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I’ve just this minute started a new sub-weblog Tasks – Blogging Tasks For Primary Six for my Primary Six class.

Hopefully they will carry out some of the tasks on their next visit to the media room.

my idea is to have slips of paper with a task and distribute them at random as they go into the room.

I’ve set the blog up so that it only shows one entry at a time in the hope of minimising distractions. The next step to post some help blogs for common tasks, taking screenshots, linking and commenting. I’ll then work on simplifying the template a bit more.

If you have any good ideas please let me know and I’ll add them to the list.

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One of the big plusses of the ScotEduBlogs site is the production of aggregated, time sorted rss feeds. I’ve just added this feed to my sidebar on the left. If you click on the ScotEduBlogs Latest link on the left it will a list of the latest education blog posts from around Scotland.

In Pivot I add this by putting [[rss:http://www.scotedublogs.org.uk/blogs/rss]] in my template.

If you are using wordpress (like a lot of Scots Edu blogs) you can use the RSS Sidebar Widget as I did on the scotedublogs aggregation blog.

(thumbnail)There are all sorts of other ways to use the feed, from subscribing to it in your feedreader to grabbing it in other applications.

I’m playing with the Dashcode Beta and have crudely adapted the RSS desktop widget to display the ScotEduBlogs feed. Click on the image on the right to see the widget in action.

It still needs some testing and the application of some graphics, but if you are using Mac OS x 10.4 you can download it and try it out.

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Cluster thingy
Originally uploaded by Lenny & Meriel.

I’ve been reading Ewan’s post about play and Mrs. O’Neill’s too. Lots of good thinks to think about. Ewan’s post is one of a series about failure which has given me loads of ideas that are not full articulated yet, limiting myself to the play idea has me thinking about play and time.

To allow children to play with the new toys (tools) takes time. Time away from other things so we need to justify it in some way, I don’t have too much a of a problem about that, but I am thinking of the amount of time it takes to blog, podcast or create a video.

For the Sandaig otters blog I usually have pairs of bloggers coming from 4 classes to the media room between 9 and 9:30 in the morning, so we should get 4 posts a day. Quite a few fall by the wayside. Even if the children make it to the room they quite often do not finish their post in the 15 or 20 minutes they have (they need to select a photo, resize it, write a post and blog the lot). Sometimes they get time to come back and finish, sometimes not (the children have also spent time the previous day taking photos for the days post).
This is an in theory way of working, it has not happened since Christmas as I have been back in the classroom fulltime due to staff absences, some children have been posting independently.

On the Primary Six SJ it has been taking up to an hour to carry out some tasks and again some children do not finish. As I am trying to take primary 6SJ to the media room once a week for ict, and we don’t always blog (spent an hour commenting on other blogs last time) it is quite hard to give the children enough regular playtime. I want them to have enough time to make the tools transparent and to get into some real collaborative fun.

Anyway I am interested in how other teachers manage this. If you blog with children how long does it take children to post? How much time do you give them to read other blogs? For people making bubbleshare slide shows and the like, how long does it take for children to put these together?

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I just posted some news to the scotedublogs aggregation blog but it looks like there might be a wee problem with wordpress.com:

So I am going to post it here too and Andrew might be best staying with self hosting after all;-)

I posted about the new feature

has added, a Stats page. This looks as if it might be useful analysing what goes on in the SEB world. The first thing I noticed was the post dinner peak you can also see the dip at the weekend, when I do most of my blogging.


has also added a ScotEduBlogs Wiki to the ScotEduBlogs site.

I was also going to post about the mockup for the ScotEduBlogs.org.uk site which I’ve just updated.

Since we have had no entries over at scotedublogs » ScotEduBlogs Logo I made the logo myself. Please let me know what you think about the design here or join in the discussion at the scotedublogs development group.

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Absolutely nothing:
inbox zero
Ewan would be proud of me (as long as he did not notice the disorganised folders in mail.app ), I often have hundreds of messages in my inbox, I am not quite at the GTD stage but it is a start.

And This:
empty desktop
I might even get a nice desktop picture now I can see the desktop.

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Andrew Brown’s site whereisab? :||: the digital home of andrew brown has had an upgrade. There are lots of interesting new sections. The most exciting for me is the Most Asked Questions, which is accessible from the left side of the homepage.

Beautiful wee screencasts explaining many aspects of blogs, rss and more, the one that had me most excited was What is scotedublogs.

Of course I read about Andrew’s changes on ScotEduBlogs.

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It is amazing how stupid technology can make you feel.

After school I was testing our video conferencing unit trying to connect to our Dutch friends De Rank via the LTS Hub.

First try and I can hear but not see, a quick call to the ever patient Stuart Oliphant at LTS enable me to see and here Suzan in Holland. Unfortunately she could not here me, more phone calls to Holland and Stuart had Stuart joining in the conference and trying various thing, we all left and joined the conference a few times, I held up helpful hints to Suzan like ‘Turn up you volume’ on A4 paper. Eventually I though maybe my mic is muted in some way, as Stuart and Suzan could both hear each other and not me, this made me to look for my mic which turned out to be still in the box:-S

My first video blush, I am only thankful that I didn’t have a class of children watching and can only apologise to Stuart and Suzan. I’ll remember to plug in the mic on Friday.

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Wonderful explanation of YouTube – Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us via cogdogblog and Ewan. I image it will be everywhere pretty soon.

A example of distributed working from TechCrunch.com/: Help Find Jim Gray With Web 2.0. After Jim Grey went missing at sea Amazon has stored digital satellite images and is asking for help on Mechanical Turk to spot Jim’s boat. TechCrunch says:

I hope that new web technologies will make helping people more common in the future. When tragedy strikes, people may be able to help in an effective and organized way instead of simply watching events unfold on their television.
I?m off to look at satellite images of the water outside of the San Francisco Bay. Please come help me.

Me too.

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If you subscribe to this blog via http://www.sandaigprimary.co.uk/pivot/jjrss.xml you might like to change over to my new Feedburner feed http://feeds.feedburner.com/johnjohnston.

I might be moving to a new url to separate me from the children/school a little. If you subscribe to the feedburner feed, now in the sidebar and in the alt link for the blog you will be able to keep up with me wherever I go if you so wish.