I found this fascinating post on pasta and vinegar via EdTechUK
A butterfly-watching system with WiFi PDAs
Which reminds me of presentation I saw at the EuropeanSchools Project in Finland last year where children used a handheld/moble to send info and pictures back to class. This seems a bit more sophisticated in some ways, the mobile device gets information back for a server.
Following Tim Lauer to Inward / Outward Aggregating on CodeDogBlog got me thinking about aggregation and reading my regular blogs again.
I am not convinced that Scottish Education Blogs on Suprglu works in the way I want it too.Ewan’s feed and other typepad feeds don’t seem to work the way I’d expect. It seems there are 3 feeds for Ewan’s blog Atom, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 plus a feedburner one.
The rdf file (RSS 1.0) andthe feedburner one seem to have all the entries dated as today, this seems to confuse Suprglu and me, I think this really should be simpler.
Anyway the Inward / Outward Aggregating post and its comments lead me to NetVibes:
and goowy:
Both are content presentations tools where you can add rss feeds etc, and a fair way to while away a holiday morning.
But stll not really the way I want to read blogs.
I like the idea of just seeing new content in an aggregator or in Safari where you can see the number of unread new items, but I like the idea of reading blogs on a page the author designed and to read comments, at the moment I have my blogs in a bookmark folder:
Maybe I should remake this to hold feeds where I could see unread ones and then switch to the web view, I’ll keep that for another holiday morning.
If you are a mac user like me you might want to switch to Firefox for NetVibes, goowy is a flash app so works fine in Safari. NetVibes say Safari support is coming.
Not really any connection to my classroom, but I just love this idea.
PARK(ing) archive.org link (2018 edit)
PARK(ing) is an investigation into reprogramming a typical unit of private vehicular space by leasing a metered parking spot for public recreational activity.
and it is a lot more fun than the quote sounds at first reading.
I did (looking for ones to add to Primary School Blogs made me a happy man, presumably only temporary, but I’ve got the screenshot
http://www.google.com/search?q=primary+school+blog
I wonder if the children will be as impressed?
Update November 2021: the screenshot was lost, but I retrieved the thumbnail from the internet archive.
We got a new podcast out last week on Radio Sandaig.
And the first comment. I am looking forward to the children’s reaction. The comment lead me to Room 613 Talk another nice primary podcast.
We hit a last minute snag with Audacity, after moving a bit of the podcast that had been recorded in Audacity from one machine to another (in order to speed up editing) the children had trouble saving, on reopening their work the was nothing on the audacity timeline. After my initial suspicion that they were not saving properly, and a few desperate attempts to work around the problem, we had to do the whole edit and export to MP3 in one session.
The recording and editing are still a time consuming process, I’ve been talking to Mark Warner who runs Downs FM. Mark’s podcasters basically record the whole show in one go, live, which seems to be a lot quicker. Before the recording they prepare clips etc. I think they are using GarageBand. The Downs FM was a live weekly Radio broadcast to the school last session and obviously have a lot of skill in the production process. (A nice description here: about Downs FM)
I think we will try and adapt some of their working practices for the November podcast). We used the Down’s promo in our podcast and hope to send them one.
Podcasting seems to be helping us make connections (Room 613 Talk, Downs FM, all the feedback from the Keepers Podcast) with other schools a lot quicker than blogging did. Podcasting seem to have had a faster uptake too.
Pupdate, Downs FM has gone, here is a link to the archive
Getting into blogging A new guide to blogging from the Modern Foreign Languages Environment (MFLE) at LTS, part of the Scottish Schools Digital Network Mentions both this place and the Sandaig Otters as examples.
I think the children will be very pleased when I show them on Monday.
After getting over the excitement of incoming links I noticed the guide to blogging is really good.
Hopefully we will have a few more classes blogging and them we can start children commenting back and forwards.
Update, lots of broken links so archive ones:
Getting into Blogging, [Modern Foreign Languages Environment (MFLE) (https://web.archive.org/web/20051217132028/http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/mfle/index.asp), Scottish Schools Digital Network
Shared Mobile learning, I’ve been reading a lot more of this since I came back lots of interesting stuff on the web, it fits in nicely with tagging/folksonomy Examples Flickr.com and http://del.icio.us/
Interestingly tagging seems to follow the long tail (also called Zipf power law!!!) that was mentioned at the conference.
del.icio.us is a web site where users store and tag links, you can view links by user and tags.
My del.icio.us links tagged with education
and everybodies del.icio.us links tagged with education
Flickr does the same stuff with photos:
Everybodies tagged with Finland
An article about folksononmy in guardian online 24 March and an earlier one
Neither of these services are child safe, but you could have quite an interesting site that would be.
For example:A site where classes/schools/pupils could upload photos and comments and tag them.
Groups form round tags/keywords invite classes to join in pictorial discussion eg on PSD keywords like ‘responsibility’ or ‘pride’ or’care’ or Art words ‘red’
Children/classes upload photos and scanns connected to tags with comments, classes can compare responses.
I attended this conference in Finland last week! With 3 other Glasgow Masterclass teachers and Tom Kane of prescience our video conferencing guru. I was presenting about our video conferencing efforts with De Rank. Talked a bit about blogs too.
I saw a host of other presentations and took a few notes, I intended to write them up, but have not had the time, too many links to follow. So I’ve just pasted my notes below, not very coherent but the links are there.
It was a fantastic trip I took a pile of photos some here.
EuropeanSchools Project in Finland
ECOLEHOME
Thursday
Learning goes Mobile Riitta Vanska NOKIA
screensize
media agnostic
not top down=informal??
project based learning = informal contribute
sharing
info nugget=for the macdonnalds generation don’t really like this term
Collaborative Mobile learning demo
Jurgen Scheilb & Teemu Leinonen, Media Lab University of Art and Desigh Helsinki Interesting
Learning Environments for Progressive Inquiry Research Group
SHARING
learning tool (Director!!)
Saw demo next day, results were not so pretty,tool looks very basic mind map sort of thing.
FLICKr type interface in flash might be more interesting.
Mind you everyone at the conference is doing ‘Mobile learning’ taking photos of presenter’s slides rather than taking notes. Marilyn says info-snaps
Friday
Spring Day in Europe 17th march missed it!
learner constructed learning objects
process not answers
Bottom Up
Saturday
We are limited by network and software for internet projects
Lots of competition for providing project web space Folk looking for sales
Dr. Sheila O. Gersh
this looks interesting as there does not seem to be the same emphasis on relying/organising with partners, could go it alone.
SKYPE
The blog moved to a new server and we had a problem or two posting until we fixed some file permissions. But I seem t ohave the archive for this blog mixed up….
