Our ICT suite started to come together today, we got a phone call yesterday to tell us to expect deliveries.

The classroom assistants did a great clean up

Hugh helped stacking the furniture

Quite a lot of boxes

And by the end of the day the plaster had been done

We are expecting the decorators on Monday and the guys to put the furniture together on Wednesday

For me the icing on the cake arrived just after the plasterers:

I am really looking forward to getting down to work with the suite and the mini suite of 4 mac minis. A few children were working with my iBook today to produce a comic life of two, which have been published on Sandaig Otters, I am hoping to that this sort of activity a lot further as the session progresses.

Image uploaded with AppleScript

Recently I’ve been testing alternative ways to post to the blog with the metaWeBlog API via AppleScript, Flock,Performancing, Ecto and TextMate.
It took me a while to get TextMate working and AppleScript worked for everything but posting images.
I got a ton of help on the pivot forum from hansfn, who was very patient with me, and spent a good while reading docs and googling, but I could not get AppleScript to upload images.
Last night I posted a comment on Tom Smith’s Blog this morning a script arrived in my inbox that worked perfectly.
It is always a great pleasure when this happens, people who you do not know giving up time to help out a stranger.

AppleScriptmetaWeBlogBlogging

Tim Lauer is Moving to Drupal. The setup sounds great:

For example each of our 4th and 5th grade teachers will have a blog which she will use to post assignments and announcements to students. Each 4th and 5th grade student will have a Drupal based blog that will live behind our firewall.

and

While we plan to introduce this to the students as a way to manage their work, we also will begin to introduce the idea that their class blog is a place for them to do other things besides just respond to assignments. We will also enable the images module so that they can use their Drupal blog as a place to organize images associated with their work. Using RSS we will create a master feed of all images and create a Flickr type collection of images that they can share and discuss with their classmates.

Sound just great. I am wondering if Drupal is suitable for hosted sites, how hard it is to setup etc, etc.

timlauerbloggingdrupal

I am just testing an AppleScript from Adam Burt which takes a screenshot of google earth and posts it to a blog via ecto. does lots of tagging and produces metadata too. Designed for blojsom I’ve tweaked the html a bit for pivot.
Details and download of the script from Google Earth Geo-Blog Snapshot – ecto Script plug-in.
I know little about google Earth, but I know there are a few folk out there who might like this.

meta-longitude=-4.322157262071
meta-latitude=55.878416254973
meta-altitude=0
meta-range=156.059623386301
meta-tilt=0.0
meta-heading=5.009656812371E-14
meta-coordinates=-4.322157262071,55.878416254973,0

technorati tags geotagged geo:lat=55.878416254973 geo:lon=-4.322157262071

I’ve occasionally dipped my toe into flash (eg Rommy Robot and some here) but not much more than the occasional image gallery, display and the odd experement in the last year or two. I am still really using actionscript 1 and it seems to be at 3.0 now!

But I read the odd flash blog and toaday saw IFBIN via Moock: IFBIN 2.0, hundreds of free, open examples, which has 100s of free examples, I’ve not really dug into them yet, but the way the files are delivered seems interesting, you launch the application and it opens your browsers which load a localhost port http://localhost:5505/flash/:

The IFBIN Service provides code installation, subscription management, and allows one click access to top quality code from the industries best developers. The service designed to provide code security in file verification and code signing. The IFBIN Service will only install files that are signed and verified as authentic.

.

I am not sure how many Scots-Edu bloggers are interested in flash, except ab but if you are, the price is right, safety seems ensured.

Well that is the first week over and it went very well all things considered.
We got a new podcast out yesterday on Radio Sandaig, just a short one, written and recorded in less than an hour. I am hoping to really move the podcast forward this session, but I have yet of figure out where the time will come from. If it was just my class, I would not have a problem, but I want to involve at least the two primary sixes and two primary sevens (we have two classes at most stages this session as opposed to one last session). I also want to minimise the disruption to my colleagues as much as I can.
I have also started my new class blogging, managing at least a post a day. I had forgotten how slowly the children type at the start of the year. The class blogging will I hope keep going at the same sort of rate until we get the ict suite up an running. I am not finding much difference having one computer in the class rather than the two I had last year so hopefully the sacrifice of the other machine to the suite will be worth it.
This session I am sharing one of the two primary sixes with a colleague, and will be carrying out some sort of ict duties in the morning (maybe some non class contact cover too). Next week I hope to get the other primary six and one of the primary seven classes blogging. Only half the classes in the school have computers working in them so far as the new network points are not connected yet. I am still thinking about how to handle an increased number of blog posts.
Away from school I am visiting my poor mum in hospital which is keeping me away from the web: , probably a good thing in many ways. (Mum is slowly recovering from a knee replacement and some complications, now improving steadily).
The most interesting things I have seen are Ewan and Andrew‘s new jobs as LTS ‘New Technologies for Learning Research Practitioners’. (A wonderful job title, I am going a slight green colour) and of course Glow, which looks very intriguing and I wish I had a wee bit more time to blog about it. Maybe launching at the start of term has both advantages and disadvantages?

I seem to have got this working now, this post was posted from TextMate and the image was uploaded from TextMate.
I quite like the idea of blogging from the desktop from a text editor, with a bare interface. I’ve only been using TextMate for a wee while, it is probably a bit over-powerful for my rather primitive html, php etc. It is probably more suited to someone who lives inside a text editor. (I like the idea of doing that, and sometimes attempt it in the summer holidays, but I’ve a living to make).

The image upload is pretty neat, you drag and drop an image onto the window, it is uploaded and the html snippet inserted. (there are templates for markdown and textile too)Tags: TextMate blogging metaweblog

This post was made using TextMate and the metaweblog API.After a few failures I am pointing to http://www.sandaigprimary.co.uk/pivot/pivot/metaweblog.php#john_johnston to see if that works, using my Blog id at the end of the url.Main entry text

Two days into term and the days are seem shorter, blog reading is pretty limited.

At the weekend, I tried to get WordPress Multi User and Lyceum to work on the Sandaig Site. I don’t really want the hugely scalability of WP MU but I would like to set a class or three up with individual blogs this session. I want to do it on our site, to keep control and safety in my hands. I want children to be able to choose some of the features of their blogs, even if it just colour and header image, and I want to be able to set up the blogs quickly. Needless to say it has not worked so far. I am casting around for other ideas, setting up one blog with a category of each child would I think lose the ability for each child to have a theme in wordpress and if we used pivot changing themes would be a little too hard for 10 year olds.

Not that we are ready for full scale blogging, we have one pc in the class at the mo, and the classes with the new cabling are not switched on yet (mine should not be, but the mitel guy told me how to make a temporary link from one router to the other).

In an attempt to distract myself from all of this and my forward plans I’ve been playing with different ways to post to the blog, hence all the weird short posts of late. I am thinking of quick ways to put up information in a standard form, say flagged blog posts in my feed reader, or children collecting data of some sort (weather say). I’ve had various partial successes, but I probably need a little help with the technical details.