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Classroom ideas

I want all the children I teach to develop a love of learning, not for ticks, badges or scores, but for the buzz of learning.

from: Robert Drummond » Blog Archive » 20% time Robert is giving his pupils free learning time in the same way Google developers get to follow their own interests, I am looking forward to see how this goes.

Here is the exam. Write your own questions. Write your own answers.

from: Seth’s Blog » Blog Archive » Tyler Cowen’s Unusual Final Exam I guess it would take a bit of work to get this going in class, but echo the 20% for me.

When you click on ‘Sign in with Glow’ you will be taken to the Glow login page. Here you can login to Glow using your usual username and password. At Glew we won’t know these details and they stay secure with you.

from: Using Glow to make a Glew Account | Glew.org.uk Charlie Love makes Glew an even more interesting choice. If I was in class I’d give it a go.

Online learning

“Mechanical MOOC” – a free and open introductory course in the programming language Python that weaves together existing resources (content, Web-based study groups, quizzes and so on).

from: The Mechanical MOOC Audrey Watters point to this new MOOC, No degrees or credits or certificates or letters of achievement will be awarded, if I though it would only involve a couploe of hours a week I’d join up.

Mozilla wants to create a generation of webmakers.

from: What we’re up to with Mozilla Webmaker (Open) badges. | dougbelshaw.com/blog Doug now works for Mozilla Foundation. I am all for making more webmakers, and am interested in how badges play out, less sure of badges effectiveness (see the first quote in this post). I suspect badges need to be augmented by personal or social media, I didn’t find codeacedemy badges much of an incentive. I am looking forward to seeing Doug speak at eAssessment Scotland this Friday.

An introduction for new programmers
So easy your human companion could do it too!

from: JavaScript for Cats looks pretty useful, I think I am involved in an intro to HTML, CSS and baby steps JavaScript for computing teacher later this year.

Odds and Ends

Alan O’Donohoe who has produced some great AudioBoos (some of which he kindly tags EDUtalk), is looking for donations to get a pro account:
Audioboo Appeal « Teach Computing.

What I am questioning, however, is whether the logic of Capital and private enterprise should be applied to the institutions of our state. Some things, after all, are public goods.

from: Some thoughts on time, performativity, and the State. | dougbelshaw.com/blog a good question.

Tuttle SVC: Should Teachers Consider TED a Reliable Source? Why, Exactly?

Techy

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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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Over the next few months, our focus will be on setting out the user requirements for Glow Plus and understanding the platform requirements that will underpin it.  The members of the Group bring a wealth of experience but others will have important views to share too.  You can follow and contribute to the discussion on Twitter using #GlowPlus.

Professor Muffy Calder
from: ICT in Education Excellence Group – The view from the Chair

I’ve made the odd #glowplus tweet over the last week or two, rendered useless by: Older Tweet results for #glowplus from:johnjohnston are unavailable. Luckly, if you want to pay attention to me, I’ve also saved them on pinboard. Given the focus on user and platform requirements I though I might expand a bit on the links I tweeted:

We need teachers

Left to its own devices, the mob will augment, accessorize, spam, degrade and noisify whatever they have access to, until it loses beauty and function and becomes something else.

from: Seth’s Blog: A tacky mess: the masses vs. great design

For me, this post points to the fact we need teachers in the system, giving pupils, or even teacher-learners, an online space is not a solution to anything. In these spaces we need teachers to be actively involved. This is what seems to separate the likes of ds106 or Colin Maxwell’s Ed Tech Creative Collective from more automated, impersonal or self-services courses: the online involvement of the leader/teachers with the learner. We need spaces that are designed to make interaction between teacher and learner as easy as possible.

For example, glow provides wordpress blogs, the wordpress technology can tick many boxes (see again ds106). Unfortunately the implementation in glow excludes the use of RSS and aggregation that would allow teachers to keep up with a class full of e-portfolios without many many clicks.

Watch your users

You don’t need to guess what your users might want or how they will experience your product. Just watch them.

from: Shane Pearlman Help Us Help WordPress | Smashing WordPress

This posts is for developers working on extending wordpress, I feel it will fit with any system, the main thrust of the advice is to watch your users, in our case pupils and teachers, using the system.

Most days of my working life I watch teacher, pupils or both using glow. Even watching experienced users I see their mice move to where they expect the next click to be, this is consistant, they are often disappointed. In setting out the user requirements I hope the ICT in Education Excellence Group will be able to take the time to watch users, not just relay on what their knowledge and assumptions. From the example in this post and my own experience, this need not be many users, and not take too long.

Learners owning their own spaces

I want to think of education using a vocabulary of creating, shaping, discovering, sharing, imagining and adapting, not one of owning, selling, earning, adding, collaborating, or marketing.

from: Personalization and Responsibility ~ Stephen’s Web

This, in my mind goes along with:

I’ve been blogging here for over 10 years. On my domain, running my software pushing out HTML when you visit the site on any device and RSS or ATOM when you look at it with Google Reader (which 97% of you do.) I control this domain, this software and this content. The feed is full content and the space is mine. Tim nails it so I’ll make this super clear. If you decide to use a service where you don’t control your content, you’re renting.

Own your space on the Web, and pay for it. Extra effort, but otherwise you’re a sharecropper. – Tim Bray

In a time where we are all gnashing our teeth about Twitter’s API changes that may lock out many 3rd party developers, Google Plus’s lack of content portability or lack of respect for the permalink,

from: Your words are wasted – Scott Hanselman

Which I quoted in a previous post.

Jaye, a member of the Glow – Schools IT Excellence Group, blogged about facebook replacing websites, and

Do we need to spend millions developing intranets like GlowPlus when platforms like this are or will be available.

as I commented I find this

a depressing thought. FB is a closed system centralised , easy to get info into but hard to get it out. There are a lot more interesting and exciting ideas out there. See for example this oldie: http://bavatuesdays.com/a-domain-of-ones-own/

Learners keep ownership and can enter co-operative spaces via aggregation.

I am much more excited about the possibilities the Charlie Love demonstrates with glew where sharing out as well as aggregating in is easy. The potential of using wordpress with the feedwordpress plugin, which is already a glew feature, is huge. Teachers could set up projects where pupils could join in by signing up and tagging posts on their own blog, FeedWordPress pulling together everything in the one place even though it is published in the learner’s own.

I also imagine a learner at some point, exporting their glowplus blog at some point, moving it to a domain of their own, this surely could be part of the picture of a successful Scottish life long learner?

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Last Wednesday we returned to Radio EDUtalk after a summer break. (The break was for live shows, IaninSheffield in particular has kept the podcast active over the summer).

Our first guest of the new session was Laurie O’Donnell, @laurieod talking about ‘Innovation, creativity and technology for learning. Laurie gave a passionated, radical and reasoned argument for Innovation and creativity in Scottish Education which I recommend you listen too.

Most of the audio is pretty good quality, although we were beset by skype dropping out which made me a little too uptight to talk sense at times. Fortunately Laurie’s audio is much clearer than mine, I’ve still a lot to learn about nicecast.

David has already put together an impressive list of participants for future shows which you can read about over at Radio Edutalk. We are very open to suggestions or volunteers for future broadcasts please get in touch, (a comment here, twitter tagged #edutalk or an email to edutalkr at hotmail.co.uk)

Finally if you are interested in contribution to the EDUtalk podcast you can do so in several ways or if you would like to try live broadcasting, hosting or co-hosting a show, please get in touch.

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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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This is going to be another slightly geeky post. The previous one, Testing a new system, was about a way to blog using dropbox and AppleScript folder actions had me thinking about other things that could be done using this sort of system. The way I am doing this relays on having dropbox and a mac that is on when you want it. If you don’t have a mac you might like Wappwolf which is a web service that can do a lot of things with files in your dropbox automatically.

So I already have a system for blogging by dropping files into a folder on my dropbox and was looking around for another idea to play with. There seems to be a few OCR apps for iPhones but I had noticed that Tesseract was available on Google Code and googled around to see how it could be installed and run on a mac. One I found was TesseractOCR Mac a Cocoa Front end to the Tesseract OCR program. I downloaded this and gave it a try. It worked well on my desktop. I then struck gold: Installing and using Tesseract 2.04 on Mac OS X 10.6.6 with Homebrew | Ramble On. This post explains clearly how to install Tesseract on a mac so that it can be used on the command line. It is also a good intro to homebrew.

Homebrew

Homebrew is the easiest and most flexible way to install the UNIX tools Apple didn’t include with OS X.

For someone who has struggled with this sort of thing before, homebrew is pretty straightforward. Installing homebrew is just a case of copying a line of code from the installation page, pasting it into the terminal and pressing return.

imagemagick

Following the instructions from Ramble On I just typed brew install imagemagick in the terminal and hit return. Lots of scary text scrolls by:

Install Imagemagick

installing Tesseract

Once imagemagick was installed I repeated the process for Tesseract.

Testing Tesseract

As I was wanting to figure out how to use my phoe for OCR I took a photo of a bit of newspaper, I used Camera+, the clarity filter, cropped and made the image Black and White:

fr_160
Click the image to see fullsized on flickr

I used Wifi Photo Transfer to grab the photo from my camera and put it on the desktop.

The OCR process is in two steps using the terminal and the newly installed applications:

  1. Convert to 200dpi tiff:
    cd Desktop
    convert -density 200 -units PixelsPerInch -type Grayscale +compress fr_160.jpg fr_160.tif
  2. Preform OCR on the tif
    tesseract fr_160.tif fr_160 -1 eng

I now have two extra files on my desktop, fr_160.tif and fr_160.txt, the txt file contains the OCR text:

(_;oogle is facing fresh criticism after
admitting that it has not deleted all of the
private data, including emails and pass-
words, it secretly collected from internet
users around the UK as it gathered data for
its Street View maps.
The search firm was ordered in Decem-
ber 2010 to delete the private information
hoovered up by its Street View cars from
open Wi-Fi networks. r
But yesterday Google told the Infor-
mation Commissioner’s Office “human
error” had prevented it from erasing the
data, which could include the millions of
emails and passwords .
Google admitted in May 2010 its Street
View cars had “mistakenly” collected pri-

Which is pretty good.

OCR for dropbox

I now can see that tesseract works well and needed to make it work on images added to a particular dropbox folder.

There are a few folder action scripts that come with a mac, there are in /Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts/ several of these deal with images files ad contain routines for handling the dropping of files. These ‘standard’ routines move added files of the correct file type to a subfolder and then pass them on to a sub-routine that deals with the files. I could just duplicated one of these and edit the process_item sub routine. Basically I just scripted the process tested above. I’ve uploaded the script ocr folder action as html, incase anyone will find it useful or fun.

To use the script you put it in the Folder Action Scripts (copy the text of the html file paste it in the appleScript script editor.). Add a folder to dropbox and attached the script to that (right click on the folder and choose Folder Actions Setup…).

Most of my bit of the script just uses do shell script to run the scripts above, the only gotcha was that although I can use convert in the terminal, in a script I have to use the full path to the script:
set ocrscript to

"/usr/local/Cellar/tesseract/3.01/bin/tesseract '" & tif_file & "' '" & tif_file & "' -1 eng"

do shell script ocrscript

This is to do with the way homebrew installs applications and the fact AppleScript doesn’t access commands from /usr/local/….

My script is fairly crude, especially about file endings, if I add :Photo 28-07-2012 12 35 55.jpg to the dropbox folder, it is moved into the processed files folder and Photo 28-07-2012 12 35 55.jpg.tif and Photo 28-07-2012 12 35 55.jpg.tif.txt are created. Not elegant.

The whole process from taking a photo to opening the txt file in dropbox only takes a couple of minutes when using 3G. The system will not deal with columns or more than a single block of text but it does that fairly well. Mostly it was fun to figure out how to do.

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This is a quick test of a alternative way to post to my blog.

I tend to blog from my MacBook. I’ve been testing various iOS systems for blogging on the go. I’ve also read a lot about blogging systems that use Dropbox files to produce a post. In the past I’ve experimented with posting to a blog with AppleScript and thought I could knit something simple together. This consists of several parts:

  • a folder on my Dropbox called BlogThis
  • a Folder Action AppleScript on this folder on my always on work mac.
  • The MetaweblogAPI enabled on this blog and supported by AppleScript.

When a file arrives on Dropbox and syncs to my work mac the Folder Action AppleScript posts it to my blog. It uses the first line of the file as a title. If the file is HTML it posts that, if it is markdown it converts it to HTML first.

NOCs

This post was created with [NOCs](http://www.wisd.com/) on my iPhone. Once I’ve finished a local, iPhone, draft NOCs allows me to move it to any Dropbox folder.

Extending

About 6 years show I was testing posting images via the MetaWeblogApi and it should be easy enough to use a Dropbox folder for that, or to script an FTP upload. This would mean I could add an image from my phone to my Dropbox. This would upload to this sit and could be encorporated into a post. Until the I could use Flickr.

I am not sure if anyone is very interested in this sort of thing. If they are I’ll be able to post more details from a desktop. This is about as long a post as I’d like to write on a phone.

Not quite perfect yet, I had to edit the img tag here. More fun to be had.

Update: it was like magic watching my home mac when posting this from my phone, growl told me that a file had been addd to my dropbox and almost immediately that a file had ben moved (by the work mac).

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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.