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

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Ewan was talking about what to do with your blog in the summer. Well i am not going away so I’ve a few things line up to do:

I am working on a site for David which will end up here I am quite happy about how it is going and seem to be learning a little MySQL.Allotment May

I am also going to be organising blogs for the primary schools in my cluster, but I’ll leave that until August. Meanwhile I am going to try and fix my google maps experiment and play with Supercard so that I can post on my other blog. Links broken

Away from the box, I’ll go some walks, take more time to cook than usual, play some tai chi and do something on Jenny’s allotment. It is hard being a teacher some time;-)

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Tim was offline for the last week or so with DNS Issues He say’s

My site has been down for about a week with a DNS issue. It is finally resolved. Not that anyone missed anything while I was gone… :-)

Well I missed you Tim and saw the Safari can’t find the server message everyday. I can’t tell you that in a comment as they don’t seem to be working?

Tim is in my daily reading and I’ve had as much fun following up web and ed ideas from him as anywhere. You also get a lovely feeling about Lewis Elementary from Tim’s postings.

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Our partner school in the Netherlands arrived last night. Some of the Sandaig staff met them for some fun and games is George Square. I took Hans and Ingrid to Starbucks to do some blogging: Basisschool De Rank Weblog. We had a bit of bother, but managed to work around it. There should be more posts on their blog and our Sandaig – De Rank blog over the next couple of days.

Notice the care with which I took the photo, no corporate logos.

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Map -John

My latest effort to provide a tool for producing annotated with text and image google maps. This one adds Lightbox JS v2.0 to view full-sized images by clicking the thumbnails in the popup things.

The map was produced with this setup which I think is well within the capabilities of most primary pupils. There a few rough edges that need ironed out, especially in the image upload and the code (don’t look it is horrible), but if I get a bit of time this week I’ll unleash primary six on it as testers. Fell free to make a map of your own over the next couple of days. After that I’ll be password protecting it.

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Talking to Glenise today about a possible article for Teaching Scotland the magazine of the GTC, and trying to think of how all the web 2.0 stuff relates to the real world of teaching.

A lot of the Edu Tech gurus talk about a revolution in teaching that they see as necessary to equip children for the coming century.

I am coming round to seeing blogging and podcasting as just an extension of normal primary school practice.

Blogging is just a Classroom Display with a bigger audience. We are always talking about making things real for children, giving a purpose, blogging and podcasting do that.

Primary children frequently present knowledge to their peers often in a school Assembly, podcasting is a extension of this. More and more I am seeing blogging and podcasting as a small extension to normal good practice rather than a revolution. Blogging a discussion as way of consolidating knowledge is not too far removed from the same activity with a big bit of paper. Publishing a bit of writing on the web is just using an open classroom wall.

Web 2.0 seems a lot more accessible and teacher friendly now and we still might help equip our pupils for the coming century.

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I added these to my del.icio.us links today.

Box.net Free Online File Storage, Internet File Sharing, RSS Sharing, Access Documents & Files Anywhere, Backup Data, Share Files. Looks like it could be used for podcasting and storing video. Found Box.net through netvibes a portal site that can pull together feeds, and other net services on one customisable page. I registered a while back and rediscovered it today, seems to work in safari now.

Finally Treehugger: Make Your Own SUV Ad Holiday fair, Chevy ask the net to remix its adverts for a SUV, some nice green responses.

Found these early this morning spent the rest of the day recovering for a Hard Drive problem on my box.

Eventually fitted a new HD and restored a backup. SuperDuper! saved my bacon. I’ve noticed this sort of problem happens during holidays rather than term time which I suppose is a good thing.

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I have published the podcast recorded in De Rank on the Radio Sandaig page.

That pretty much wraps up the trip. We had a great time and I think I learned a lot about a whole range of things.

  • Recording with my new Logitech® USB Mic straight into Audacity is, as I expected, a lot more efficient than using the iPod. The sound quality seems fine too. I am going to use this more for the regular Radio Sandaig podcasts.
  • It is nice to be connected, I blogs from the airport, the two schools and the hotel we stayed in, the iBook really shines for this, I never had to touch a setting except to put in wireless network wep passwords.
  • There can be a real connection using Video conferencing. This is the first time I’ve conference with people (my own school) who I know well. Although there was no obvious educational content in the conference, mostly “hello” & “this is what we are doing in De Rank”, it will hopefully help to build links between our schools. I am also aware of the difficulty the Dutch children have in understanding the Sandaig Children’s accents. I will be thinking of how to communicate on a visual rather than verbal level in the future.
  • I also really like the muli layered communication that we were trying, blogs, video conference, just posting image galleries and the podcast. I am very optimistic that his will really help with building friendship across the North Sea.
  • Comic life, what a wonderful application for Education, children just love it.