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A couple of weks ago I had posted More Posterous Worries I had tweeted to @posterous and mailed the help to no avail. Then a week ago I tweeted to Sachin Agarwal @agarwal and got this response :

Agarwal Conversation

Sachin was a founder and CEO of @posterous. I had amazing support from him at the start of EDUtalk but was surprised he had time for a few emails. Not only that, the missing player for mp3 urls that was troubling us was fixed. (I still need to update all those post but new ones are fine).

API 2

Happy with this, today I though I’d update the script that posts audioBoo to posterous. Unfortunately there seems to be a problem with curl and the current version of php running here. Rather than try to work around that I’ve changed track and created an AppleScript that:

  1. Downloads the rss feed from http://audioboo.fm/tag/edutalk.rss
  2. Loops through it checking for new boos
  3. Posts these to EDUtalk, marking them private.
  4. Keeps a list of published boos so that I’ll later be able to download for the Radio EDUtalk AutoDJ archive.

I plan to have the script running all the time and checking each hour for new boos. It seems to work fine, not that it does anything clever like error checking, but given a bit of time I can fix that.

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Lots of information about glow and glow2 trickling through twitter recently. There seems to be a change in timescale for Glow2. This was discovered: View Notice – Public Contracts Scotland which is a strange way to find out about the change, especially after Mike Russell’s initial announcement how Glow will be developed in September 2012 on YouTube. That announcement and the following summit last October lead me to expect more regular and open engagement.

Glew

On monday Charlie Love sent me an interesting link and which I then discussed tonight on Radio EDUtalk, after which Charlie tweeted:

Glew Tweet

What is Glew

Glew is beta software of a single sign-on framework which can be used to integrate Google Apps for Education and other services such as WordPress Blogs, Media Wiki, Moodle and many more. This is a test site so please accept that authentication and users may be removed during testing.

So pretty much a glow 2 style site with a lot of tools I’d expect from Glow 2. Although a Beta you get a really good idea of how this would work. The most interesting feature, to me was the expandability of the site, I asked Charlie about the possibility of adding a wiki to the feature set, in 15 minutes he had added a MediaWiki (the software used in Wikipedia!)

Glew

I highly recommend you pop over to Glew and have a look around.

Hopefully the 15 months that the Government have to work on glow will let them build something like this, if I was the Cabinet Secretary I’d give Charlie a call.

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I’ve been a big posterous fan since June 29, 2008 since then I’ve blog with and about posterous a lot.

More importantly it is at the heart of EDUtalk where there are over 600 posts of educational podcast episodes of course Radio Edutalk.

Six weeks ago posterous was aquired by twitter and I had some Posterous Worries. I am now more worried as a few things have happened.

  1. The stuff that makes the edutalk.cc domain work with our edutalk posterous site broke. A bit of reading and guess work got it fixed. The real worry was that both a tweet and email to posterous got no response. In the past I have been amazed at the quick reaction by the posterous team to both problems and suggestions, to help with SLFtalk, the precursor to EDUtalk they added a feature to their API overnight.
  2. Over the last couple of weeks the posterous API 1 for posting seems to have broken. AudioBoos tagged edutalk are normally posted to edutalk via the api by a script. This has stopped working, admittedly I am still using the depreciated API 1 rather than the new one, but as far as I know, the old one was just meant to keep working.
  3. When posting audioboos and phlogs to edutalk we relied on the fact that a url to an mp3 file would result in the posterous player being used to allow the audio to be played. This seems to have stopped working.

I know that we have been lucky to have a wonderful tool like posterous for free. I expected it to go pro at some point and would have been more than happy to pay for the service. I pay for hosting for this and other sites, I pay for flickr…

I am not sure where to go for this, in the last Posterous Worries post I listed the features that we need. I’ve asked the question on Quora: Is there another service like posterous which allows anyone to email content and has an API? – Quora. I’ve still not got an idea.

Some of this I guess we could sort with wordpress and some plugins. The disk space for large files will be a problem. The submit audio via email will be a problem. I am open to ideas?

I have found Posterous Backup Tool for Mac and spent the £2.49 in the mac app store. This worked a treat and I now have 600 odd posts and the audio that was posted to edutalk (not audioboo or ipadio files) in a >1GB backup, I just need to figure out what to do with it.

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I’ve been aware of Radiowaves for a long time, it was one of the inspirations for Radio Sandaig and started me podcasting. I have not followed the development of the site with a great deal of attention but have been aware that it has been evolving in interesting ways. This is what they say about themselves:

Radiowaves is the social learning environment that provides social media for education. It enables schools to create and safely share videos, podcasts and blogs. With a free Radiowaves website you can easily start school blogging, join national campaigns and develop digital literacy skills.
…
Over 50,000 pupils use Radiowaves regularly to broadcast their school podcasts and videos to friends and family via the safe social network.

I’ve also met Mark Riches CEO at Radiowaves (and founding director of NUMU which looks interesting too) a few times over the years and he talked about RadioWaves on EDUtalk at BETT. At that point he told me that they were working on an iOS app and I asked him to let me know when it came out. On Friday he did. I am really impressed with this free app.

I’ve not really got my head round the Radiowaves site, its features and how teacher and pupils sites work together, but I love the app and though it worth posting some information about it.

You can get a free account at Radiowaves, this allows unlimited blogging for a school but you are limited to 30 minutes of audio and video. I created a free account to test this app. I didn’t read any of the help or explanations either in the app or online, just clicked around.

Makewaves

Makewaves 1

The app is called Makewaves (iTunes link) and is free. It runs on an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad. On the ipad it runs as an iphone sized app but can be used at 2x size to fill the screen.

I really like the look and feel of this application. Simple and straightforward.A lot of recent apps that I’ve downloaded seem to be simpler and cleaner looking, less 3d drop shadows and gradients, more space and less colour.

The app is split into 5 main sections accessed through the toolbar along the bottom:MakeWaves, Buzz, Post, My Stuff and Settings.

The MakeWaves screens shows three streams of posts from the site, primary, secondary and Things to Do. Clicking on thumbnails lets you access the content on the app.

The section I was really interested in was the Post one, but before I went there I need to visit the Settings and add my account details, this was straightforward although I didn’t notice the setting for default item which was story rather than blog. I am still not too sure of the difference between the two.

Makewaves 2

As soon as I saw the Post screen I liked it. 4 simple buttons at the top to upload media, Pictures from the camera roll, video, audio and the camera. The video button lets you choose from the camera roll or take a new video.

In seconds I had taken screenshot, used the Photo button to choose it, written a line of text and posted it.

I followed by testing the audio button, the app lets you record a sound and upload it, again a very straightforward process.

I then tested Video, and used an iPad and iPod Touch as well. All preformed beautifully.

Later on I used 3g to post a short audio file from outside. It worked a treat, uploading quickly.

An interesting feature of the app and radiowaves generally is the teacher approval. I was acting, I think, as both teacher and pupil so had to approve my own posts. The process is pretty simple on the radiowaves site and there is a in app purchase (£1.49) that lets you approve your pupils on the Buzz screen.

The My Stuff screen gives you a view of your stories and blogs, lets yuo know the ones that are still awaiting approval and the work of others in your station. You can also see if anyone liked your work.

The setting screen is straightforward, the place you can log in, easy too to log out and allow the same device to be used by more than one pupil.

I am extremely impressed with this app. It is the first one I have seen that allows posting of images, video and sound. (When I saw the posterous app I immediately put in a feature request for audio recording).

The application, when used on an iphone or ipod touch, is not built for long form blogging, but it is ideal for the much more interesting, in my opinion, mobile and group publishing of rich media. This is done in a way that minimises the technical barriers allowing users to concentrate on digital storytelling.

This could be an amazing tool for trip blogging. It should even be possible to have, say, several ipod touch out on a trip using one iphone’s tethering to allow mobile blogging by a group.

Finally having struggled and mostly failed to find a simple mobile blogging method for glow blogs it would be great to have a similar app in he new glow.

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HyperCard a tool so beautiful it still makes me cry. Although I say “used”… Sam, Richard, Kris and Stephen were our proper programmers… I tended to join in excitedly, but mainly made black & white graphics or icons.

By 1997 we’d made what you’d call a CMS ( Content Management System ) in HyperCard. It made making web sites easy. So easy that school kids did it, in their Mosaic browsers and even won awards. I remember one class project that was a site about World War II, that just grew and grew. You could start to see what all the fuss about HyperText was

from: Prograph – Back in the Day | Tom Smith’s: theOTHERblog Gone so archive link

Tom Smith’s post is mostly about Prograph, which I know nothing about. I still use SuperCard, a HyperCard clone, most days.

HyperCard keeps popping up in unexpected places. It is the reason I got interested in ICT (other than producing worksheets that pupils could actually read in the age of bandas).

The idea of a “Programming for Poets” application is still very attractive. There have been a few tries, TileStack was an attempt to recreate HyperCard online with JavaScript. I still wonder why Apple, 1. abandoned HyperCard and 2. have not made a HyperCard for either OSX or iOS. Maybe this Apple Patents A Tool Allowing Non-Developers To Build Apps | TechCrunch will come to fruition.

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A few days ago I noticed that Alan Levine is mashing up ds106 assignments withThe ds106 Remix Machine. This, briefly, allows you to take an assignment from DS106 and add a filter. Shades of John Davit’s Learning Event Generators.

For example this remix: stop frame photography [remixed]: Uncle Bob — Remix Machine takes this original assignment stop frame photography and adds this remix card:

Uncle bob Remix

Use Existing Media

Remix is using the created media of others – it does not count as a remix if you use your own assignment work. As raw material for your remix, use media from examples created by other ds106 participants for this assignment.

I’ve not ds106ed for a while so, just for fun (is there another reason?), I took one of a series of images from here: ds106: Stop frame photography by Rowan Peter and did this:

Cogmole

Mole photo from Mole Flickr Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

This could be a lot better, but it didn’t take long. I am tempted to dust off a copy of flash and make a wack a ds106 mole game;-).

DS106 has been looking very interesting of late, especially the Kickstarter project which has gathered a pile of money for developing DS106 in lots of interesting ways. (I am in for a t-shirt;-)). This looks like making ds106 increasingly interesting as time goes on.

Next time ds106 runs I am going to give it another shot, set up wordpress blog to make my tagging work a bit better. and have some more fun.

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Assignment 8 – This Is The End – #edtechcca8

You must summarise what you have gained or achieved through participating in The Educational Technology Creative Collective. You have a choice of how you do this.

Either

make a visual presentation of what you’ve gained / achieved – use a tool of your choice, a video, Prezi, Animoto, etc

or

make an audio recording of your experiences

I’ve choose the audio option.

See my other posts for edtechcc.

I’ve not got much to add about the course except to reinforce that, if you are interested in ed tech and Colin Maxwell does something like this again I highly recommend it.

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Flickr cc Picmonkey

Every so often something nice happens:

Which made me look again at the flickr CC search toy. A while back I posted about Picnik closing and then about PicMonkey which is a picnik replacement. The nice folk at PicMonkey let me know that the picmonky API is the same as the picnic one, so I thought I’d swap them out. As you can see from the screenshot, if the images found in the flickr CC search toy allow editing (ie NoDerivs is not in the License) there is a link to edit the picture in PicMonkey. I’ve changed the way this works so that PicMonkey will load the medium sized photo with the attribution stamped on it, rather than the original flickr image. Before I was expecting pupils to be able to add the attribution themselves if editing the picture.

I’ve also added a checkbox to the search form to only search for pictures you can edit.

The code behind this, php and javascript is a very messy affair. I intend to work thorough the whole thing sometime and make it more efficient etc.

If you have ideas of how this could be more useful to primary aged pupils please let me know.

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Teachers use of the iPads in their lessons began primarily as substitutive in nature, but has seen an increased in augmented uses and in some cases, teachers even redefining how they teach.  Teachers across the board desired more training and support when it comes to integration of the iPad in their daily lessons.

Student research and questioning suggests that it has transformed learning at an even greater rate than that of teaching.  They have discovered new and creative ways to use the iPad to help them learn and collaborate…

from: Data and Analysis of a High School 1:1 iPad Program. «

Lots more interesting information in the post I was particularly interested in these two points. Based on my very brief visits to our, smaller, ipad 1-2-1 project classes I think we are seeing similar things. If the pupils are leading the way in finding new and creative ways to use the iPad to help them learn this should lead to an increased in augmented uses by teachers. Listening to some of our younger pupils talking about how they use the iPad I realised that my old comfort zone of knowing more about the tech that the learners has gone!

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Last Sunday in the Observer I was reading Why all our kids should be taught how to code and have been following with great interest the boos by Alan O’Donohoe (teknoteacher) Submitted to EDUtalk
I am also interested in the difference between digital literacy/ fluency and coding beautifuly described by Josie Fraser in response to Mr Gove’s surprising enthusiasm for coding SocialTech: Computer Science is not Digital Literacy:

It’s dismaying then, to see in a week where we are seeing a huge move forward in the promotion of technology and a fresh look at how ICT as a subject area is designed and implemented in schools, to see digital literacy being used as an interchangeable term for computer science skills.

With the introduction of iPads into the mix as a really powerful tool for curricular ict. I am also intrigued by the tension between this back to programming and the use of ict to support learning. Brief visits to the primary classes piloting 1-2-1 have been exciting and gone a long way to convincing me that this is an important direction for ict in education.
Although I hope the iPads are only for consumption myth has been put to bed I’ve been wondering if there are ways they can support programming in education. It has often been pointed out that the reluctance of Apple to allow apps that produce executable code will hinder their use for coding.
(As a primary teacher this is well out of my depth or experience but fun as a sort of thought experiment.)
Some of the efforts to enthuse pupils and others in coding have started with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. (Hackasaurus and the like links). I though that might be a good place to start.
photoI’ve blogged before about Textastic – Text, Code and Markup Editor with Syntax Highlighting – FTP, SFTP, Dropbox – for iPad, the web page title says most of it.

a challenge of sorts

I though I’d give it a go and create a page or two with some sort of JavaScript stuff. To keep things nice and simple I thought I’d use the Dropbox functionality to publish the pages created to my Dropbox public folder. In a teaching situation this would avoiding FTP uploading.

templates and images

The first nice thing I noticed was that textastic supplies a few basic html templates which gets you off to a nice start. I created a folder in textastic then some files. Next I clicked on the globe to access my Dropbox. You see a listing of a local folder and one in Dropbox it is simple to transfer files back and forth. You can also pull images in from Dropbox to the textastic folder if you want to added images to your web page. This means a trip to the Dropbox app to add photos to that folder from the iPad photos.
I could not find an app on my iPad that would let me resize images where I could see pixels rather than manipulating with my fingers, but I am sure such an app exists.

auto complete

Textastic supports autocomplete in a TextMate like way type a < and say a p it pops a list of possible tags, selecte one and it is completed. The app then put the cursor in a good position, eg between the opening and closing tag of a paragraph to ready to type in the first parameter of a link. With more complex tags it wil select the first edit then tab through the other section indicated by a wee triangle:


update: the first image I uploaded Looked ok on the iPad but was unreadable on my desktop. I’ve replaced it. Image editing for blogging is a bit of a challenge on the iPad, but I am learning.
It was pretty simple to create a HTML page and link it to a CSS file in the same folder in textastic, easy to publish both to Dropbox. Textastic allows you to locally preview and it is easy enough to switch to Safari too.

JavaScript challenge

Since I know little JavaScript this should be a fairy realistic test of the iPad as a tool to learn coding. I decided to try assignment 3 from Mashups: Remixing the Web a course from New York University. The assignment was to create a lolcats memory game. I decided to make one with Flickr images. There are a few good hints in the assignment but I need to do a few things: look up JavaScript references on the web, preview and debug. Reference was easy to do by switching to safari and searching. Textastic supports preview and firebug. I also turned on the safari debug console. Textastic supports auto complete for JavaScript too.
The result is not a polished or complex piece of work, but I’ve stretched myself a wee bit. And managed to stick to the iPad throughout.

update a couple of tweets from @fraserspeirs who will know a lot more about this than me:


– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Crow Rd,Glasgow,United Kingdom