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I’ve not posted anything about the Scottish Learning Festival or the associated TeachMeet here. I did do a quick audio review of my two days SLF 2013 on EDUtalk and am starting to post tmslf2013 audio at EDUtalk too.

One of the three things I talked about in my 7 minutes at teachmeet was the new ScotEduBlogs site. I posted plans about this here, ScotEduBlogs Evolving a while back. The new site is now running at the old domain. It seems to be running fairly smoothly with a fair number of posts pulled in so far:

Seb-dashboard

I particularly love the zero spam comments. Although the new site is a blog there is no opportunity for commenting, clicking on titles of articles directs you to the original post.

So far I’ve kept the them very minimal, just using the standard Twenty Twelve theme, with a few adjustments in a child theme, the main one being the ability to toggle the amount of text show for each post. I’d expect some folk just to want to scan down the titles, clicking on the ones that interest them, this will open the original post in a new tab.

Seb View

I’d be happy to get advice on this or any other aspect of how the site runs.

We have refocused the site on professional blogs at the moment, to see how it holds up.

I’ve also installed the jetpack pluging mostly for the mobile theme:

Sebmobile

Please Join In

If you are a Scottish educational blogger and you are not listed please Add Your blog. Please also spread the word if you know any other Scottish educational bloggers who might like to join in.

FeedWordPress a glow wish

As you might know, glow, Scotland’s national intranet is undergoing a refresh at the moment. I believe a new wordpress provider is being commissioned, I really hope that the new service will either alow us to install our own plugins or includes the feedwordpress plugin too. This pluging powers the aggregation at ScotEduBlogs. This would be a wonderful tool for glow. Teachers could aggregate all their pupils eportfolio onto one blog, schools could aggregate posts from their class blogs onto a school one. I also hope they are going to enable the MetaWebLogAPI that allows posting from mobile apps, this is sadly missing from the current glow blogs.

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Mozilla Webmaker

Webmaker moz

Mozilla Webmaker seems to have improved a lot since I last looked. In Doug Belshaw’s Things I Learned This Week newsletter, recently, he pointed out that thimble now supported JavaScript, I went over to lok and found that the site now lists your productions:
Search – for johnjohnston. I knocked up a couple of quick JavaScript examples: 5Dogs & flipcard, the later being an old one.

OpenShift

OpenShift by Red Hat, this is pretty amazing:

OpenShift Online is Red Hat’s public cloud application development and hosting platform that automates the provisioning, management and scaling of applications so that you can focus on writing the code for your business, startup, or next big idea.

What that means is you can easily and cheaply (first 3 free), set up websites with applications. It is pretty geeky for a teacher but there are plenty of instructions, and they work.

I gave it a quick test last week and managed to get a ‘server’ up and running with etherpad is short order: Etherpad Lite. Not sure what I’ll use that for, but I can delete it and start something else if I get to the max of 3 apps.

Openshif wp map

Slightly more useful, on an email list I am on someone asked how, using iPads, could a set of pupils construct a resource with a map and pins with images, text and video. I though this could be done with
WordPress a plugin and google maps. OpenShift allowed me to test this very quickly:

  1. Set Up a new app
  2. Installed WordPress
  3. Added the MyGeoposition plugin
  4. Added some posts and used the plugin interface to add positions to these posts.
  5. Knocked up a quick google maps page to display the blogs RSS, which now had geo info.
  6. Added that to the blog

Here is the blog and the map.

OpenShift made it practical to turn a bit of simple blue-sky thinking into reality.

I am not suggesting that everyone should dive over to openshift and start playing. You need a slight friendship with the terminal, at least have heard of ssh and git (I’ve used ssh a we bit setting up the piratebox and a raspberryPi, heard of git). If you do, the possibilities for trying things out are wide open.

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#edutalk. #slf2013
If you going to the Scottish learning festival this year I would like to invite to contribute to EDUtalk.
EDUtalk is, among other things, an open to any contributions podcast.
Glasgow, Glasgow City, Scotland

This audio file was orginally posted to AudioBoo(m) with the mobile app. It has been downloaded and posted here since audioboom no longer supports free accounts.

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listen to ‘An Invitation to EDUtalk at the Scottish Learning Festival ’ on Audioboo

If you going to the Scottish learning festival this year I would like to invite to contribute to EDUtalk.

EDUtalk is, among other things, an open to any contributions podcast. EDUtalk started at the Scottish learning Festival in 2009 when David Noble and myself invited any of the attendees to submit audio to a podcast SLFtalk (lost when posterous stopped). We were trying to provide alternate sources of information and reflections about the festival and make it as easy as possible for people to both contribute and listen to the contributions of others.

This year given the ubiquity of personal mobile devices is even easier to contribute to EDUtalk.

Here are three simple ways:

  1. Audioboo an application for both iPhone and android, Audioboo allows you to record short segments of audio and upload then to the Audioboo site. If you tag the ‘boo’ #EDUtalk they will be brought in automatically to the EDUtalk site.
  2. Just record some audio on anything a computer on smartphone whatever you got. Then you can email it to audio@edutalk.cc and we’ll take it from there. There are usually a few computers on the floor at a SLF that are connected to the Internet many of these will have built-in mics it should be pretty easy to record something there and email it to edutalk.
  3. Another app you can use is a ipadio, this is an app like audioboo – available for android and iOS to record audio and sent to ipadio. Again if you tag it #edutalk we’ll pick up automatically and post it to edutalk.

So what do people talk about. You could talk about a session you been to. A keynote. You could talk to a colleague or friend.

You can have conversations with anyone about anything educational, at the coffee bar , in a quiet corner. it can be about whatever, educational, topic you like. Your thoughts we want them.

With the huge changes going on in Education this is a chance for us to join in the conversation, to talk across boundaries, of local authority, of hierarchy and think about what really matters today.

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I am going, and looking forward, to TeachMeet SLF 2013


Wednesday 25th September 2013 from 5.30 – 8.00pm

Esk/Forth Room at the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA)

Third Floor, The Optima Building, 58 Robertson Street, Glasgow, G2 8DQ

Handy if you are down (or up) in Glasgow for the Scottish Learning Festival.

I’ve signed up to talk about the ScotEduBlogs reboot and invite folks to listen to and get involved with EDUtalk.

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On Friday I went to this conference in the University of Dundee. David and I were invited to broadcast and record audio from some of the speakers and others at the conference.

There was a pretty packed programme which is continuing online (I’ll be trying to make the ds106 one. I only attended the keynotes as I was busy recording during other sessions. The atmosphere was great, folk from all sectors talking and sharing.

It was a great privilege to get access to the folk I talked to for Radio EDUtalk. As usual I am surprised at how generous folks are with their time and ideas. Lynn Boyle, @boyledsweetie did all the hard work of organising folk to come and talk to me. We also arranged to have a couple of people plus myself for each session, this makes, I believe, for a more interesting conversation.

I enjoyed and learned a great deal from the keynotes, although my notes are mostly single words to remind myself of questions to ask the presenters when we broadcast. I’ll not blog much about these, but you can see Catherine Cronin‘s slide deck. She kicked off the topic of working in the open which was certainly a theme of my conversations throughout the day. Helen Keegan‘s keynote was mind-blowing: getting her students involved in an ARG without their knowledge.

I’ve now posted all the archive audio at EDUtalk with the tag easc13, if you find it half as interesting as I did you are in for a treat.

My other treat was to be able to have a great chat and dinner with David Noble, my edutalk partner and regular contributor Ian Field.

Not being in the classroom I was able to take a holiday to visit the conference. Many classroom teachers would have found it of great value too, if they could have attended. We know that many teachers are happy to give up a day holiday to attend cpd (we hare run well attended summer courses for the past 3 years), it is a pity that class committed teachers could not have a ‘cpd day, get out of class free’ card to be able to attend events like this. e-Assessment Scotland was a free conference and wonderfully organised.

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DS106, digital storytelling 106:

is an open, online course that happens at various times throughout the year at the University of Mary Washington, but you can join in whenever you like and leave whenever you need. This course is free to anyone who wants to take it, and the only requirements are a real computer, a hardy internet connection, preferably a domain of your own and some commodity web hosting, and all the creativity you can muster.

from: About ds106

DS106 can be difficult to understand without becoming involved. It is easy to bounce off the surface of animated gif twitter chat, but there is a lot of learning going on both on the surface and by looking s little deeper.

It is worth having a look at the syllabus.

It covers the basics of setting up an online presence and space for the storytelling you will be come involved in, a blog, twitter and flickr accounts and the like.

The course then goes through theory and practice of digital storytelling, covering design, images, video and audio. In each section of the course participants can add to the assignments as well completing them, the course is, to some extent, built by the students.

What, in my opinion, has made ds106 stand out from the crowd of bigger online courses is the atmosphere and the guidance provided by the instructors at UMW, other locations and from repeat students. The dedication of the instructors to model what they expect from students and to openly comment on the students published work is phenomenal. What is more they do this for open online students. They have also managed to install this work ethic in the participants, there is a high level of engagement between learners and some blurring of roles.

The other exciting thing about ds106 is the riffing of one participant on artefacts produced by another, participants are encouraged to share their creations with cc licences and to remix the work of others. They are also encouraged, required for students at UMW, to give the back story, working methods and ideas surrounding their assignments.

This iteration of DS106 is a we bit different, there are no instructors:

What we are going to do is to publish every Monday a suggested set of activities and creative assignments that you are free to do as you see fit or interested. These are republications of previous materials from ds106 courses taught at the University of Mary Washington since 2011, but this time around, there are no registered students, just the open folks.

from: Getting Closer to Headless #ds106 – CogDogBlog

I’ve deliberately used the word participants above as there is a blurring or rolls between instructors, students and open-online-participants in a normal ds106 course, this one will push that a bit.

I’ve had a huge amount of fun (my ds106 blog), learned a lot about digital stroytelling and online learning dipping in and out of ds106, if you are interested in online education, learning about digital media and openness I cannot recommend it enough.

DS106 Fall 2013 Headless starts on the 26th of August. You can find out what to do here: Coming Soon! The Headless ds106 Course

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Summary (TL:DR)

  • ScotEduBlogs is a site with aggregates Scottish Educational Blogs. This allows one to keep up with many blogs in one place.
  • ScotEduBlogs is being redeveloped, simplified and streamlined, repositioning to be a hub of educators blogs (which reflects its original use).
  • I’d appreciate anyone interested looking at the new site, http://scotedublogs.org (temporary url) and letting me know what you think or adding your blog if appropriate.

History

Way back at the beginning of time, well about 2005, there was a first(?) flourishing of blogging in Scottish education lead by Ewan Macintosh.

This lead to a wiki being developed, scotedublogs where folk could add their blogs, organised by Local Authority.

It became popular and this lead to the need for something better than just following links, so after some discussion here Robert Jones, helped by Pete Liddle and cheered on by myself created ScotEduBlogs, a site that aggregated and disseminated blog posts from around the ScotEduBlogosphere.

The site has been very successful in pulling together about 400 blogs for the last few years.

SEB as was was first hosted by Robert and later with sponsorship from LTS and the SQA got its own server. As of 2010 the site is sponsored by the SQA.

Over the last couple of years the site has not developed much, the SQA asked for a professional stream to try and highlight the professional posts from the ones from schools, classes and pupils and we (Robert) implemented this with a pro page.

Robert and I discussed, for time to time, making changes but we never settled on a direction, and recently site did not get many of the new Scottish educator blogs added. The site has stagnated a wee bit over the last year or two, there are a couple of problems displaying content that we did not address (mostly media embeds).

Another problem was that SEB had trouble with glow blog feeds, I am not sure how that is going to work out long term as the future of glow blogs is not too clear but personally I feel it would be great if Scottish educators had a good blogging system to use for their professional development.

Development plans

Recently I had some ideas for redeveloping the site, discussing them with Robert. This lead to a bit of thinking about how much work was involved and the fact that Robert would bear the burden of the development. Given that he now has more professional and personal commitments I suggested simplifying the site and moving it to wordpress using FeedWordPress as the aggregator. Robert is happy with this.

This is going to lead to some changes, particularly in the focus of the site. The site was originally setup when there were few pupil or class blogs in Scotland, now with eportfolios there are thousands, too many to aggregate without a lot more resources than we have. The way glow blogs server their RSS was not compatible with the site. It is compatible with the new one. I am starting out with the subset of blogs already in SEB that are tagged as professional. You can see a list of Contributing blogs.

The next steps would be to add in school and class blogs. Individual pupil blogs could be added to a list, filterable if possible but not aggregated.

I’ve started the process at http://scotedublogs.org and would appreciate any thoughts and feedback.

Hopefully this will lead firstly to some extra professional blogs being added. You can Add Your blog now, Hopefully too it will become a more streamlined and useful, from the professional/cpd point of view, site.

The look and feel of the site is basic at the moment, again I am open to suggestions for how to take this forward.

The idea at present is to run http://scotedublogs.org in parallel with http://scotedublogs.org.uk for a month or so and if there are no problems and the new site seems useful we will switch to the new system.

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I had a a couple of nice example of how well google image search can work with uploaded images and a couple of descriptive words. Here is one.

While walking today I saw clouds of butterflies, although I tried to get a good photo I failed miserably.

This was the best one:

red-argus-poor

I uploaded this to the google image search, which gave me good feedback on my photo skills:

Gresult 1

Google thinks my butterfly is a bear, dog or fish!

The addition of a few keywords nails it:

Gresult 2

A google wrinkle worth teaching I think.

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Last year Radio #EDUtalk was at the eAssessment Scotland 2012.

I had a great time and we broadcast some great folk and recorded for the podcast: eAS12 | EDUtalk

This year the Programme looks really interesting.

Kenji Lamb has asked us to cover the conference again! I am really excited about going again and getting into some great conversations that will be a bit over my head.

Last year it worked, IMO, really well by having two knowledgable folk in most of the broadcasts (ie as well as me). I hope to repeat this method again.

You will be able to listen to the live stream on Friday 23 August.

We are also going to run a couple of eAssessment Scotland episodes on Radio #EDUtalk on the Wednesdays before and after the conference.

As usual I am amazed at being able to talk to interesting folk just by sharing the conversation.