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Sfl 09folk

I am starting to filter through various thoughts about the two days at the learning festival and of course TeachMeet09, yesterday I posted my unused, TeachMeet09 presentation (not a presentation, just talking and webpages) and I’ll have to post about our successful SLFtalk project in more detail later.

I found listening to all of the audio posted over the two days (27 in all i think) that got me thinking about how I had spent my time at SLF, firstly I had obviously missed a lot both on the trade show and seminars.

In fact I missed a few seminars that I had booked due to the printout supplied by the festival lacking days, the events I had booked were listed and times given but no days.

The following is probably a bit mixed up as to times and even days, in the SECC one hour looks like another.

Wednesday

My iPhone powered Posterous go off to a good start even before I got into the SEECC as I met Miss SLF herself, Tess just outside, Tess dressed the part and we grabbed a coffee and started bumping into folk until the doors opened. This met and chat formed a major part of my festival and quickly filled up my head with lots of ideas. On previous occasions I’ve live blogged a few seminars, I gave that up as my typing and thinking are not fast enough, this time I did not even take notes, but I think it might be a plan not only to take notes in seminars but at coffee time too.

Glowing Lounge

When the doors opened I went to the glow lounge, where I was introduced to Fraser Davidson an RM glow support guy. Although he was busy Fraser had time to swap ideas about using glow with me and we have been tweeting back and forth since. I am pretty excited about some of the functionality that Fraser has been adding to glow and will keep my eye on the Glow Scotland blog for news.

Fiona Hyslop Keynote

Next I went to the Fiona Hyslop – Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning keynote, this didn’t trigger any alarms, except perhaps when she mentioned several times that teachers would need to stretch themselves, not sure how many teachers have any more to stretch! The political aspects of the keynote mostly went over my head, luckily Bob Hill filled me later in when I asked, I hope he will blog about this soon.

Davidnoblepres 09

David Noble Using Glow Meet to connect learning professionals

After that I headed for David Noble’s seminar Using Glow Meet to connect learning professionals – lessons from the Access Network where David talked about his work in networking groups of professional online. He used his Access Network as an example and explained how he is starting to use Glow and GlowMeet to work with Chartered Teachers. David has an amazing amount of experience in this and filled in a lot of detail of how to make this work in reality rather than theory.

In the audience I met Joe Dale for the first time (in the flesh) the first of quite a few English educationalists who had made the journey north.

After David’s seminar he Joe and I headed down to the floor and buttonholed folk as we went asking them to post to SLFtalk I am not too sure how this went down, but we did pick up a few promises that came good.

Stevedoug

At some point we bumped into Doug Belshaw and Steve Beard and went for fish and chips. The usual banter and info swap took place.

Steve later showed me some of the way he is using sharepoint to provide a learning platform for pupils. The interface was, imo, better than Glow which is also based on sharepoint, I pointed Steve at LTS’s Andrew Brown and crossed my fingers.

The rest of the afternoon was a bit of a blur, I met with my north Lan colleagues, watch Ann present on 2DIY and the Smartboard on Smart’s stand. I’ve seen the smartboard in a new light since moving to North Lan, mostly due to watching Ann present, my previous use was mostly as a big mouse and scratch pad for brainstorming by pupils, Ann seems to know the notebook software inside out.

CPD Lounge

Bigtweets cpd Lounge

At some point(s) I visited the cpd lounge, when I enjoyed the Scotland on Screen presentation and persuaded David Griffiths to record a segment about the project for SLFtalk: Scotland on screen. The CPD Lounge seem to be acting as a meeting place for lot of people, I finally got to exchange more than a tweet with Mike Coulter, Mike is a fire hose of great ideas and has given a great deal of support and informal advice about SLFtalk. We had an interesting chat about aggregating and filtering information. I also fixed the cpdLounge video camera and was delighted to see that they were using big tweets.

I met up with David Muir and went with him across the Clyde to:

TeachMeet SLF09

Bob Camel John

TeachMeet too place over the river at the BBC building. As usual an amazing set of people were there, including a big English contingent. Although I was disappointed not to get drawn for a presentation this was offset by the people who were. All were really interesting and it is hard to pick the favourites. I guess the ones that made the most impression on me were the ones that were about the effect on pupils:

Technology took a step back in Tess Watson‘s presentation on STEP as well she had a cloth’s line of pictures instead of a slide deck. Neil Winton was on passionate form and you can follow his slides on Slideshare, Neil was gently cameled as this year was a first visit to Scotland by the TeachMeet Camel.

A feature of this TeachMeet were the Learning conversations at the break, I’d guess most folk just had a chat but I joined in with Can Glow drive pedagogical change? lead by Bob Hill, along with John Connell. It is easy to get on a high horse talking about this stuff and I think I probably did, rather overstating some of the problems with Glow.

After that is was into a taxi and off to TeachEat for a lot more informative chat. I ended up in the pub next door with Ollie Bray who had lead a brilliant effort at organising teachMeet and Tom Barrett. Tom gave me my favourite image of the day, describing his classroom with Endless Ocean projected from a Wii beside a long wall display as ‘taking the game out of the console’. This natural mix of technology with pain and glue is essential in the primary classroom.

There is already a lot of content online tagged tmslf09 and there will be more.

Thursday

Some of Wednesdays reports my be a little out of chronological order and these ones certainly are.

Glowing Lounge

Ger Glowmeet

I visited the Glowing Lounge twice on Thursday to see 2 of my North Lanarkshire colleagues present, both have only been using glow since January but have made great progress.

  • Geraldine Shearer talked about setting up her own school site, joining and participating in a National group, The very important bear, and setting up another National Group ‘The Unsinkable Ship’. Geraldine’s class joined in a glow group and the moment their smiles indicated that Geraldine appeared on screen spoke volumes.
  • Marjory Murphy talked about introducing glow to her class and using glow for Active Literacy; story writing and posting Formative Assessment comments.

Although I’ve seen some of this before it hammered home to me how glow is making a difference for teachers and classes that have not used online collaborative tools before. Glow may be an imperfect tool, but given the large amount of support given to teachers using it compare to other online tools and the overall vision, it will hopefully change many games.

Smart Table

Smarttable ian

At some point in the day Tom and I ended up at the smart stand watching Iain Hallahan Presenting on the SMART Table, you can read more on Iain’s blog, but I was captivated by the attention and concentration his pupils gave the table.

It would be great if the festival could be run on a day where more classroom teachers could come along. Over the years I was luck enough to get along but for most class teachers this is not possible.

Dragon’s Den

Was another area where pupils got to perform and worth watching because of that. Showed what pupils can do, confidently presenting to a large group of adults in a competitive setting. The sort of thing that goes on regularly in a lot of schools across Scotland.

Derek & Ollie

I didn’t stay until the end of the Dragon’s Den as I wanted to catch the spotlight by Ollie and Derek. At that point Derek was still in the Dragon’s den. Being a regular reader of both of their blogs I didn’t expect too many surprises but it is nice to have beliefs reinforced. In the event both gave a pile of interesting information and some food for thought.

Ollie talked about opening youTube up in schools and suggested that we should risk assess in the same way as we would any other potential problematic activity. I have always explained of online activity to my classes as being similar to a school trip, explaining that pupils represent the school and I expect positive reactions from the public. Ollie extended this nicely, explaining that using youTube would not mean free searches for whatever caught the pupils fancy but the use of youTube for meaningful learning.

Among other things Derek gave a rundown on CANVAS Scotland’s first schools based virtual world for learning. I’ve been involved at the LA side of this project and have been impressed by the scale of the project. That is it is small scale and focused. Although Derek probably winces when he sees me in his inbox asking for updates I think this has real possibilities for the classroom and As Derek has explained could be duplicated for other projects. Canvas uses opensim to create a Secondlife like world, in this case dedicated to art. each LA in Scotland has its own virtual gallery wher pupils art will hang alongside video of the pupils talking about their art. Pupils will be able to meet and talk about their art work in this virtual world. Watch the video to get more of an idea of how this will work. CANVAS will be accessed through Glow.

One thing Derek said that I have trouble with. In talking about various 3d virtual worlds he said:

are they going to gravitate or grow into text based one dimensional interfaces, …. I don’t think that they will…

I am not so sure, I hope children (and adults) will be able to move between 3d and text, appreciate hand written poetry as well as 3d movies, be happy using text and video chat. I hope CANVAS could be a model for a similar project using pupil voice instead of pictures and video. I like the idea of Tom’s pupils moving between Wii and wall display the two connected together.

I recorded parts of Derek and Ollie’s presentations for SLFtalk and you can listen there: Derek Robertson on CANVAS and Ollie on youTube.

Last minute on the floor

After the spotlight I went back to the floor to visit a couple of stalls I had meant to go to i-board make open-ended tools, games and activities for interactive whiteboard, like many other stands, but came at the recommendation of Marlyn who is working on matching the activities to CfE, at the moment they are offering 6 months, full access to all materials for free. I’ve not had time to explore much but trust Marlyn’s judgement.

I also dashed round to 2Simple Software to speak to Alan about the launch of 2Simple Online. I really like the 2simple products, and especially wish 2DIY was available for macs. At the moment 2Simple are giving all Scottish Schools one years free access to 2PublishExtra which will be accessed through Glow. This is another example of how glow is becoming more interesting as a portal rather than a tool.

SLFtalk

During all of this activity I was keeping half an eye on SLFtalk asking folk to contribute and moderating their contributions.

It is important, to me at least, that this moderation was just to avoid spam rather than to filter content.

I am delighted with the range of contributors and contributions to SLFtalk and will be blogging more about this later. Enough to say it has restored my faith in podcasting, openness and the human voice! I also hope to produce a compilation podcast of all the contributions ‘Now That is what I call SLFtalk‘ very soon.

Highlights

The above is a bit rambling, so here are my highlights:

  • Meeting folk, too many to mention, some for the first time in the flesh. As usual all were interesting, some as expected and some surprising.
  • Glow, how it is being used, and the tools that are becoming available through it. (I didn’t think I’d be saying that.)
  • Pupils, Geraldine’s pupils smiles, Iain’s concentration, the Dragon’s den presentations. I wish I had asked Neil’s a sensible question or two.
  • SLFtalk, lots to think about there. more later.

I also regret lost opportunities, for conversation, seminars and even some stalls, hopefully next year will be even better.

And

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picPosterous is a photo and video publishing app for the iPhone.

Picposterous 0Picposterous 1

At first glance I could not see the advantage of using this rather than the iPhone’s mail application, and neither could TechCrunch but a tweet or two from Sachin, one of posterous’s founders both put me on the right track and gave further evidence that the posterous guys never sleep.

The idea of the applcation is that during an event (or day or meal or whatever) you take photos and post to posterous. The difference is that you can continue to add images to the post after the first image is posted. This will certainly make it a useful application. Instead of waiting until the end of an event you can snap and post without crating a series of posts. picPosterous will also queue up the photos and post then when it can. You can quit the app and it will try to post again the next time you open it.

Lock28posterousscreen

So the app is a lot more useful than I first thought. A couple of drawbacks/limitations: the only text you can post is the title and the media is limited to pictures and video (on a newer phone than mine). The auto post feature, which I have turned on for twitter, flickr and a test blog only posts the first photo, which makes sense for twitter but if I used posterous as a means of posting to flickr I’d probably want the whole album being added.

All in all a handy addition to ways of posting stuff online if not a whole solution I think I’ll be using picPosterous regularly.

I also imagine that if the development of posterous itself is any indication the application will be upgraded and improved regularly. Posterous itself has had an incredible rate of feature addition. The founders are very responsive to any suggestion for improvement making it the most exciting blogging platfrom out there.

Aside, I used Camera Genius for iPhone as a replacement for Night Camera for Anti-shake stabilization. night Camera didn’t make the upgrade to the 3.0 version of the iPhone software. Unfortunately Camera Genius doesn’t seem to take photos with location exif data so posterous does not get to produce a nice wee map.

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Yest another mapping/iphone post. This might not seem like education but I consider the mapping of walks etc. a sort of trial for possible Teaching and learning activities. At Sandaig I was always interested in blogging trips (Sandaig Netherlands 2008 or Glencoe 06 for example). I am interested in trying to get pupils and groups to tell stories in different ways, audio, text, pictures and video adding location into the mix seems like a good idea. This week i was talking to some of the instructors at Kilbowie Residential Outdoor Centre Oban discussing some of the potential for adding some more ict into their mix through Glow.

On Friday I was going for a walk and decided to try a few different ways of recording the walk centred around the iPhone.

WalkMapBenDonich

As usual I recorded a gpx file and took some photos with the phone for A Mapped Walk

I also took other pictures with my camera and geotagged them once I got home with gpicsync suggested by Dan Stucke in a comment here. gpicsync is a visual front end to exiftool that I’ve mentioned before and works well, unfortunately my iPhone battery gave up early as I was using lots of apps, but a few were mapped by Flickr. The rest taken on the way bak down are untagged.

At the top of the hill i decided to try audioBoo. I love the way Audioboo combines a picture, the audio and a wee map and is simple to use. Unfortunately I didn’t have a good enough signal to post the boo from the hill.

Posterousimgaudio

Instead I turned to posterous. The really good thing about posterous on the iphone is that because it used email you don’t need a signal, the mail app will just wait until it gets one and sends the mail. I found this out on my holiday this year when I seemed to get an occasional signal overnight, making posterous the easiest way to blog.
I’ve also found out how to combine images and audio in an email from the iPhone and because posterous now geo locates your post if there is a location in the exif data of any images posted you get the same effect as audioboo. See Ben Donich – John’s posterous.

The trick is, take a photo, switch to the camera roll and click the share/mail icon. choose the picture and copy it (This will work with several images). Then open up the Voice memos app, recods some audio and then mail it. You can paste the image(s) into your mail and send.

Lifecastingicon

The last thing I tried was the lifecasting app iTunes url, this allows you to choose some photos and then record a narration over a slideshow of the images. The result can be uploaded to youtube or downloaded to your desktop as a m4v file (the app like many others acts like a wee server and puts up a webpage with the movies to download.)

Lifecasting works fairly well, the fact you cannot mail the file is a pity. The other problem is that the slides are shown for a fixed length of time, the example below is the longest, so you have to fit your audio to the show. I did duplicate a couple of images to give myself longer to talk. If the slides could be set to last the length of the audio and you could use mail or the metaweblogAPI to upload them this would be a great app for mobile learning.

lifecasting Example

T“>

I’ve downloaded a couple of other slideshow apps to investigate (at the vast expense of 59 pence each and will try them out whenever I can find them and have a bit of time).

Them ore I use my iPhone the more I believe that a device of this sort has a real place in the classroom for creating the sort of thing I used to use digital cameras, videos, imovie, garage bands and a blog for; the types of activity listed by Margaret Vass in her recent post on Learning, Teaching and ICT » Digital Storytelling ….. and ePortfolios?. We might need to wait a wee while the the right combination of price and feature set but it is getting more interesting every week.

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Bogle

I am just back from a weeks holiday. While I was away I had just about no connectivity. I had packed my laptop and iphone, but there was not internet access I could find and I had to walk about a mile to a nearby cliff top to get a mobile signal!

I gave up on following RSS, twitter and getting email and left the laptop shut. I did do a bit of photo blogging from my phone to my posterous account, and this worked very well.

The new iphone software allows you to mail up to 5 photos instead of just one, posterous makes pretty galleries of sets of photos. The mail app on the iphone allows you to create mails and then will send them later whenever you get a signal, this turns out to be a great feature in comparison with other iphone blogging applications.

The results are on John’s posterous, photos from my camera rather than iPhone were uploaded to flickr when I got back.

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Since my last walk map post I’ve made a bit of progress. I am now using Trails an iPhone app that:

allows you to record, import and export tracks onto your iPhone.

Trailsscreen

Trails is really nice, it records and show position and altitude. It also allows you to cache map tiles when you have a good connection to use later on a walk.
You can zoom in quite close and it has already been handy in finding out I was going the wrong way in the mist.

Trails allows you to email a track in both kml and gpx format. Clicking the kml file opens the trail in GoogleEarth.

I’ve been using GPSPhotoLinker a free app to add geotags to photos using the gpx track from Trails. Once you have dome that they will be mapped by flickr.

I’ve then been using .SuperCard to read the data from the photos and the gpx track and produce an xml file and set of resized photos. The xml files can be used with the google maps api to show the track and photos on a google map.

I’ve started to put together some webpages to list and show the maps: Mapped Walks.

Walklist tn

The idea is to end up with a SuperCard project that cuts out some of the steps, it would take in photos and gpx file and upload resized photos and xml file to the web. I just need a bit of time to write and test the scripts.

I have managed to add an mp3 player to some of the google bubbles on one map that plays sound recorded on my phone. The aim is to have pictures, audio video and text. The maps now also have links in the bubbles that take you from one to the next in the correct order, I think this could be come an interesting way to tell a story that travels through space and time.

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Herramientas – Tools by karramarro
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License

Since my move from Sandaig I’ve not had time to sort out this site the way I’d like it. I spent a wee bit of the rainy holiday Monday moving some webpages over here and tidying them up a little. In no particular order:

A flickr CC search toy This is a variation on the flickr search theme, the page searches for flickr creative commons images and shows them. More interestingly it produces the html code to embed the photos with attribution into a webpage or blog. for example the image on the left was produced by a search for tools. The search is fairly underpowered but if you want to give pupils a way to search for images to embed in a blog post and talk about attribution it might help. I hope to improve the page when I get time and a bit more know how.

A Tasty Tumble This is one of my favourite pages it is a fake tumblelog produced from my delicious links. An experiment in presenting data from delicious. Again the code do with more tidying up.

Big Tweets is a simple tweet search and display page that auto updates every minute, it is designed for use with a projector (big text size). It uses the twitter search API and is based on a toy I made for Joe Dale‘s The Isle of Wight Conference.

tags is a page that pulls information for several sources: del.icio.us, technorati, flickr and twitter. For example things tagged glowscotland. I’ve found technorati less useful recently as it doesn’t seem to keep blog posts for as long. This was first developed for teachmeet06.

I’ve also move my wiki over here, it is mostly empty, and I still have various maps to organise (pics, work navigation and some walks ), optimise and sort out. I’ve also got an experimental lifestream home page to finish off.

While none of these applications will set the heather on fire, they give me a lot of fun. They may be useful to others on occasion, but mostly they have served to keep me happily plugging away at the keyboard on rainy afternoons and dull evenings. If you do find anything of value let me know, I work for smiles. They all use various APIs and Libraries provided for free (credit on the various pages) by various developers whose generosity still amazes me, long may they continue.

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twitter icon

I’ve messed about with the twitter API before in a ham fisted sort of way (say ObliqueTweet, twitter presenter or Tweets @iowconference08) by basically borrowing various snippets of code, this is another such effort.

I notice an interesting post on Tom Smith’s theOTHERblog: Twitter, Growl, Boosh! In AppleScript!!. I’ve borrowed code from Tom before and was interested in this latest script. The script basically used growl to show tweets for a search or hashtag to be used when watch tv with a group spread over different locations. Tom’s script used the Vienna rss reader as a intermediary for handling the RSS. I recently switched from Vienna to NetNewsWire and didn’t have Vienna installed so took a slightly different approach.

I remembered that someone had mentioned that AppleScript handles xml now (via the ‘System Events’ application) and this seemed like an opportunity to mess about with that and growl.

Growltweets

I’ve cobbled together an applescript that runs and every minute, downloads the latest from a twitter search and growls them. The script is pretty rough at the moment (and in all likelihood will stay that way) but I’ve posted it for view and will upload the actual script once it looks a wee bit better.

The script might be of use in the same way Tom’s is, to display tweets over a shared experience. Or perhaps so make sure I don’t miss an @johnjohnston tweet but don’t get caught up in twitter while I am ‘working’ but really it served to give me a bit more practice with the twitter search API and in starting to learn to parse xml with AppleScript. As twitter become bigger by the second and its API continues to grow I hope one day I’ll do something useful.

twitter image Mirjami Manninen from smashingmagazine

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Every Trail

I decided to try a new approach to plotting photos on a map today and use EveryTrail which according to the site:

With this geotracking application, you can record your movements, take geotagged photos, make notes and immediately upload it all to EveryTrail, the leading online community for travel storytelling

The weather was not very nice so i just went a short way from home to the Kilpatrick hills. I started walking and took some photos with EveryTrails as I went, it seemed a smooth and well crafted application. After about 20 minutes I decided I could not remember if I had locked the car to turned around to check. I clicked stop and save in the app and as I was looking at the field to fill in the application quit. On opening it nothing was saved.

On restarting the walk I reverted to using SnailTrail (this application seems to have vanished from the store.)

SnailTrail just lets you save a list of waypoints and email them to yourself. I sure a simple SuperCard project to create the kml file from the list and the photos exif data. I’ve uploaded the the kml file which will open in google earth and imported it into google maps.

googlemapscreenshot

I noticed a strange thing when working with the photos, the ones taken in portrait seemed to have lost their exif data. I drag the photos from iPhoto onto my SuperCard project to get the exif data (Via the exiftags commandline app), it seems when iPhoto rotates the images according to the camera’s instructions it loses the exif data. however if you export the files via iPhoto’s file menu you can check a box to include location and the exif data is in the exported files.

Update 2 March 2009 I was trying to incorporate mp3 sound in the kml file but the object tag is not shown by google maps (it is by earth) so I’ve experimented with the maps API and have markers with pictures and sound: Mapped walk which has some potential I think.

Tracker

I had a very pleasant location experience this week. I had been trying the iPhone app Tracker to ftp a small webpage with my location to the web (example target=”new”), I was then parsing out the data with php to produce a static google map (example). Then the application was upgraded and the structure of the html file was improved, this of course broke my script. I then emailed the developer Stefan Welebny and asked him if he could have an option just to upload the basic information to a text file. Much to my surprise he wrote back and then updated the application. It now will send the information as parameters to a webpage, in my case a php file. at the moment my file just writes that information out to a text file but I hope to soon be able to record my location to a list and then do other things with it. As I understand it Tracker will send its position every 20 seconds so I could use it by turning the app on for a few seconds to record a location.

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@suewaters well that did it:-)
@suewaters well that did it:-)

This evening I was having a wee search for World war 2 images for reuse. I hope to be working with a class next term using images as part of there topic work, mashing the images with iMovie. I had a look in the usual places (including http://www.flickr.com/commons/ mostly) but didn’t get what I wanted. Scran have some great phtos but I don’t think we could edit them. So I turned to twitter, with the usual gratifying results now tagged on delicious:

LCC bomb damage maps – a set on Flickr

WW2 Image Album

Flickr: east_lothian_museums’ stuff tagged with worldwartwo

World War II Posters – a set on Flickr

WW2 History – a set on Flickr

NEN Gallery : World War Two

Flickr: PhotosNormandie’s Photostream

ARCHIVES NORMANDIE 1939-45

I’ve also discovered that pivot allows you to display an rss feed in a post, so this list will update as I add more links to delicious.

@johnjonston : Sorry, it had to be done! on TwitPic
@johnjonston : Sorry, it had to be done! on TwitPic

Thanks Neil

At the same time as I was doing lazy research, nearly everyone else i know on twitter seemed to be playing connect 4 with Santa avatars! @nwinton is busy making Santas out of everyone on TwitPic / nwinton. It is this sort of mix that make twitter special, useful and silly at the same time.

If you have any other sources of World War 2 photos that can be reused in class let me know with @johnjohnston on twitter or for:troutcolor on delicious.