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River Tales

I am listening so some great pupil podcasts on Mr O’D’s class posterous pupils take on the role of a river and tell their life story:
Rachael does Rivers and
Kyle and the Nile for example. They show, in my opinion, the power of mashing up subjects and reinforce for me the value of podcasting and the voice.

Regular Gems

The User Outcomes section of Doug’s new Synechism Ltd. blog is turning up some nice stuff, this week’s gem for mac users is One Thing Well A weblog about simple, useful software.

UK Sound Map

I didn’t realise that the great UK Sound Map project was limited to a year and read:

The final date for uploads to the UK Soundmap is Friday 24 June, 2011. No new recordings will be added after then, but the UK Soundmap will remain online and you’ll still be able to listen to its collection of sounds.

I really meant to add a boo from work yesterday but got caught up in other things. There is a fair racket as the school, behind which I work, is being renovated. I had a good time contributing to the map and felt quite sad to learn it had finished. Visit the SoundMap and enjoy listening to sounds.

Listening to more podcasts

I’ve been listening to more podcasts recently thanks to Instacast. I’ve removed podcasts from the iPod app of my phone and don’t sync them via itunes anymore. Instacast allows you to build subscriptions (I imported from the iPod app before stopping the sync) and download episodes without being tied to a computer in a much simpler way than the ipod app. I can now sync my podcasts at the office before the drive home, rather than noticing that I had forgotten to sync my phone from my computer at home.

Instacast allows you to see the episodes you have downloaded, and also stream new ones. This can lead to a hammering of your data allowance.

I am presuming that with iOS 5 that apple will have some sort of similar setup too. It is certainly the way I want to go with mobile stuff.

The interface of instacast is nice, very minimal, although the text is a wee bit too small for my eyes at any distance. Well worth £1.19 even if Applce come up with something as good in iOS 5.

Islay high School

Joe Wilson blogs about Islay High School a reminder of all the great work going on there over the past few years. Good to be reminded that it is not the tech:

Beyond the technology they timetable 3rd to 6th year together – which leads to a great community feel in the senior school. This allows for personalised timetables over 3 or 4 years – this gives learners a large range of academic and vocational options and allows some to really stretch themselves – a few 5th years have achieved Advanced Highers.

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One Thing Well

One Thing Well is a simple blog that focuses on technology that makes life better by doing, er, one thing well.

via Synechism Ltd. – User Outcomes Weekly – #3 synechism.com

Great find by Doug Belshaw, this blog has a long list of great application that do one thing well, small lightweight interesting an slightly geeky mac apps. Doug’s weekly (?) lists at synechism.com turns up good stuff every week.

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one of the things I, and so many others, love about Dropbox is that it’s all about making our data more accessible to us. You never have to think about how to get your data out of Dropbox. It’s sitting right there on your hard disk, reminding you why you love them. Because their product empowers you without locking you in.

via scripting.com

I hope iCloud is as nicely integrated as dropbox.

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A while back I bought a ‘Gorillapod Gorillamobile Style Tripod for iPhone 4’ from eBay, for about a tenner.

iphone tripod

This works very well, and has now survived a few walks and being stuffed in pockets, bags and rucksacs.

Iphone Tripod 2

The seller I bought it from does not seem to have any left but Tripod iPhone 4 search on eBay UK turned up a few similar items.

Here is a pretty steady video shot using the device.

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The first thing to understand is that Facebook is all about “the social graph” while Twitter is about “the interest graph.” For the most part, you “friend” people on Facebook because you’ve met them at some point in real life. Twitter is about reading and engaging with interesting people, whether you know them or not. The whole point of Twitter is find people with interesting stuff to say, and tune into their train of thought. If you’re waiting for your friends to join Twitter, you’re misunderstanding what the service is for.

via birdhouse.org

from A Guide to Twitter for Facebook Users — scot hacker’s foobar blog the best intro to twitter I’ve seen.

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Edutalk fist

Last night I went along to Teachmeet Strathclyde at Jordanhill college, I had signed up a couple of days before and stuck my name down to talk about edutalk.cc.

I noticed there were nearly 70 folk signed up and quite a crowd was gathered eating cupcakes when I arrived. This was the first TeachMeet I’d attended when I had not really though much about it or had any involvement with before hand. The participants were mostly students which gave the meet a slightly different energy, slightly more formal and organised than some TeachMeets, the crowd was quietly energetic and motivated.

A couple of the usual suspects were in attendance but I didn’t know the vast majority of attendees.

As usual for teachmeets the presentations were all interesting, with lots of things I either nodded to or was completely surprised by. The compare Paul Campbell kept everything running smoothly.

I was nice to have a round table break in the middle, I went to a Games Based learning table organised by Morven Skinnder, Jen Deyenberg was in the group and has extensive experience in gbl. I suspect learning in Jen’s infant class would be wonderful with or without the high tech additions as I can’t imagine an object or situation she could not animate with learning.

I’ll not go into details of the different presentations or the round table as I am currently chopping up the audio recording I took and posting to Edutalk I had my two minutes talking about Edutalk, should have done 7 as I expect that most folk went huh; without the chance to listen, or see a demo. I am quite pleased with the slide though.

Edutalk is fairly pushing out the episodes at the moment, with the purpos/ed crew adding one a day for their #purposedfutured campaign and the audio from TMLothians11 – TeachMeet Lothians & Borders 2011 which I am (with permission) reposting on Edutalk.

There is still plenty of room for move voices on Edutalk, see the How to EDUtalk to find out how easy it is to join in.

My photos from Teachmeet Strathclyde on my John’s posterous site and there is a Teachmeet strathclyde Edition – Stuff from the strathclyde Teachmeet posterous waiting to be filled up.

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Rain

One of the things I’ve been trying to keep up with (and failing) in my RSS reader is Digital Storytelling | We jam econo

Digital Storytelling (also affectionately known as ds106) is an open, online course that will begin on January 10th, 2011. This course is free to anyone who wants to take it…

About ds106 | Digital Storytelling

I’ve been following mostly through bavatuesdays the blog of Jim Groom.

As an aside I first blogged about Jim a few years ago, pointing to the marvellous Welcome to the People’s Republic of Non-Programistan which seems to have vanished and The Party Line which is still there.

One of the things that the ds106 folk have been doing is creating animated gifs from very short sections of movies. I am still not sure if I see the whole point of this, but it becomes a very addictive process. Recently Jim posted: Creating Animated GIFs with MPEG Streamclip and GIMP and pointed to another tutorial Better Animated GIF Tutorial for PS CS4 « Bionic Teaching. This got me playing and thinking a wee bit on a rainy weekend.

I’ve not got Photoshop and have seldom opened GIMP, but was creating animated gifs just last week for a blog post. I used Gifsicle which is a command line application to create animated gifs and works very well indeed on OSX (and is available for lots of other platforms) Gifsicle is © Eddie Kohler.

I am only using a very few of the many gifsicle options here, you can see all of its features on the Gifsicle Man Page

I wanted to speed up my workflow playflow for messing about in this way and though of SuperCard, my favourite mac application. I’ve used SuperCard to create a simple application (mac only) that will, load a Quicktime compatible movie, grab a short selection of frames, and create an animated gif with a few mouse clicks. The SuperCard bit grabs the frames and then used the gifsicle app (which it contains) to create animated gifs.

I’ve tested the application only briefly on a few different macs (10.4, 10.5 & 10.6 or tiger, Leopard and mostly Snow Leopard) and it seem to work. On the old G4 10.4 machine there is a wee bit of lag grabbing the frames, but it works out ok.

Here is a screencast:

You can download Movie2Gif from my dropbox, it is a rainy afternoon project miles away from a polished bit of software but might be useful/fun for someone.

If you Movie2Gif and give it a try, let me know how you get on, if it gets any positive feedback I’ll do a bit to improve it. Please send any suggestions, bugs etc to me.

Hump Catch

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the Internet gives you access to a world of bloggers, tweeters, speakers, photographers, videographers, and colleagues who will teach you anything you want for nothing more than the price of your time and attention

via downes.ca

Great snippet from Ted Curran quoted by Stephen Downes. I always think PLN is a bit of a mouthful compared to friends, pals or folk I know but this really nails why teachers and learners should be online.