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The questions are at the end feel free to skip down there if you know anything about gps.

I spent quite a while over a year ago messing with the google maps api. eventually I made an interface for creating maps, uploading photos and placing them on the map. This gave me a lot of fun, but I found it too time consuming for children to use.
The earlier this year Google My Maps came out which was a lot neater than my effort, and I’ve used it a few times, mostly pasting in the links flickr provides to add photos.

Cort-ma-Law from Lecket hill This week I stared another one with a few photos from a walk.
I was a bit frustrated about placing the photos on the map as I found it hard to figure out where place where in the rather featureless Campsies.

Flickr map Sorry

I switched to using flickr own maps but found them it a bit slow (that might be my aging mac).
I found it even more difficult to get the photos placed with any accuracy on flickr maps, although the interface for adding and looking at the photos is very slick, especially when you grab a bunch of pictures and throw them on a single spot.
Perhaps I just do not go far enough so need to much detail on a map to make my walk look like a walk rather than a spot.

All this made me think about my previous experiments, especially as there was an article in macuser about using the flickr and google maps apis combined. I had just finished using phpflickr to make a community gallery so though this might be quite quick.

Unfortunately the macuser article relies on a flickr api flickr.photos.geo.getLocation which depends on you having placed the photo on the flickr map (I was beginning to go round in circles).

Then I remembered Adam Burt‘s Applescript for getting geo tags from Google Earth ready for pasting into flickr. Adam does amazing things with blogs, google Earth/maps and geoblogging.
The appleScript copies to the clipboard geo tags of the location showing on google earth at that time.
It is much easier to figure out where you are on google earth, it has a smoother gui than google maps and a better resolution (of where I was at least). so I geotagged a bunch of photos, grabbed a new google maps API key and got busy.

Flickr googlemap mashup

Of course at that time I didn’t know about flickr.photos.geo.getLocation depending on flickr maps.And I didn’t know a tag geo:lon=-4.704382114809 would be returned from the API as machine_tags=”geo:lon=4704382114809 geo:lat=56258859999999″ ie without the minus sign or point so I spent a fair bit of time staring at a blank map, as the google maps API didn’t understand what I was sending to it. Anyway to cut a very long afternoon short, I delved deeper than I had been before into the data returned from flickr.photos.getInfo and finally clunked together a couple of files, the first uses phpflickr to grab the info from flickr and store it in a file, the second pulls that info using the google maps api and create a map.
I did try pulling the information and creating the map all at once, but that took too long. The data from flickr obviously does not need to be updated very often so that job was hived off, speeding up the maps creation. The unfinished product is here: John’s Flickr Map Mashup.

This is just scratching the surface of what could be done, it would be better maybe to create different maps for different days or for particular tags. if all of my tagged photos go on the same map it might eventually be too crowded and need some pagination.

Help wanted: I’d like to know a bit more about geo tagging and perhaps GPS:

  1. Would it be possible to get data from a GPS device and add it to the EXIF data of a photo before uploading it?
  2. Does Flickr undersatand embeded gps data?
  3. Is there a cheap enough GPS device that would work with a mac?

I am thinking of a work flow that includes the tagging of photos before uploading, maybe in iphoto with AppleScript or a SuperCard project, I think I’ve done some EXIF data extracting so imagine that adding can’t be that much harder.

Any ideas that do not involve a lot of expense gratefully received.

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It looks like a pile of the ScotEdubloggers are holidaying on facebook.

I was invited a few weeks ago and joined up.
Compared to bebo and myspace the interface is pretty calm. I’ve messed about with a few tools and gained a few friends but I have not been convinced.

I was planning to blog something about this, but serendipitously in this morning guardian I saw Jack Scofield’s article: If Facebook is just this year’s version of AOL, is that bad? which linked to Facebook is the new AOL (kottke.org) which I followed to Facebook vs. AOL, redux (kottke.org).
Kottle pretty much sums up my feelings:

As it happens, we already have a platform on which anyone can communicate and collaborate with anyone else, individuals and companies can develop applications which can interoperate with one another through open and freely available tools, protocols, and interfaces. It’s called the internet and it’s more compelling than AOL was in 1994 and Facebook in 2007

and

If you’re not a Facebook user, you can’t do anything with the site…nearly everything published by their users is private.

The bit about blogs and Web 2.0 I really like is the fact that most of them produce rss, which is the basis of the Small Pieces Loosely Joined argument. (I am guessing as I’ve never read the book, but the title sounds cool).

Facebook seems fine, fun etc but it misses the serendipity and easy linking and mashing of data. From my, admittedly very limited experience, it seems you can pull information into facebook but not get too much out.

With more open tools it is easy to gather, mix and redistribute information, blogs, wiki updates, podcasts, flickr, del.icio.us etc. can all be mashed with existing tools or a bit of scripting. Facebook seems exclusive rather than inclusive, closed rather than open. I am happy to vist but I would not want to live there.

Or am I missing something?

facebook rss blogging web2.0

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Or some sort of micro/mini blog that lets you add just a bit more than del.icio.us to a link…
Interesting things I’ve noticed today:Skitch example

Mr W sent me an invite to skitch, which looks like an interesting ‘add notes and shapes to an image and upload it’ sort of application. You can upload to my skitch or flickr among other places or use it with Comic life from the same developer.
Thanks Neil.

I’ve not really seen a need to use twitter as it would seem more useful to say consultants and conference dwellers than teachers, but I noticed a couple of interesting posts Christopher D. Sessums :: Twitter Me This: Brainstorming Potential Educational Uses for Twitter and ELT notes: This Twittering Life which are food for thought.
Kind of links to the ideas hovering around David Warlick‘s posts: A Bucket of Drops?. and It Isn?t Easy which join up in my mind at least. The possibilities of the new technology are accelerating away from what actually goes on in the classroom. There are some interesting comments in the It Isn?t Easy post, including one about an unnamed blogging guru giving an admiring teacher an unasked for autograph, which made me laugh out loud.

Exciting for me Pivot X2.0 screenshots., I use pivot to run this and the other Sandaig blogs, looks like they have a lot of nice new features in the works.

So i probably don’t need a micro blog for these notes to myself, just keep a textmate window open all day and add to it.

Blogged from tm

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End of School Year

Straight from school on friday to the pub, for a bit to eat, a few Guinness and to talk a fair bit of nonsense.
Steam was let off the world put to rights and a few farewells said.
The way staffing in schools goes at the moment you spend a lot of time saying goodbye.

The next day I got down playing with phpFlickr here, increasing my admiration for both flickr‘s api and phpFlickr. It is a great pity that flickr is not available in many schools (it is worth repeating this frequently I think).
I finally bit the bullet and bought a pro account on flickr, nice seeing the old photos reappear safe and sound and the badge on my other blog is refilled.

Progress

Due to rain, I’ve spent a bit of time today tidying my desk at home and planning the geeky bit of my holidays.

A few weeks ago Carol Fuller (Sandaig’s fairy blogmother) invited me onto facebook, which I hope to explore and blog about. Through it I’ve discovered mojungle a mobloging sort of application which seems nice. I’ve also found that flickr is getting on better with my phone so I hope to try some moblogging experiments perhaps combined with the aforementioned phpFlickr. I’ve embedded my flickr tagged moblog and mojungle on my moblog.

I didn’t use the third glow pilot as much as I did the second, but I need to blog a bit about glow I think.

I am also going to spend a bit of time with SuperCard and update some of my projects.

Other than that I hope to get down to the beach, climb a few wee hills and resurrect my tai chi practise all once the rain stops.

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Class in a box box

Although I am ready for my holidays rather a lot of interesting things have appeared on the horizon in the last couple of weeks.
On the software front I finally got round to using scratch with the children, samorost is inviting and we tried out slideshare. As usual I underestimated the amount of time I’d have to teach in the last couple of weeks of term and suddenly we have no time left!

A couple of weeks ago our pcs were refreshed and this should really make a big difference to using ict in the school, the old ones were getting really slow. At the start of this week I had another flurry of excitement when our class in a box box arrived, the laptops to go with it have not got here yet but hopefully this is going to be a great resource to use ict flexibly across the curriculum next session.

My job next year is going to be rather different than what I’ve been doing this year.

This year I’ve been teaching with ict across the stages using our new media room, unfortunately for me this didn’t really work out as planned, term one the suite was not ready, term 2 went as planned, but staff leaving and a lot of staff absences kept me in class most of term 3, term 4 saw the switch from the mitel managed service to dell and put our network out of action for 4 or 5 weeks.
From my point of view this has been pretty disappointing.

Next session or staffing number change for the worse and I’ll be changing roll.
It looks like I will be spending a fair amount of time on Emotional Literacy, working with children who have problems in this and other areas of their learning. Pretty challenging, especially as a lot of the things I’ve been doing over the last few years have worked best with our more confident and motivated learners, how much blogging, dv, podcasting I will be involved in is in question I think.
I’d be really interested in anyone who has experience in these areas passing on ideas and tips, especially ones involving ict and Web 2.0

I am also looking for a wee summer project, hopefully involving being paid for something I enjoy (edu, blogs, html etc) again ideas gratefully received.

I will be continuing to blog a bit over the holidays as I have a few things to think about that I’ve not had time for.

Have a great summer

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P6190008.JPGYesterday we got a new set of pcs at Sandaig,24 desktops and a pile of laptops, one per full-time equivalent member of staff.
We decided to deploy all of the desktops in our media room leaving the laptops for classroom use. Hopefully we will also have a class in the box of wireless laptops as a pilot very soon.

Even a committed mac-fan-boy like myself could not help but have a big smile on my face by the time I had finished securing the pcs on Tuesday evening.

Compared to our old kit these are lovely machines, decent sized screens and you can’t see the screen redraw in the old snail like fashion we are used too. XP is a lot nicer than win 2000 too;-)
I had children testing the machines constantly today and so far it has been great. Children are able to have more than one app open without everything slowing down and really start to work properly.
Unfortunately it is nearly the end of the session (I am not sure I really typed that) and there will not be much time to exploit the new kit until next session. Due to various factors I am not completely sure what stage I am teaching next session so I am not too sure in which way I’ll tap into ict yet.

Scratch_screenshot

While the suite was out of action and there is a slight relaxing of the curriculum as the holidays approach I took the opportunity to let my class have a go with scratch. I downloaded it in the Spring break but have not really tried it out. I have it installed on a few non networked macbooks so it was idea for the network downtime on Tuesday.
I got a couple of early finishers to work through the getting started guide and as they had no problems I grouped the class into threes and let them loose on the same guide.
This starting children on an application you have not used yourself might seem a little irresponsible but I though I had enough knowledge of beginning programming (ifs and repeat) to figure it out on the fly.
If hoots of laughter are a sign of active learning then scratch is a winner, the children had a great time exploring.
We had a quick show at the end and I was delighted to see that all the groups had managed most of the first tutorial and taken there animation in different directions, using different aspects of scratch. The guide introduced ‘repeat forever’ loops but some of the children managed to use conditional if/then type constructs and other interesting features.
Some of this was using the million monkeys approach, but I can already see scratch is a wonderful engaging resource and I hope to be using it a lot more.

So we have 7 more days to go before the summer holidays and although I am really looking forward to the break and sharing in the general staff exhaustion of this time of year, there are also a ton of interesting avenues that I hope to explore next session.

Glowmessanger

I’ve also been messing about a bit with the new glow pilot, not as much as I did in the spring break (time) but like Gordon I am not finding anyone to chat to.

Newspaper

Usually as the summer approaches I’ve managed to get some sort of summer project together, last year it was the Podcasting Directory other years it has been wee html jobs, flash or the occasional bit of SuperCarding. This year nothing so far, I am not going away on holiday this year and am open to suggestions or offers. I am not really wanting to spend the whole summer slaving away but a wee bit of extra interesting work would be nice.

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Samorost Grab
Three years ago I noticed a Strange ‘Game’, (the game is no longer at the url links from that post).
I played the game for a few minutes and got nowhere, it looked lovely so I just linkdumped it for my class and forgot about it.
Recently I’ve saw mention of it (on KimP’s Blog and Ewan’s) so I looked again. It still looked cool and I still got not very far.
This afternoon, I was delaying going to music (my least favourite bit of the curriculum) so I fired up Samorost on to the wall and gathered the children round.
They had a ball, giving me advice and solving the puzzles to work through the game. As a class they took about the same time as Ewan and a lot faster than Derek;-)

I realise that there are lot of areas (as well as music) that I don’t get. I recall getting the first version of Myst along with HyperCard 2.3 and not getting that at all, I spent a wee bit of time wandering in an aimless fashion then a good deal more time gently hacking into the game to check out it’s Hypercard roots.

Anyway there is not much time left this session and we are getting a refresh of hardware tomorrow which might slow thing up, but I hope to get my class to follow the AllStars progress using Samorost and perhaps replicate some of their activities> I might get to see what I can get out of this type of gaming. Moving a little way out of my comfort zone.

(Note to self Samorost2, thanks Ewan).

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