on various services.