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I guess this will be blogged and tweeted a fair bit, 3 years ago I hopeful posted:

Unfortunately I have found navigating the discussions very clunky. lots of scrolling and clicking, neither of the two views let you read and respond with out a lot of clicking.
It is hard to follow discussions that you have started and taken part in, as there is not ‘my discussions’ or even a search. There is no recent discussions list either so to see if a discussion has be updated you need to dig down into the various threads. The date on the threads is not the date that the last addition to the tread or sub thread was made.
I really hope that this can be improved on by the time the portal goes live.

Today I woke to a barrage of tweets about glow forums. Glow forums are are forum setup on glow using the popular phpBB Open Source forum solution. Like many other internet users I am already familiar with phpBB which is a vast improvement over Glow discussions.

Of course this will have training implications for glow users who have spent time getting their heads round Glow discussions but I for one will be a lot happier showing folk how to use the new forums than I ever have been waffling round the previous tools shortcomings.

With blogs and wikis due to be added this session I will not have much room to moan about glow anymore.

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It has taken me a while to get round to the second post based on a morning at Glencairn primary working on the ipod touch project. In fact the pupils have beat me to it: Comic Twist.

After syncing the ipods I did a wee bit of work with the class on their new apps.

The first app was Comic Twist which allows you to create comics with up to 3 panes a little like Comic Touch, the Comic Life for the ipod/phone. I went for comic touch as it is cheaper that Comic Touch and does 3 panes in a comic.

The second app is i think going to be a great one, it has been sitting in front of my nose for quite while, firstClass. FirstClass is the email and communication systems used in North Lanarkshire Education and I have been rather slow to realise its potential for all sort of things. It is a great way to have discussions, share files etc. I’ve used the mobile client on my iPhone a lot mostly for email, it is amazingly quick even in an area with a very poor mobile connection.

I just had not thought of using it with pupils. The weekend before the iPod touch conference it suddenly dawned on me that we could use it to pass files around the classroom, messaging etc. At the conference the children from the Friezland iPod Project were using firstClass in this way. So when I got to return to Glencairn I synced the iPods with new software and showed the pupils their new firstClass account. We are only using one account for all the ipods to share but the children could easily upload images (created with comic touch) and join in a discussion. The images and discussions can of course be accessed on a desktop or via the web. This makes it very easy to get text images and files onto and off the iPods. We could add movies to a file store in firstClass on the desktop and access it on the touches. We even quickly tested exporting a keynote presentation that some pupils were working on and uploading it, it worked a treat.

Click on the thumbnails to see bigger versions of desktop and iPod views.


I think FirstClass is going to be very useful for working with iPod touches in the classroom.

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Parasync

This is the first of a few posts based on my morning today at Glencairn primary helping with their ipod touch project.

I started syncing and adding a few apps to the iPods. When I had originally set up the ipods with apps it took an age, syncing them two by two to my macbook and I was not looking forward to repeating the exercise. In the meantimne I’ve become a middle man between the Consolarium and a north Lanarkshire school to trial Taptale, this involves LTS lending the school sone ipod touches and a parasync. While we are waiting to get that project up and running I borrowed the parasync to update the Glencairn iPods. It took about 20 minutes to sync all of the iPods. The only glitch was the fact that I had turned of installing apps in the iPods restrictions. Once I had reset them all the update went flawlessly.

A parasync costs about £800 which is probably outside most school budgets in current times, but when weighed agains the time that it takes to sync 20 ipods two by two it is to my mind worth considering. It might be worth several schools owning one together using it for major updates and just recharging the ipods with 4-Port USB Chargers.

I was delighted to see that most of the children had personalised their ‘screensavers’ with drawings, photos and even lunes!

More about the apps I’ve added to the touches soon.

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Recently I’ve been thinking about ipod touches quite a bit. As well as giving some support to the Glencairn ipod project and being the middle man for a wee Consolarium trial of TapTale which will start soon, I am just back from Oldham and Blackpool CLC’s iPodTouch Conference.

The conference was a great success and there is a lot of interesting chatter on the ning site and on Twitter #ipod2010

Last weekend I started playing with an idea for a wee web app. The idea is to provide an interface for searching flickr and creating images combining flickr photos and text. Using only photos that can be adapted and incorporating attribution.

shark_touch_poem

As a sort of proof of concept I made a web app that makes lunes. A Lune is a fixed-form variant haiku created for the English language. It has three words on the first line, five on the second and three on the third. I’ve used lune writing as a classroom activity on several occasions, they are simple and fun to write. (Lune (poetry) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

The web app works like this:

Touch Poem Screens

  1. Pupils load the webpage int oSafari on their ipods and type in a search.
  2. The app retrieves and displays a list of creative commons photos that you are allowed to make derivations of.
  3. Pupils select a photo by clicking on it. This opens the photo with a 3 line form over it.
  4. Pupils type in poem and click Go.
  5. The image and text is sent to the server where it is stamped with the text and attribution and sent back to browser.
  6. Pupil presses on image, save dialog opens and image can be saved to photos.

I am using the phpFlickr to search and GD to stamp the photos

I tried the app out with the Glencairn primary six class on tuesday, we then bumped the photos to my phone, transferred them to a mac and added voice in iMovie: Animal Lunes, all in 90 minutes.

I though the app ran fairly smoothly except for quotes ’ which came back escaped with a slash ’, some text ran off the pictures and the problem with not being able to fix spelling mistakes. I should be able to fix the escapes and hopefully alter the font size to suit the picture width.

Of course the whole thing was put together in an afternoon, the code is rough and the interface rougher. The plan might be to make it a bit more ajaxy and add a few different poem types, proper haiku, kennngs, Cinquains etc. I am wondering if it would be worthwhile developing? Is it too much of a one off to be really useful? I’d love to know what you think?

You can see the webpage in a quick and dirty Lunes Simulator or directly Flickr Lunes.

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HandBrake came to my rescue, yet again, at work yesterday. A teacher brought in her JVC Everio HDD video camera with some footage on it. Plugging the camera into her mac and trying to import into iMovie failed. We had a quick look inside the disk that mounted and discovered the video was in .MOD files. A quick google found lots of folk wanting to convert these files. We tried MPEG Streamclip but it wanted us to buy an extra bit of software: QuickTime – MPEG-2 Playback. The next guess on my part was Handbreak, this has converted a few things for me including ripping video from those cameras that record to DVD. Pointing Handbreak at the MOD files converted them to m4v files that opened in quicktime and could be imported into iMovie.

Video cameras and formats can cause a bit of a problem if you don’t check the editing possibilities before you buy, Handbrake can help if you are stuck with a camera that you didn’t research. I have never had the time to look at all of Handbreak’s features and setting but it does a pretty good job of making you look knowledgeable at the default settings.

If you have to deal with video it is a good tool to have in your toolkit.

Update: Looks like it could have been simpler, this tweet from islyian

@johnjohnston John Rename .MOD files to .AVI and most editors recognise it

Would have saved me some time.

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On Thursday I went over to the Scottish Seabird Centre in North Berwick for TeachMeet 10 East Lothian. The Sea Bird Centre was a great venue and what I cold see of North Berwick made me think it might be nice to visit in the day time.

The event went very smoothly indeed, Fearghal Kelly and David Gilmour kept things running very smoothly indeed.

Puffin

I arrived a little late so didn’t reall pick up Martyn Pegg on Taking Curriculum for Excellence in the right direction.Outdoor Education, orienteering and the energetic classroom. It looked pretty exciting with members of the audience running all over the shop. The EL East Lothian Outdoor Education Service blog looks interesting. I managed to grab a sandwich an a seat thanks to the helpful centre staff and settled down to watch. There were a lot of new faces to me, I guess a big local turnout with perhaps a good few new to teachmeet, the evaluation was very positive.

I didn’t take any notes during the presentations but enjoyed them all, I loved the mix of tech & tech in Rowena Blair & Krysia Smyth talking about E-scape but failed to get my hands on the fizz-book. Don Ledingham gave a quick and impassioned defence of Curriculum for Excellence and blogged about this: Curriculum for Excellence: Stand up and speak up : Don Ledingham’s Learning Log on Wednesday. Neil Winton presented via Skype and I was surprised how good the video was.

I am going to be revisiting all of the presentations over the next week or so as I post the audio to EDUtalk.cc my own presentation was about EDUtalk and I recorded the other speakers. I would recommend listening to them all.

There is a lot more info on the TeachMeet 10 EastLothian wiki page and:

After the meet I had a quick pint with Robert Jones fresh from his parent’s night, Rowena, Krysia (Who kindly gave me a lift back to Glasgow, thanks Krysia), Fearghal and David. As you would expect an interesting chat and ScotEduBlogs, google docs and delicious links in RSS feeds, the last has led me to remove mine as it seemed to annoy most folk. If you are disappointed you can always Add me to your network.

Now I am looking forward toTeachMeet Perth which also has the CfE badge.

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Bumping

I’ve just organised (in a loose sense) an iPod touch pilot at Glencairn Primary School. At the North Lanarkshire ICT & Technical Services Centre we have an an ICT Box Scheme – Hi-Tech Kit on Short Term Loan and had originally got 22 iPod touches as part of the scheme. Although schools regularly borrow the other kit on the page no one had asked for the touches, so we decide to do a slightly more formal pilot and asked for classes to volunteer. We wanted a primary class with ? 20 pupils so that the children could feel some sort of ownership for the devices. We had a few volunteers and drew Glencairn out of the hat. The pilot will run from now until Summer.

Last week I spent a couple of days trying to choose some apps, and ended up with 50 odd and a pile of podcasts. Here are the apps: 3D Brain, Angle, Art Envi, Basic Math, Brain Toot Lite, Brain Tuner, Brain Tutor, Bump, CM_, ColorTalk Free,Comic Touch Lite, CountriesLE, Dictionary, Documents, EU, EuropeanCapitals, EuroTalk, FlagsWorld, Flickr, FlingFree, FlipBook Lite, Fliq Notes, French LITE, Google Earth, HistoryMaps, Hubble, iBearFlagsEU, Icon Memos, iSpy, iTalk Lite, iThesaurus, Kaloki Free, Martian, MATHO, Maths, miTables Lite, Muscle Head and Neck, NASA, Newbie Lt, Pix Remix Lt, PopMath Lite, Quick Graph, SculptMaster D FREE, SimpleDraw, Skeleton Head and Neck, Sketch Pad, Sketchmania, Slideshow, Stars, TCT Lite, TimesTables Free, touchPhysics Lite, UpThere, Whiteboard & Wikipanion. I just copied the file names from the finder and remove the file extension and version numbers so the names may not be exactly the same as the app names.

The podcasts:

The ipods all sync onto one mac and the idea is that we will not add any more apps and the children will not be able to update the ipods, they will be able to transfer images to classroom computers. I was surprised that this allows you to buy apps and add them to all of the ipods.

On Friday I visited the school and handed over the touches to the pupils. I was surprised at how many of them had touches at home, over half a dozen out of 19. We went through some stuff to introduce the children to the the basics. I used a document camera to project one touch to the class smartboard and that seemed to work fine. After we let the pupils explore the ipods and play with a couple of games we introduced some apps. We typed a sentence into the notes app and figured out how to copy and paste. Next we checked out the Calculator and Dictionaries. Then we created Martians with the Make a Martian app and use Bump to share them between phones.

The classroom has an airport base station (one of the older grey ones) and I was please at how quickly the children could exchange images using bump over wifi. I hope this can become the basis for some collaborative work, groups collecting images or screenshots annotating them with Comic Touch Lite and bumping them. eventually they may be able to use some sort of slideshow app to put the images together.

The possibilities for using the touches seem endless and we explained to the children that they were more likely to see how to use the touches to help their learning as we were.

The hour and a bit I had in the class went by far to quickly and i feel a wee bit of jealousy for Ms Moonie.

We have started a blog Glencairn iPod for the class to report their adventures and assess the devices and I’ll have to go back in a couple of weeks to explain how that will work (that is my excuse anyway).

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SconicPics is an iPhone/ipod touch application that allows you to create custom slideshow movies. The movies are made from still photos which you can add from the photo library or take with the iPhone’s camera. You can then narrate a voice over and create and enhanced m4v video with chapters.

In this example I’ve just used some pictures from classrooms I’ve been teaching in recently. It only took a few minutes to create and I am sure taking a little more time would have produced a more professional result and few plosives. I exported the 4v to reduce the size which removed the chapters too.

This looks like it could be a useful app in a classroom equipped with iphones or iPod touches. With touches pupils could use images downloaded from webpages or screenshots.

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A couple of days ago I had to cancel my intended trip to BETT. I’ve not been since the famous Glasgow Jumbo junket, as the papers called it, when to celebrate the new city wide network glasgow flew (not in jumbos as it happens) its ICT coordinators down to BETT. Needless to say I do not regard BETT as a junket, but an cpd opportunity. The CPD quotient of conferences and trade shows, has to my mind, increase a lot over the last few years, mainly due to TeachMeet and other self organised meetings of partitioners. I think you gain more for a coffee with an enthusiastic teacher than many a seminar.

I had hoped to do a little bit of evangelising for EDUtalk at BETT and join in TeachMeet Takeover to do so. Unfortunately I can’t do that.

I mailed Tom Barret to let him know that I would not be speaking and he offered me the opportunity to gust blog on his site. This is a really generous offer give the size of Tom’s network and following. In the unlikely event that you have not read Tom’s blog I suggest that you head over there as soon as possible. Tom produces a stream of detailed posts of how he introduces new tech and ideas to his primary classroom.

Anyway I blogged EDUtalk at BETT 2010 on Tom’s blog on Monday and put out an EDUtalk phlog today EDUtalk365 #13 – EDUtalk @BETT calling for contributions to our ‘open mic‘ podcast over the next couple of days. I look forward to hearing some interesting audio. If your are going to BETT please pick up your phone.