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A while ago I mentioned that I had received a LG Shine phone from the LG Shine blogger relations programme. I’ve started to investigate/play around to see if it can be of use in my teaching.

As someone who doesn’t usually use a mobile phone much I am not in a position to review the phone and compare it to others. I can say it seems pretty straightforward to use for a newbie.

The camera seems to work well except for the lag between clicking the shutter and taking a picture. The picture quality looks ok to me too, here is a random picture of my desk using the macro facility and the unusual flash (the mirror just lights up). I’ve had a few children take photos and they had no problem.

I’ve only tried the video camera briefly and have no complaints. I’ve also used the voice recorder the quality does not sound as good as my iRiver and i guess it would be best for one voice rather than a conversation. The file format is amr, I guess that would be best converted befor sending it to the web.

I listened to the latest Booruch podcast on the way home from work today and it sounded good. Flicking through audio, image and other files is quite easy with the scroll wheel.

It was straightforward to set up bluetooth with a macbook and dell latitude transferring file is simple via this or USB.

Email was again was easy to set up sending and receiving is pretty simple. It is also easy to send an image file via email.

What I am really interested in is using the phone to send stuff to the website/ blogs. I’ve tried a few approaches:

Pivot has a moblog functionality, which I managed to get working last November, but I have completely failed to do so this time arround.

As a workaround it is easy to post photos to Flickr, but that is of limited use as we cannot use flickr in school. I have been experimenting with pulling the images from flickr to the sandaig site: Sandaig MoBlog. One of my class posted a photo easily, you can tell which one is hers because it has got a long description, my texting is not up to it yet. I am not sure if this is a great idea in the long term.

The other thing I’ve been testing (see the last few posts) is BlogMailr a service that provides an email to blog solution. So far I’ve not managed to get this working, the html is a bit mangled. I am not sure why, but I had the same problem posting to wordpress so I don’t think it is a pivot metaWebLog problem.

So as soon as I can I am going to try and let the class loose with the phone, both as a tool to play with and as a way to start discussing the use of mobile phones. I’ve started collecting some links tagged with “mobile” on del.icio.us, if you know of any others let me know (tag them for:troutcolor if you have a moment).

I’d also like to know of any other free mobile to blog solutions out there.

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After messing around with pivot’s moblog settings for a while I eventually gave up. I know it worked in the past so I think I’ve probably just messed the config files about so badly that I’ll need to up load another one.

I decided to try another tack. I set up a flickr account for the school/phone and an email address to post photos to flickr.

Flickr is blocked by websense in Glasgow schools, so I used the Flickr API and phpFlickr to pull the photos from Flickr: Photos from sandaigprimary and download them to the sandaig site. The photos are then shown of a web page: Sandaig MoBlog. The page is pretty crude at the moment but I think I can add some features as we go along( pagination, sorting by tag, maybe HaloScan commenting ).

A couple of children in my class posted a photo today and managed to add a description pretty quickly, unfortunately I had not set permissions on the server correctly and we go a page full of very odd characters. I think I’ve fixed it now that I am home and will try a relaunch of moblogging next week.

I had put my own sim card in the phone but it looks like my virgin payg account is not the cheapest way to send email. I talked to someone in the T-Mobile shop and bough a payg sim from them. According to the salesperson, data cost so much per kb but it is capped at £1 a day. I though this would work out well as we will mostly use the phone on school trips and should be able to fire off a bunch of photos for a pound a trip.

I also asked about emailing from abroad, but this seems a lot more expensive, I wonder if I could buy a sim card in holland to fire off photos for the week we were there, if anyone knows anything about mobile provides in Holland please let me know.

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Ewan sent me an early heads up about ScotEdupedia

ScotEdupedia offers everyone the opportunity to share their knowledge and expertise by adding to an existing article or creating a new article on an aspect of Scottish education.

LTS have taken the unusual step of providing an empty shell for users to fill up.

The wiki looks pretty sweet: friendly and approachable, hopefully it will fill up steadily.

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Just testing a wee snippet I’ve made for the blog that should let children publish video with less intervention from me.

It is still a bit convoluted:

Upload a jpg with the image tool.

Upload a flv file with the same name as an enclosure.

Change:

[[download:butterfly:icon::]]

to:

[[flashvideo:butterfly.flv:320:240]]

Where the size of the video is 320 by 240 pixels.

Given the infrequency of video being published I don’t know if the children would use this independently, but it will at least save me having to open up an old post, copy out the html to embed the flash swf, image and flash video file for any video posts.

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Absolutely nothing:
inbox zero
Ewan would be proud of me (as long as he did not notice the disorganised folders in mail.app ), I often have hundreds of messages in my inbox, I am not quite at the GTD stage but it is a start.

And This:
empty desktop
I might even get a nice desktop picture now I can see the desktop.

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If you read my blog much you might have noticed the odd moan about flickr, not being able to be used it here.

Recently I found Pics4Learning. This is

intended to provide copyright friendly images for use by students and teachers in an educational setting.

There does not seem to be a specific license attached to the photos, they only ask for attribution. Yesterday my class searched for photos to go with poems they wrote, downloaded them, resized them and posted them to their blogs. I also explained that they need to give some sort of attribution, unfortunately I had not found the instructions, so we just linked to Pics4Learning, next time the attributions will be to the photos.

I was quite please that quite a few of the children a managed this as there are quite a few steps involved. I was especially pleased to see Courtney who didn’t have time to finish her post went home searched for a picture, added it to her blog (remembering to resize it) and attributed it.

I realise that the site is nowhere near as wide and deep as flickr, but it will be a great asset to our blogs this session. I also think there is some advantage in the children downloading and editing photos rather than just linking to flickr. It should also insure that readers of the children’s blogs who also have images sites blocked will see the pictures.

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One of the things I like about blogging is how posts disappear into the archive to be forgotten.
One of the things I hate about blogging is how posts disappear into the archive to be forgotten.
I thought I might spend some holiday time trawling through my archives and pulling out some posts,:

  1. January: I mostly pointed to interesting stuff, started blogging with appleScript and made the suggestion for folk to comment my class I’ll comment yours for the first of many times.
  2. February: I discovered cocomment, went to holland for a couple of days to podcast with the De Rank children, started thinking about communicate06 with a nice example of blogging and played with flash.
  3. March: I went to communicate06 and the MasterClass New Technologies Course/
  4. April: I posted a brief how to podcast overview, played with google maps and tested a few things.
  5. May: The first Scots Edu Bloggers meetup, more google maps, the children told me what they though about podcasting and I just like the photo with this post.
  6. June: started thinking about video blogging pointed to andy’s blogging course and though about commenting again.

I realise this post (or the second part) is not much use to other folk, but I found it quite useful to have an overview of what I’ve been doing, I’d recommend it as an interesting exercise.

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screenshot

After Andrew’s comment yesterday I’ve been trying to collect all the rss feeds from the scotedublogs.

I uploaded a first effort:  scotedublog.opml.

I got the links by downloading an export of the wiki. I then extracted all the links for the html, downloaded the files and checked for an rss link. I used that to build an opml file, mostly automated with SuperCard, I guess it would have been faster with perl if I knew any perl. I did a little bit of hand weeding to remove broken stuff and make the opml file validate. The screenshot is of the opml feed imported into flock.

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I’ve got a couple of ideas for the blogs here that are nearly ready but both need me to commit to a particular technology, so this is a cry for advice.
1. Now we have access to a suite of pcs I want to trial individual blogs for my class. I want to host the blog here rather than on external sites for ‘control freak’ reasons. The Sandaig blogs run with pivot, but I’ve been thinking about wordpress mu or lyceum which is a multi-blog derivative of WordPress. (test install) I’ve also tested Nucleus CMS v3.23 and tried out a few more systems over at OpenSourceCMS (which allows you to try live installs of a pile of cms, blogging systems etc).

So far I cannot get wordpress mu to work here, it doesn’t seem to like www. urls.
Lyceum seems to work ok, but you cannot have multiple blogs without multiple emails. I suppose I could use 20 of those gmail invites to set up 20 emails on a temporary basis but it seems a lot of hassle. I also have not used wordpress/lyceum enough to know enough about which templates will work with lyceum so that the children can have their own look and feel.

So I am thinking of setting up another install of Pivot with 20 subweblogs showing one category associated with one user. Which means setting up 20 categories, users, style sheets and templates.
I thought that I might be able to edit the settings directly, I seem to be able to do so for users and categories but sub-weblogs look way to complex for me, I’ve a fair idea of how the templates/ css works in pivot but it will take quite a while to set everything up. I don’t want to give the children access to the admin side as the template and css editing are not wysiwyg.
This would mean limiting them to designing a header graphic and telling me if they want some colour changes.
Using Pivot would also mean that the children would be able to use the main blogs and their own without much thought.
So the dilemma is which blog software to go for, given the limitations of my knowledge and our setup.

2. The second thing is presenting movies in blogs. We have dipped our toes in on the The Dream Dragon and here and here, the second 2 are just very Q&D made with a digital cameras, I think this has a lot of promise.
So far I’ve just uploaded Quicktime movies and displayed them with scripts from embed the video!. I see a lot of blogs displaying video in flash, but all my attempts to convert QT to flash using Flash 8 Video Encoder have given poorer quality and bigger file size than Quicktime. I want to keep the files on our site rather than use a video hosting service, as I suspect we may run into problems with filters. So any handy tips about encoding video for flash would be appreciated. Or opinions about sticking with quicktime.

technorati tags blogging video