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.

Absolutely nothing:

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:

I might even get a nice desktop picture now I can see the desktop.

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.

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.

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

I hope to post a bit more as I digest the last couple of days.

First the linkage:
Blog postings about SETT – The Scottish Learning Festival, collected by technorrati:
http://www.technorati.com/search/sett06

Flickr: Photos tagged with sett06

Blog posts about TeachMeet (bloggers, and others get together at the festival):http://www.technorati.com/search/teachmeet06

Flickr: Photos tagged with teachmeet06

Flickr Creative commons search sett06

Official SETT Weblog

I am posting the links to the technorati search page rather than the tag pages, technorati seems to have missed quite a few posts tagged with teachmeet06, this means that my teachmeet aggregator and more professional tools like Hitchhikr don’t pick up all the posts, Hickhiker get more with the [Conduct String Search — may return some irrelevant Blog Entries]. I wonder if it worth a trip to Technorati API: Search. Probably not, but might would be a nice distraction from implementing all the good teaching ideas I saw at sett.

I seem to be the only person so far tagging my comments, but not too much commenting has gone on as far as I can make out.

I’ve been thinking a bit about live blogging events, it seems a great idea, but I am not sure I am the person to do it, I don’t type fast enough and I really need times to think about things. I was at Peter Peacock address, trying to blogs the important points and chatting to Ewan on Skype. After a while I realised I’d just typed a collection of buzzwords, Ewan had written a coherent post, fast fingers. I didn’t post my list.
Most of my SETT posts will be useful to me as a reminder and link list, I am not sure if they will be useful to anyone else.
The other problem about live blogging is that it should lead to a blossoming of comments and I’d guess most folk are too tired after two days under the weird light and too much technology, even the folk blogging didn’t seem to post many comments on the day, too much to blog too little time. Anyway, I’ll probably blog my next sett/conference and hope the Scot’s Edu blogsphere reached a tipping point.

More important than a bunch of teachers blogging is, in my opinion, a bunch of children blogging. Unlike Andrew who wrote:

Instead of my usual forray into techy stuff at SETT, this year I thought I?d try and take in something that wouldn?t usually have jumped off the page at me.

I went to quite a few thing that are along my line, including Building primary communities, Infants Can Communicate! and To Blog or Not to Blog. I really enjoyed them all, and picked up a pile of great ideas. the last two listed were reports on blogging projects that really impressed me. My foray into classroom blogging has been bluesky, these project really pointed up good practice and linked it to learning and the curriculum in a very coherent way.
A middle aged blogging dog was taught a lot of new tricks which will hopefully end up improving the learning in my classroom.

Finally(for now, it has taken me best part of two hours to get this far, due to browser meanderings) I met a ton of old and new friends, many of whom on Thursday I asked to chat to (ie steal ideas from) on the Friday, they successfully avoided me and I still have a pile of things I’d like to know, and requests to make. I actually think I needed a longer sett, maybe with a few breaks

teachmeet06 sett06 blogging

I am excited about this one, Morag and Marylyn’s blog the Interactive Talking Teddies is one of the best examples of good practice I have seen.
Subtitle: A Tale of Two Bears and Two Classes, the room is full and they have sent for extra seats. David has been dispatched to get a cable. Spencer and Campbell are in place.

Project took place between to Argyll Primaries.
Started two years ago, adapting ideas for younger children,
Bears posted to respective schools.
Children discussed what to do with the bears, some wanted them to go on the bus.
Nice audio-slides of the children talking. Recorded delivery, track bear’s progress.
Children assumed bear would hibernate during journey.
Children talk for bears, videoed with iSight. Bear taken on board as real person, video and photos taken by primary two children.
Bears went home, over 2000 digital photos came into school.

Kidspiration to write and tell children in partner school.
Children’s work added to scrapbook which returned to original school.
Campbell went to Isaly to do an island tour, vib on Logan Air flight.

Interactive whiteboards, Morag started posting on a blog about there ict activities.
After a hibernation, Spencer and Campbell wanted a blog!

Spensers and Campbell’s activities provided a inspiration for children’s writing, from getting a uniform knitted to going on a boat trip.
Primary 3’s wrote article for calmac magazine, great real audience.
Children made ‘contraption’ technology for transporting the bears, the children wrote at length.
Children took Bears home; on condition they did something interesting and they wrote about it in the bear’s diary.
Comic Life
Flappy le Crow, a french crow from Tobermory visited and only spoke french.
Home School links, holiday activity, bears passed from child to child, lots of parent involvement.

Children created holiday projects, there are so many great ideas attached to this project, too many to type.

Motivation, Approbation, independence, Confidence, Communication, Collaboration

Best thing I’ve seen at Sett

sett06 scottishlearningfestivalblogging teaching bloggingbestpractice