from mail.app
ScotEdublogs.org.uk update and a request
I’ve not blogged about ScotEduBlogs.org.uk for a while now, but I use the site every day.
The site got a bit of a face lift today, Robert fixed up my latest effort at design and put it to work.
I started adding a bit of information about the site and how to use it to the ScotEduBlogs Wiki a while ago, but there is a lot more to be done before the current features are adequately explained. I hope to do some more on the Using_ScotsEdublogs page over the Easter break. If you are so inclined you are more than welcome to add to the wiki too.
At the moment the features of the site are already more than many in the ScotsEdu world will use, but as the number of blogs grows and the discussion get more diverse they will be invaluable. It is worth taking a look at the Blogs page where you can filter and sort nearly 300 ScotsEdublogs. The site also creates rss feeds for the list of blogs you filter, so you can make a set of blogs to your liking and then follow them with your RSS reader.
Robert Jones and Peter Liddle have even more sophisticated features in the works (some are documented on scotedublog – Google Code wiki, and should move to the main wiki soon. some are discussed in the scotedublogs_devel Google Group).
A request
- Visit the wiki, search for your blog if it is not there add it.
- Check the tags your blog is tagged with, fix them up to your liking.
- Blog about the site. Add a link to your sidebar, you can pickup a snippet to ad a logo from the wiki Community page.
- If you like make a better link logo, add that to the wiki.
- Help out with the wiki, make feature requests, quite often Robert has added a request of mine with in the hour.
The reach of this blog is not far but if you read this pass it on and ScotEduBlogs.org.uk and Scots Educational bloggers will benefit.
3 Interesting links
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.
This week we have been mostly 403ed
(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.
Moblog
After messing around with pivot’s moblog settings for a while I eventually gave up. I know it worked in the past so I think I’ve probably just messed the config files about so badly that I’ll need to up load another one.
I decided to try another tack. I set up a flickr account for the school/phone and an email address to post photos to flickr.
Flickr is blocked by websense in Glasgow schools, so I used the Flickr API and phpFlickr to pull the photos from Flickr: Photos from sandaigprimary and download them to the sandaig site. The photos are then shown of a web page: Sandaig MoBlog. The page is pretty crude at the moment but I think I can add some features as we go along( pagination, sorting by tag, maybe HaloScan commenting ).
A couple of children in my class posted a photo today and managed to add a description pretty quickly, unfortunately I had not set permissions on the server correctly and we go a page full of very odd characters. I think I’ve fixed it now that I am home and will try a relaunch of moblogging next week.
I had put my own sim card in the phone but it looks like my virgin payg account is not the cheapest way to send email. I talked to someone in the T-Mobile shop and bough a payg sim from them. According to the salesperson, data cost so much per kb but it is capped at £1 a day. I though this would work out well as we will mostly use the phone on school trips and should be able to fire off a bunch of photos for a pound a trip.
I also asked about emailing from abroad, but this seems a lot more expensive, I wonder if I could buy a sim card in holland to fire off photos for the week we were there, if anyone knows anything about mobile provides in Holland please let me know.
New stuff and News…
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.
If you know more about this subject
Ewan sent me an early heads up about ScotEdupedia
ScotEdupedia offers everyone the opportunity to share their knowledge and expertise by adding to an existing article or creating a new article on an aspect of Scottish education.
LTS have taken the unusual step of providing an empty shell for users to fill up.
The wiki looks pretty sweet: friendly and approachable, hopefully it will fill up steadily.
BarCampScotland
I spent the afternoon at BarCampScotland BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment.
Organised by
and others it was the first BarCamp in Scotland. Interesting for lots of reasons. The idea is that everyone there should present a short session.
I was there with
to talk about ScotEduBlogs (my slides).
and I met for lunch at Susie’s Wholefood Diner and had a wee yack about ScotEduBlogs, it was great to accually meet Robert after a few months of online collaboration.
I pretty much stuck to education presentations:
Ian Stuart talking about Islay High School amazing project to embed ict in all areas, give all the children an UMPC and lots more. A really exciting project. I had a quick play with one of Ian’s UMPCs which was a great tool for children, nice handwriting recognition, they looked really usable and portable.
Digitalkatie talked about giving all the children in her school mobile devices too, another exciting and motivational project.
One of the problems I had was not writing down the location and time of all the speaker at BarCamp. So I was a few minutes late for Tess‘s discussion of Glow her report of how her pupils took to glow was very reassuring as was the screenshot of the primary pupil view of the portal. I feel a lot more positive about glow after hearing from a real classroom. I am still a bit worried about losing our international audience.
I also watched a couple of nice podcasting presentations and a very interesting higher edu blogging one, unfortunately I didn’t get a link from these, due to lack of attention to the speaker boards and the fact I did not take a laptop with me.
FLV Snippet Test
Just testing a wee snippet I’ve made for the blog that should let children publish video with less intervention from me.
It is still a bit convoluted:
Upload a jpg with the image tool.
Upload a flv file with the same name as an enclosure.
Change:
[[download:butterfly:icon::]]
to:
[[flashvideo:butterfly.flv:320:240]]
Where the size of the video is 320 by 240 pixels.
Given the infrequency of video being published I don’t know if the children would use this independently, but it will at least save me having to open up an old post, copy out the html to embed the flash swf, image and flash video file for any video posts.
The Best laid plans…
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.