Kind: Articles

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

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I’ve come across a couple of new, simple to use, almost throw away blogging tools recently:

Throwww

Throwww – The Simplest Blog. An example post: Minimal Blogging engines – Throwww.com

Throwww is the easiest way to write something and share it. Just start writing, post it, and share the url.

Posts on Throww can be tied to your twitter account, as my examples, or anonymous.

Authpad

Authpad my example
Minimal Blogging engines – johnjohnston’s Pad.

Authpad (beta) is a frictionless approach to blogging. Our goal is to take away any distraction that keeps you from focusing on what’s important — producing quality content.

Authpad has more of a traditional username/password setup, comments via disqus and themes.

Both support markdown for writing and work on iOS (I tested with an iPad).

Both also get away from the relative complexity of most blogging platform’s ‘dashboards’ and editors. Authpad has a slightly less minimal editor, as it has a toolbar:

Authpad Toolbar

Whereas with throwww you just type on the home page. Once you type a bit the Save button and a Formatting Help link show up, the latter will give you markdown help.

Authpad also gives you an option to publish as website or a blog style.

throww_editing
authpad_editing

 

Both, in my limited testing, are straightforward and easy to use. I an not sure that they are tools for the classroom, markdown and hosting images elsewhere might be a wee bit complex for pupils. They might fit with some teachers for their own publishing, certainly they are quick to use.

I am also not sure where they fit with the current trend to reclaim ones data from web 2, or a Domain of One’s Own or Un-Web 2.0 which I am finding interesting at the moment.

A couple of other similar things, Calepin which I’ve not tried and Scriptogr.am which I tested a while back: John Johnston | scriptogr.am.

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This is an invitation to those attending the Scottish Learning festival, TeachMeet SLF 2012 or TeachMeet SLF fringe to share their thoughts and reflections via EDUtalk.

Three years ago, David Noble and myself organised, SLFtalk – Audio publishing by attendees at the Scottish Learning Festival, the idea was to gather reports and reactions from the floor of the Festival from anyone who wanted to join in.

This developed into EDUtalk – Audio publishing by educators, using mobile devices which has now collected around 400 audio recordings about education.

This year, I am not going to the Festival or TeachMeet, I’ve a 25th anniversary to celebrate and although I’ve spent the odd anniversary at TeachMeet before, I am not going to miss this one.

I realise that I’ve been very privileged to attend SLF for a number of years (Thanks to MasterClass, Glow, Moira McArthur now NLC council ) and not many teacher get the chance. This was one of the reasons behind SLFtalk.

This year

I would like to know what is going on. I am sure I’ll read blogs posts and news from Education Scotland but I would also like to hear from folk attending. I am sure this is true for many others.

Why Audio?

I believe that audio has some advantages:

  • For the listener it can be listened to when doing something else, the dishes or driving. It also brings an extra dimension of information from the sound of the voice.
  • For the recorder it is quicker to get ideas down by a quick recording than it is to write. It is also very easy to publish.

So if you are going to the Scottish Learning festival, or attending TeachMeet SLF 2012 or TeachMeet SLF fringe please send us your thoughts and reflections.

How to contribute

Contributions to EDUtalk are supposed to be easy to do, we are not looking for polished pieces of audio, although these will not be turned down;-)

There are 3 main ways of contributing now:

  1. Email any audio to post@EDUtalk.posterous.com
  2. Tag an Audioboo edutalk
  3. Tag an ipadio phlogs edutalk

There are of course many many ways to record audio, most devices, computers,smart phones and mp3 players have applications do do this. You could use any one of these, all you need to do is save an audio file, mp3, aif, wav etc and mail it to post@EDUtalk.posterous.com. If you can send an mp3 and save yourself some audio, but any audio format will do.

Audioboo and iPadio both have smart phone applications that are free. You just need to download then onto your phone, record audio and tag that audio edutalk, Audioboo limits you to 2 minutes with a free account but it is surprising how much information you can give in 2 minutes.

What to talk about

Anything you want really, as long as it is about education. Some ideas:

  • A conversation with a colleague following a formal session
  • chat with a presenter after their session
  • you own reflections on a session attended
  • about a stall or product on floor (no adverts!)
  • conversation with colleague about recent teaching and learning
  • a group discussion that you are part of.
  • or something else…

Pick up the mic or phone

Please do, I think we need to hear from all sort of folk talking about all sorts of things in Scottish education. If you are a regular voice or have never published anything, HMIE inspector or probationer, leader writer or blogger please think of adding your voice to the EDUtalk mix.

Cross posted at http://JohnJohnston.info/blog and http://edutalk.info

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The reader, who asked not to be identified, is an ICT co-ordinator at a secondary school. He tells how his “image-conscious” headmaster was seduced by a scheme that allowed all the school’s staff to replace their laptop computers with an iPad 2.

Our source says staff were initially thrilled at the prospect. “Most staff are IT illiterate and jumped at the chance of exchanging their laptop for an iPad,” he writes.

Now, however: “the staff room is full of regret.”

What’s gone wrong? The biggest obstacle is that staff still cling to old documents and resources created in software such as Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, and of course there aren’t fully-fledged versions of the Office apps available for the iPad as yet. “Some staff are needing to produce documents and resources by remoting in [to a PC] on an iPad,” our source reveals. “Trying to operate Microsoft Word using a remote app that dumps you out of the connection is a nightmare.”

from: The school that swapped its laptops for iPads… and wants to switch back | PC Pro blog

There is at least a The iPad experiment hasn’t been a total disaster paragraph and a good number of comments explaining correcting and discussion.

It looks like the school jumped into iPads without doing any research to see if iPads fitted their needs. Staff welded to MS office for essential tasks will struggle with an iPad. Most of the problems could be surmounted with a bit of research into replacement apps (pages, keynote, Haiku deck and many many more) and distribution (dropbox, which they use, and webdav (Otixo adds webdav to dropbox) and some staff development/training.

Personally I would not yet like to give up a desktop/laptop for an iPad in all circumstances and certainly would have hated to be pushed into making that jump without training and practise.

Sidenote, One of the commenters remarks that tablets are for consumption and not creation. This was I though buried. From a few visits to the primary classrooms piloting iPads in North Lanarkshire I see a whole lot of creation by pupils going on.

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David Baugh points to Pinnacle studio iPad video editor.

I was delighted to find a more feature rich video editor for free in Pinnacle Studio and even better – for now it is free.

from: Learning in Touch » Blog Archive » Free Video Editing iPad App from Pinnacle Studio with multi layer video David has a great Digital Storytelling page too.

I’ve mostly though about MOOCs as cpd , but…

So, what does this have to do with K-12? Everything. Or at least a lot. If this is the wave or a wave of the future of learning and teaching then this is something that we need to pay attention to. If the job of parents, K-12 educators and the public school system is to prepare students for the environments they will be expected to work and learn in, then we ought to pay very close attention.

from: What is a MOOC? The Canadian Connection.

This and the others in the Honest Logos set made me laugh, but perhaps an interesting take on the design a logo activity?

Mcdiabetes

image Creative Commons — Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported — CC BY-NC 3.0
from: Honest logos on the Behance Network

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I am having an early start today. A while back we had Kenji Lamb on Radio EDUtallk. He kindly invited us to the eAssessment Scotland 2012 conference to do some recording.

The conference has a really interesting looking program. Some of the participants joined David and I for our regular live show earlier this week which was fascinating. We hope to be broadcasting live on Radio EDUtalk throughout the day of we can. Hopefully we will tweet: #edutalk the segments as they go live.

If you are listening live the quality may be better with iTunes, WMP or other non browser method as we will be switching between live and Auto DJ regularly.

Blogged with a hand knitted system

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Haiku Deck is

the simple new way to create stunning presentations – whether you are pitching an idea, teaching a lesson, telling a story, or igniting a movement, it’s fast, fun and simple for anyone to use.

Says Haiku Deck. It is an iPad application for making presentations. Very simple to use and the defaults look nice.

That took about three minutes to knock up. The main feature, based on three minutes use, seem to be a nice search to find images to match your words. Looks like it searches Flickr and some other sources. It does some sort of cc search. I don’t think it quite respects the license though. This image:

Winner

By David Muir is licensed under a Creative Commons — Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic — CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license. Unfortunately the app does not seem to do the attribution for you.

Haiku deck says:

Where do Haiku Deck images come from?
Haiku Deck finds images from across the Internet that photographers have licensed under the Creative Commons license. Some Creative Commons images carry a “not for commercial use” restriction. If you’re making a Haiku Deck for commercial use, please be sure to turn the “commercial use only” filter.

I am not sure that is in the spirit of the attribution part of the license?

It does however make a very presentable presentation pretty quickly, saving to the web, announcing by twitter and providing an embed code. It also exports to PDF via mail.

The price is right, free with some paid for themes, the app is extremely easy to use and if they added attribution to the images it would be even better.

Update, my bad: I had adjusted the embed code to fit the iframe into my blog the attribution appears on the Haiku Deck website: Radio #EDUtalk – A Haiku Deck from Giant Thinkwell and on the embed if you don’t mess about with the code to resize the iFrame. Apologies to Giant Thinkwell.

So here is the attribution copied from the Radio #EDUtalk – A Haiku Deck from Giant Thinkwell page:

Much to my embarrassment I asked about this on twitter: Twitter / kleneway: @johnjohnston @HaikuDeck you …

Update 2: I’e also noticed a nice feature, republish a slideshow with an extra slide updates the original and the embed.

Blogged with a hand knitted system

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Jaye commented here:

My other thoughts are about the need for anything at all. Are we past the age of intranets? Should we concentrate on disseminating good practice and let teachers use all the miriad tools available now and in the future

(Jaye had already expressed this sentiment on her blog).

It is a compelling idea. If I was still in the classroom I am pretty sure I’d be happy with using some of these tool myself rather than a set of nationally provided ones. When I was in the classroom I tended to use unconventional tools, self hosted pivot blogs and a pmwiki for example. I was happy researching and choosing what I needed.

However there are a couple of problems with this approach.

  1. Services are often blocked in schools. I recall building A flickr CC search toy so that my bloggers could easily attribute pictures for their posts. Unfortunately I could not persuade the Local Authority that Flickr was a suitable site for children.
  2. time: I was naturally inclined to spend a lot of time on the web, researching, setting up and playing around with the tools. Many teachers do not have that interest, time or sometimes the confidence in their ict skills.

These two problems were partially tackled by Glow. Glow provided a set of tools, eventually including blogs and wikis, that were otherwise unavailable in some Local Authorities. Glow also did. A great deal to encourage the penetration of ICT into the curriculum. Partially by giving teacher access to the tools but also by proving a fair bit of cash and other resources for training. The national push to get folk using Glow filtered via the Local Authorities into schools and classrooms.

I also believe that being a member of a community can be useful. A sense of being in it together, helping each other and having fellow practitioners with similar experiences and challenges could be provided by a national intranet. Although I am fairly indifferent to political nationalism I do feel identified as a Scottish educator.

Jaye also commented:

So far though, I can’t see how we could better Glew, or something similar.

No argument form me there.

Blogged with a hand knitted system

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Apple’s original software construction kit: HyperCard turns twenty-five years old today | TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog

IMG_8585 by tantek
Attribution-NonCommercial License

I missed Hypercard’s birthday yesterday. I can’t begins to explain how this application has affected my computing life. HyperCard lowered the bar to making ‘software’ on a mac. When I started using it I quickly was able to make games and tools for teaching. The mailing list taught me how useful an online community was, hundreds of free files showed the power of sharing, and I even learnt HTML using a HyperCard stack.

Gone but not forgotten.

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Education Secretary Michael Russell has appointed the Chief Scientific Adviser Professor Muffy Calder to convene an ICT Excellence Group to consider the future development of the schools’ intranet ‘Glow’.

As previously indicated, the new ICT excellence group will draw on the experience and expertise of end-users, and educational technology experts to scope the long-term user-centred future of Glow.

from: Engage for Education » Archive » Glow – Schools IT Excellence Group set up (update 6 Jul 2021 link broken: archive.org)

The list of members  (archive.org) was posted yesterday. There are some great choices, personally the inclusion of Charlie Love give me great hope for the technology behind glow being flexible and adaptive.

I was a wee bit disappointed that mainstream primary education was not represented. I’ve also noticed, from the twitters a few other omissions.

@fredcoyle:

ICT Excellence Group – Am I the only one really disappointed in lack of Primary on this group?? We were pioneers surely ??

@atstewart:

ICT Excellence Group – Who on this group has a thorough insight into additional support needs and the role of ICT in support?

@Carolgolf

Very blinkered. There is more to ICT than Glow. Too many are excluded from Glow. FE, as usual, not represented.

@SusanMcAuley

ICT has massive positive effect on ASN pupils but their needs are different great to see teachers on panel can we ASN as well?

@atstewart

Make up and balance seems wrong somehow. No problem with those on group but it needs more balance, spread & depth

Of all the folk on the list I know, or have read/listened too, I would not want any to be omitted but the list could certainly do with some additions.

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Blogging Au Plein Air,  after Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
Attribution License

Glew is becoming more interesting everyday. The MetaWeblogAPI is now working. This is a big deal. The MetaWebLogAPI is the code that allows you to post to a blog through a variety of software rather than through the web interface. I am writing this post on my iPad using the blogpress app. This will publish this post via the MetaWeblogAPI. I usually use textmate on my mac to write blog posts. It uses the MetaWeblogAPI too. 
Recently I’ve been asking primary pupils about how many of them own an iPod touch, often in the upper primary class it is the majority of the class.
Glow blogs never managed to have this feature enabled. A great pity. The potential for pupils blogging on the hoof is a great one. Imagine a school trip. The teacher has an iPhone, this is set to be a hotspot. Pupils are posting pictures and text while they are on the trip. iPod equipped pupils could be updating their eportfolios by grabbing photos of their artwork as it is produced. Glew blogs can now also be public on the Internet, so you can see my first Mobile test made with BlogPress on my iPhone and a Blogsy test made from an iPad.  – Posted using BlogPress from my iPad