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I had a great day yesterday. I stared off blogging Ewan‘s We’re Adopting! An Adoption Strategy for Social Media in Education which I really enjoyed, it is very tempting to move to east Lothian for the support of David Gilmore and the great blogging community they have put together.

After that I chatted to a few folk and walked around nervously before my spot. I accually sort of enjoyed my self and the audience seemed happy enough, I posted a few links and hope I’ll put the presentation up at the weekend.

After that I tried to blog both In the Wild (Glasgow) and Stephen Heppell

I didn’t do a very good job of it so didn’t post anything, both INW and Mr Heppell were really interesting, but I didn’t type anything worth posting, David was typing away and I guess he will have done the job when they arrive on Connected Blog

teach meet audiance

At 6:00pm we dashed back across to the science centre for TeachMeet07. Previous events have been describes as “My best continuing professional development” by no less than Ollie Bray, who is often described as one of the best cpd providers so a lot to live upto.
This time we had a huge space in the science center and the biggest ever crowd, hopefully someone else will estimate, but 200 bottles of beer didn’t last long.
About 25 people had volunteered to present, most offering seven minute micropresentations and some two minute nano-presentations. This time Ewan had organised a virtual lottery to choose the next presenter and explained that folk should fell free to chat if the presentations did not interest them (it is an un-conference). He had also organised some excellent audio so even in the huge space everyone was clearly heard.
I was delighted to be pulled out the virtual hat first and raced through a quick intro and guide to scotedublogs.org.uk, trying both to explain what it is good for and to get the bloggers in the room to link to scotedublogs.org.uk (this might mean you). It seemed to go down well, the audience was very friendly and encouraging. Maybe because I only took five of my seven minutes.

teachmeet screen

After that it really was the best cpd in the world, speaker after speaker produced wonderful ideas, the audience cheered and wooted and before you knew it it was 8:30. One or two folk did not get to present, but we managed to here most of the list. I could not pick out anyone particular, but was sorry Ian Stuart and Theo Kuechel were not heard. I had an idea about what they would be talking about and it sounded great.

The atmosphere in the room was amazing, teachers are not always the most cheerful of folk when they are getting after hours training. I do not think I have been in such an open and friendly crowd.

After that it was off to Khublai Khan’s for some food and more excellent cpd. A vote of thanks to Softease who sponsored the weird and wonderful menu.
I probably got more ict teaching tips and great links and ideas than in the rest of my years cpd put together.

I have no idea how this event could have been improved but I am really looking forward to the next one.

Blogged from tm

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I am typing this as I wait to do my turn. For what it is worth I hope to have the slides up over the weekend, I’ve nearly finished recording the audio in keynote.
Here are the web pages that I refer to in my presentation.

UpdateI posted these links and they were all broken, I’ve fixed them now.Sandaig Otters – The Weblog of Sandaig Primary School in Glasgow
Sandaig Otters » Primary 6 Bio poems
Sandaig Poets – Poems from Sandaig Primary School
» Our Bio Poems – Thanks Sandaig Primary 🙂 Primary 7v Class Blog
Sandaig Television – A Video blog from Sandaig Primary in Scotland
Netherlands 2007 – Sandaig Primary Visit the Netherlands 2007
Eco Otters – The Weblog of the Sandaig Eco committee
Snakes and Ladders   
Sandaig Otters » Twin Castles
Sandaig Otters » our record
Sandaig Otters » P6 TO P7
Sandaig Otters » First Circut Movie
Sandaig Otters » Flick Flacks
Sandaig Otters » Gears
Sandaig Otters » Dancing
Sandaig Otters » Name Art
Sandaig Poets » bio poem by Kimberley-Jayne
Nicole – Sandaig Primary 6 SJ
Tasks – Blogging Tasks For Primary Six
Radio Sandaig
John @ Sandaig Primary – mostly what we are doing with ict in class and some links
John @ Sandaig Primary » Starting Blogging in the Classroom

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Since the last post I’ve continued to messing around with twitter.
My facebook and twitter script has stopped working, due I think to changes on facebook, but I’ve become more interested in twitter. It is not much use in school, because it is blocked in Glasgow primaries, but it has been interesting watching the tweets spring up when I am at home. I’ve installed Twitterrific a sweet, free, desktop app, to view and post to twitter. I am beginning see the use for firing off quick informal questions but even more interesting are some mashups.

The most educational of these is twitterlearn :: micro language-learning from the Radio Lingua Network. Basically you can follow learnitalian on Twitter, it will give you tweets of short phrases to translate into italian and a link to provide the answer in a blog post. So in the twitter feed you see:

Translate into Italian: “I’ve already visited Rome” http://tinyurl.com/2osa6g

Clicking on the link will take you to the answer.

twittermap

The nice thing about twitterlearn is that it uses another service twitterfeed.com which posts RSS to twitter automatically. so the questions are produced automatically from the blog posts that combine questions and answers.

I’ve used twitterfeed.com to post this blog to my Twitter and created a new twitter account for scotedublogs.org.uk : ScotEdublogs on twitter, if you follow the ScotEdublogs tweets you will know when new posts arrive at SEB. (there is one for teachmeet07 too).

I’ve also looked at twittermap which allows you to set your location in a tweet and places you on a google map, via the google maps api. This is connect to twittervision which show tweets poping up all over the place and provides pages for users showing where they are: twittervision: johnjohnston

I am still unsure where twitter would fit into a primary pupil’s learning but there are lots of interesting things being done with twitter now.

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The questions are at the end feel free to skip down there if you know anything about gps.

I spent quite a while over a year ago messing with the google maps api. eventually I made an interface for creating maps, uploading photos and placing them on the map. This gave me a lot of fun, but I found it too time consuming for children to use.
The earlier this year Google My Maps came out which was a lot neater than my effort, and I’ve used it a few times, mostly pasting in the links flickr provides to add photos.

Cort-ma-Law from Lecket hill This week I stared another one with a few photos from a walk.
I was a bit frustrated about placing the photos on the map as I found it hard to figure out where place where in the rather featureless Campsies.

Flickr map Sorry

I switched to using flickr own maps but found them it a bit slow (that might be my aging mac).
I found it even more difficult to get the photos placed with any accuracy on flickr maps, although the interface for adding and looking at the photos is very slick, especially when you grab a bunch of pictures and throw them on a single spot.
Perhaps I just do not go far enough so need to much detail on a map to make my walk look like a walk rather than a spot.

All this made me think about my previous experiments, especially as there was an article in macuser about using the flickr and google maps apis combined. I had just finished using phpflickr to make a community gallery so though this might be quite quick.

Unfortunately the macuser article relies on a flickr api flickr.photos.geo.getLocation which depends on you having placed the photo on the flickr map (I was beginning to go round in circles).

Then I remembered Adam Burt‘s Applescript for getting geo tags from Google Earth ready for pasting into flickr. Adam does amazing things with blogs, google Earth/maps and geoblogging.
The appleScript copies to the clipboard geo tags of the location showing on google earth at that time.
It is much easier to figure out where you are on google earth, it has a smoother gui than google maps and a better resolution (of where I was at least). so I geotagged a bunch of photos, grabbed a new google maps API key and got busy.

Flickr googlemap mashup

Of course at that time I didn’t know about flickr.photos.geo.getLocation depending on flickr maps.And I didn’t know a tag geo:lon=-4.704382114809 would be returned from the API as machine_tags=”geo:lon=4704382114809 geo:lat=56258859999999″ ie without the minus sign or point so I spent a fair bit of time staring at a blank map, as the google maps API didn’t understand what I was sending to it. Anyway to cut a very long afternoon short, I delved deeper than I had been before into the data returned from flickr.photos.getInfo and finally clunked together a couple of files, the first uses phpflickr to grab the info from flickr and store it in a file, the second pulls that info using the google maps api and create a map.
I did try pulling the information and creating the map all at once, but that took too long. The data from flickr obviously does not need to be updated very often so that job was hived off, speeding up the maps creation. The unfinished product is here: John’s Flickr Map Mashup.

This is just scratching the surface of what could be done, it would be better maybe to create different maps for different days or for particular tags. if all of my tagged photos go on the same map it might eventually be too crowded and need some pagination.

Help wanted: I’d like to know a bit more about geo tagging and perhaps GPS:

  1. Would it be possible to get data from a GPS device and add it to the EXIF data of a photo before uploading it?
  2. Does Flickr undersatand embeded gps data?
  3. Is there a cheap enough GPS device that would work with a mac?

I am thinking of a work flow that includes the tagging of photos before uploading, maybe in iphoto with AppleScript or a SuperCard project, I think I’ve done some EXIF data extracting so imagine that adding can’t be that much harder.

Any ideas that do not involve a lot of expense gratefully received.

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It looks like a pile of the ScotEdubloggers are holidaying on facebook.

I was invited a few weeks ago and joined up.
Compared to bebo and myspace the interface is pretty calm. I’ve messed about with a few tools and gained a few friends but I have not been convinced.

I was planning to blog something about this, but serendipitously in this morning guardian I saw Jack Scofield’s article: If Facebook is just this year’s version of AOL, is that bad? which linked to Facebook is the new AOL (kottke.org) which I followed to Facebook vs. AOL, redux (kottke.org).
Kottle pretty much sums up my feelings:

As it happens, we already have a platform on which anyone can communicate and collaborate with anyone else, individuals and companies can develop applications which can interoperate with one another through open and freely available tools, protocols, and interfaces. It’s called the internet and it’s more compelling than AOL was in 1994 and Facebook in 2007

and

If you’re not a Facebook user, you can’t do anything with the site…nearly everything published by their users is private.

The bit about blogs and Web 2.0 I really like is the fact that most of them produce rss, which is the basis of the Small Pieces Loosely Joined argument. (I am guessing as I’ve never read the book, but the title sounds cool).

Facebook seems fine, fun etc but it misses the serendipity and easy linking and mashing of data. From my, admittedly very limited experience, it seems you can pull information into facebook but not get too much out.

With more open tools it is easy to gather, mix and redistribute information, blogs, wiki updates, podcasts, flickr, del.icio.us etc. can all be mashed with existing tools or a bit of scripting. Facebook seems exclusive rather than inclusive, closed rather than open. I am happy to vist but I would not want to live there.

Or am I missing something?

facebook rss blogging web2.0

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Yesterday I went to Glasgow’s Concluding Masterclass Conference. As usual with these meetings I really enjoyed meeting and chatting to other ict enthusiasts from Glasgow schools. As far as I know few Glasgow teachers have joined the edu blog world so I often know more about other athorities than I do about my own! I am not implying that glasgow don’t send out information or share practise but more that if it dosen’t have an rss feed I often miss it;-)
It is sad to think this will be the last time for this gathering.
Neil McDonald who led the Glasgow Masterclass team and Glasgow’s ICT programs announced that he is leaving the authority. Between Masterclass and Neil I have had a great deal of support over the last few years and will certainly miss both. Neil has always made it easy for masterclassers to put together a proposal for funding with the minimum of form filling and always answered overlong emails from me promptly even when I imagine he had more important things on his laden plate.

At the conference in the morning we heard reports of various interesting projects, my pal Marlyn Ross is supporting a team of cross sector E-Specialists Teachers, which sound like it is having a serious impact. One of her specialists D. McAleer (sorry I can’t recall the first name, David?) gave a wonderful talk about how he is a smartboard convert, taking us through his progress and finishing with a biology lesson. His presentation was funny and informative and I guess his classes are great fun.
We also heard about Shawlands Learning community Digital imaging project, again cross sector working with pre 5 to primary and primary to secondary transitions, the secondary pupils making a dvd to help primary pupils moving into secondary and primary 6 pupils working with pre five children in creative ways. Input from video professional seems to have helped. Jacque Crooks and a pile of confident children from the Shawlands Learning community presented.
We also heard of the Lourdes Mothership project and interesting online community including pupil produced radio and content and after school online help from staff. Unfortunatly it looks like the url works from within the Glasgow network only at the moment as I’d love to take a closer look.

Before lunch Mari Dougan of LTS gave a review of Masterclass and and update on glow (I just noticed that glow is the first hit for glow – Google Search).

After lunch various folk were presenting about their Masterclass projects, unfortunately I didn’t get to see any of them as I was presenting about Web 2.0 at Sandaig.

Hopefully I got across the main thrust of my argument. that blogging etc. is just a wee extension of normal classroom practise, display, assemblies, production of class newspapers ect. has always been at the heart of primary teaching, we just have a bigger wall display now.

As well as show some of the fun we have had blogging and podcasting over the last few years I talked about my approach to blogging and pointed to ScotEdublogs as a good place to start thinking about blogging. In a nutshell, I think you should start by reading blogs for a while, go on to commenting and then start whole class blogging, suing that to set the tone and expectations. From there the possibilities are endless.

It looks like I am going to be expanding on this theme at The Scottish Learning Festival (SETT) this year: Audience, Purpose and Conversation: the World Wide Display Wall. Now masterclass has closed I needed an excuse to get to SETT especially as there will be another edition of Teachmeet, presenting was the only surefire way I could think of.

Note: it is not all over for Masterclass the community lives online and is open to all

technorati tags: masterclass scotlearnfest07 blogging classroom glasgow masterclass glowscotland

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New DellRecently the Glasgow Primary network/managed service has been taken over by Dell.
During the Easter Holidays Spring Break Dell took over the network from Mitel. It has been a bit of a bumpy ride with various unseen problems popping up making teaching with ict quite difficult since then. The plan was to switch over the network with the original hardware and then to roll out new kit.

This week we were asked to pilot a few of the new machines, three desktops and a couple of laptops arrived yesterday and I’ve been encouraging the children to pound on them as hard as they can. Compared to our old pcs these seem amazing, you can’t see the screen redraw when you switch windows;-) They are running xp rather than windows 2000 and seem like quite zippy boxes. The biggest benefit is going to be the size of the screen, a huge difference to the 15 inch monitors we have been running at 800 x 600. This will make lots web apps a lot more usable.
We are still seeing some issues with old and new machines but there is light at the end of the tunnel.

At the same time as getting the pilot pcs we were switched to a different internet filter. I first noticed when I saw that blogs by my wee guys read on edublogs.org and blogspot.com were blocked. Happily an email to the Dell service desk has sorted this out very quickly and hopefully we should be doing some serious commenting tomorrow.

In anticipation of the new big screens I got the children to set there monitors to 1024 pixels wide and have a wee play with ToonDoo today. It looks like a really nice web application for making strip cartoons. You can see some results on the Primary 6 sj blogs. One of my favourites is Steven’s chaos of A Turkey a surreal way of sending an environmental message!
Unfortunately ToonDoo seemed to lock up towards the end of the lesson when lots of children were trying to save their ‘toons. I am not sure if this is due to lots of folk signed on with the same login or just bad luck.

If we can sort that out, I think Toondoo will be a really useful application for classroom use.

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A while back we got a free LG shine from The LG Shine bloggers relations programme. This was really useful on our recent trip to the Netherlands where we posted photos regularly to the Sandaig’s Netherlands Moblog, we are also starting a wee classroom experement: Sandaig MoBlog which needs some work.

 

 

Anyway I’ve entered the Born to Shine Competition to try an win another phone. All we need to is to get more comments on the Born to Shine Competition – blog entry than other entries and we will be on our way to a class set of phones.

You can see the full size full size photo and if you have a minute please pop over to the entry and give us a hand.

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We got back from our Netherlands 2007 trip this morning after a rather tiring drive through the night.

I think we made a pretty good fist of blogging the trip and I am beginning to think about what went right and what didn’t work so well with the way we handled the blogging, I might have better thoughts once I’ve had a good night’s sleep.

The main focus of the blog was communication with the parent and it certainly hit that nail on the head. The reaction from the parents and from the children when I read the comments on the buss proved that.

But I am starting to think of other possibilities:

The trip was not really designed for the children to do written work, our timetable is packed and I was relying on volunteers to try posts during the bus journey. This meant not every child was posting and the posts were pretty much the first thing that the bloggers thought of.

It might be possible to build in some whole group reflection time where diaries and blogs would be kept uptodate, but we would not want it to feel like school.

Maybe we could have a blog/pod team organised on a room basis and give them a wee bit of time each day (maybe they could stay up a little later then they would not miss out other things).

An internet connection in the hotel would have been good, I posted shivering in the dusk from the town square with a t-mobile pay as you go wifi one evening, a cosy cafe was better the next night and I am afraid I had to shelter in Macdonalds on a third.

The Netherlands Moblog was a good idea, but unfortunately my kludge to get it working left no facility for comments, this could be a really good tool.

I made the firsts UK post and the last one via a bluetooth mobile, this worked very well and didn’t cost too much. I posted one quick post, one small photo and about 6 words, from the Netherlands and it cost about £4! I’d like to investigate getting a dutch sim for another time.

I lost my MP3 recorder on the first day, but even then it was apparent that the children really need time to think and rehearse even informal podcasts. Again time would need to be made for this if it was to include all the children.

We had another tech disaster when a card in a camera with a load of great pictures and video got corrupt. Very disappointing.

Overall I am quite pleased with how the web 2 aspect of the trip turned out (other aspects were good too) but it is really another scratch in the surface suggesting lots of ways to do it better.

Now all I’ve got to do is read a weeks worth of email I think I’ll leave my fed reader for tomorrow.