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

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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.

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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.

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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.