from mail.app

Via

‘s feed: an exciting looking app Scratch.

An interesting report from one of my favourite blogs birdhouse, the Will Wright Keynote Speech at sxsw discusses exploring concepts of linear and interactive narrative and Spore a new game from the sims creator. The splash page looks good and Scott Hacker says

Games are perceived as mindless toys, but they can allow us to do systemic thinking about our world, build more accurate models, give us the ability to navigate the future with more intelligence than we did before.

and lastly a strange flickr pool: Camera Toss.

(Title recycled from Ewan)

The system/organisation for blogging on Sandaig Otters is that 2 children per day from each of the primary seven, primary six and now primary 5 classes are randomly selected as bloggers for the day, their job is to choose something blogworthy, maybe take a photo and the next day to come to the media room between 9 and 9:30 to blog about it.

I am quite please with this system although it relies on me not being class committed so it probably will not last longer than this session.

This week from Wednesday to Friday we had no connection to the internet until about 10 am (403 Forbidden), hence the blogging slow down. quite a few posts were saved in word to be blogged later, but I don’t know if that will happen. I logged the problem with the help desk each day but I don’t know if it will do much good. One operator told me it might be do do with the switching of the primary network between mitel and dell if so there might not be much on the Sandaig Otters blog until after the holidays:(

Particularly disappointing as I had 23 bloggers in the room on Thursday, full to capacity and nothing blogged.

I think this is one of my longest gaps on this blog, a couple of busy weeks and being away at the weekend have kept me from the blog. Luckily my class and the rest of the Sandaig Otters have kept the posts flowing.

Like all the other schools in Scotland we have had a bit of extra money to spend as the financial year comes to a close. The school entrance has been clogging up with brown boxes. This is my favourite. I know we cannot put macs on our network at the moment, but when the opportunity to spend came up Glasgow was in the middle of a change in managed service and there was no recommended way of buying pcs to network (there is now).

Also I am a bit of a mac fan, my class have been producing theodd comic life blog post and video for Sandaig Television using my wee collection of scrounged and now aging mac. The computer club also use the macs for flash animation the new macbooks will be of great use to run things we cannot have on the managed service. We should also have a couple of mac minis soon which will be a wee experement of macs on the network. I’ve also be able to order a few more digital cameras, mp3 players, mics and I Can Animate. Hopefully we will have some more placticine animations next term.

The reason the picture of the mac book looks a bit weird is because of another new toy/tool our LG Shine. (I took the phone’s photo with the mac and the mac’s photo with the phone.

We got this as part of the The LG Shine blogger relations programme . The children were pretty excited, but have not done much more than take a few photos. I am hoping it can be a tool to discuss the use of mobiles and allow them to steer themselves away from some of the terrible uses we have seen lately (a relative was assaulted and this was recorded on a phone and posted on the web recently, so I feel this is close).

I also hope that we can use it to post photos and directly to the school site when we are on a school trip. So far I’ve managed to post to flickr but after spending quite a few happy hours playing with the moblog config file here, I’ve not had any success. I did mange a few tests from an email app a while back so I expect I’ll get it working eventually. What I’ll probably do in the meantime is set up a page on the site that will pull in photos from flickr a bit like the iPun Fun test I tried a while back. This will download the photos to the Sandaig site so they will be visible (flickr is blocked at school).

I am not sure how the school blogging will go as Easter approaches, over the holidays our managed service is changing from Mitel to Dell (Dell and Glasgow City Council agree 15.5M contract for pre-12ICT Provision). The Dell guys should switch the network over in the holidays and then roll out a refresh of kit from the end of April. It looks to me like a good idea the new machines will be a lot more powerful than the current ones and run XP rather than windows 2000. We will also be better placed to install software ourselves. The plan is for the changeover to go smoothly, but I would not be surprised if we disappear from the blogosphere for a day or two.

Well I thought I hadplanned a good session the Tasks were all set, the class had been asking all the time, when are we going to the media room and then WebSense struck.

Of the tasks I had set up. One site I’d linked to was blocked by websense, another blog where I’d asked the children to look at a powerpoint was accessible but the filesharing site the powerpoint was on was not. (update: and of-course one blog I pointed them too was using bubbleshare, I should have remembered we cannot see that) And most of the other tasks just took a little too long for an hour in the media room.

I need to rethink a bit, simplify the tasks, check them out in school and repeat.

We did get the podcast finished and my next wee tasks for the evening will be to upload it to Radio Sandaig.

The other interesting conversation I had was with a boy in my class who had posted a comment to our blogs with his PSP, an argument between several experts about if you can upload images or not followed, much hot air but no facts we will investigate when time allows. Unfortunately I can’t see us getting permission to get PSPs on our network anytime soon.