I’ll be talking about Glow Blogs in a seminar at SLF on Thursday along with Andrea Hunter PT at Whinhill Primary School and some of her pupils. Andrea’s class blog at Diary of a Whinhill Pupil.

I’ll be at SLF both days spending some time on the Glow stand. If you are at SLF and have an interest in blogging, podcasting and the like please do have a chat. You can catch me on twitter @johnjohnston.

I’ll also be at TeachMeet SLF15 on Wednesday evening. We will try to stream that on Radio #EDUtalk.

Finally ios allows upload of files from more than the photo library. This is just the first mp3 I found in my Dropbox. It is a recording n Buchanian st. In Glasgow.

The more includes OneDrive for glow folk.

image

This opens up lost of possibilities for blogging and podcasting on the move.

I see a call for the banning of mobile technology in the classroom is popping up again:

Pupils could be banned from taking mobile phones and iPads into class under a major government crackdown on disruptive behaviour at school.

and

More than 90 per cent of teenagers have mobile phones, but a recent study by the London School of Economics claimed schools where they were banned saw test scores rise by an average of 6 per cent. There is currently no government policy about mobile phone use in England, as schools have to set restrictions themselves.

from: Mobile phones and iPads could be banned from classrooms – Telegraph

There is no doubt that in the classroom or ones personal life , mobiles can be a distraction. But this could easily be a teaching opportunity. We are all just scraping the surface of using these wee computers. Addressing attention, the social use of mobiles and the like could be an educational experience.

I am constantly being amazed at the power in my pocket. Last week I took a walk along the Kelvin to Milngavie. As I wandered along the phone records my track, analysed my speed, distance ect. I could grab notes, and take photos of interesting things.
If I’d needed to I could have made field recordings and I could have sent all this to a variety of places online for further manipulation. I’ve got a pile of data that can be analysed and shared.

Compared to only a few years ago this, and many other mobile applications, feel miraculous. The featured image photo, of a hoverfly (I think), is to me wonderful. Not because it is a great picture but because I can catch this amount of detail without being a photographer with the phone from my pocket.

Even this small subset of a mobiles features should surely make it worth the effort of how to minimise any negative effects of mobiles and their notifications. It is early days to be talking about bans.

Maybe advice like #tds75 You don’t need Twitter…. or #tds74 This is why I turn off notifications from The Daily Stillness (@livedtime) might be a start.

I’ve got my raspberry pi working as a webcam posting gifs every 9 minutes and stills every 5. Gif Cam.

The pi has been sitting around for a while acting as a web server with a broken tweetbot. It took very little effort to get it taking photos from our window and showing them on the web. Little more to grab a bunch and gif them (Gifsicle again). A better view might be more interesting.

I’ve not spent as much time as I’d like playing with the pi but the potential for play, learning and work seems large.

Saw this on DaringFireball.
DirectLinks – Canisbos is a Safari extension. Really useful for copying links from Google Search results. Update 6 Sep 2021: extension is gone, se DF for details, link now to archive. Ironic that the link goes to spam sites now.

Normally when you try and copy a link from a google search you get this sort of thing:
https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCwQFjABahUKEwjq9YnOtOPHAhXxS9sKHUQDB-k&url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FFolktale&usg=AFQjCNHDEzwkM43l294OJ6AptxA7_Gg1pw&sig2=Lnf3ewVtFjbDOa7bl3SosA

As google wraps the link so that they can count clicks. Installing the DirectLinks extension means if I copy the same link I get:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folktale

Which is a lot more useful.  A quick google finds ways of doing this in Firefox and chrome too. I’ve not tested those.

TeachMeet Scottish Learning Festival 2015 Breakout.

It is time for TeachMeet SLF 15.

WHEN: Wednesday, 23 September 2015 from 18:00 to 20:00 (BST)
WHERE: Citizen M Glasgow – 60 Renfrew St Glasgow, Lanarkshire G2 3BW GB

This time we are going back to out roots (sort of). The precursor to TeachMeet was the ScotEduBlogs meetup in May 2006 in the Jolly Judge in Edinburgh. The location was choose because it was in Edinburgh at the same time as the eLive conference, it was a pub and it had WiFi.

Over the years TeachMeets have diversified and spread. The locations have sometimes become a little more formal, with a focus on listen to one person at a time. We will still do that but the space at Citizen M will lend it self to breaking out into small fluid informal groups. I am not sure if I’d describe Citizen M as a pub, but it has a bar and the Wifi is the best I’ve experienced.
You can signup on the wiki to present or head over to eventbrite for a lurkers ticket.

Yesterday’s tweet from @livedtime, the daily stillness lead to a great video:The innovation of loneliness http://t.co/s1WAfX4fFV

A beautiful video. Of course I recognise lots of these negative factors from my own online life. But I also get some real connections. Thee are made possible by being able to hook up with people who share interests that are not local.

When I started using computers I found a series of interests, professional and personal that were not common locally By being  online I could find pals to discus these things.

A lot of things I ‘share’ online are probably not of a great interest to the majority of my, say, twitter followers, but they sometimes do  find a target.

The other thing about lonlieness or being alone is that is is sometimes nice:

Source: Thimble by Mozilla – An online code editor for learners & educators.

Thimble gets a nice update.  Here is the quickest webpage I could make: Kicking the Thimble.

You can now upload files, css, image, javascript ect and create & edit multiple files. Code completion seems a lot better to me too. It grumbles about Safari s oI switched to chrome which is recommended along with FireFox.

Obviously useful for learning to create webpages.