That last post was just to show the Heads of the primary schools in our learning community how easy it is to blog. The poor souls listened to me for about 90 minutes and the upshot is we are going to try setting up blogs for the other 5 primaries in the Bannerman New Learning Community for next session.

I am quite excited about this, I hope to set the sites up over the summer and then do some cpd with my colleagues next session.

I’ve got a few ideas about using the blogs that I’ve not inflicted on them yet, I’ll wait until the blog bug has taken hold.

David Warlick’s tool for collecting photos, postings etc about conferences.

Like my eLive 2006 RSS experiment on steroids.

powered by performancing firefox

As the final term of the session slides into sports days and clearing up we are doing a couple of interesting things at Sandaig.

The recent romans podcast is Educate’s podcasting directory’s featured podcast.

As mentioned below I started a World Cup 2006 blog. If you have a minute, please give the blog a comment.

It has been hard for the children to get time to post much, as we are busy with filming The Dream Dragon. Based on the Keepers poem for National Poetry Day October 2005 written by Sandaig children and turned into a play by Carol Fuller, an American high school theatre teacher in Austell, Georgia in the southern United States of America and pupils at South Cobb high school.

The production is pretty lo-fi, no costumes or scenery, only a few props. Focusing on the performances and how to stage it. The children are shooting the video taking turns at being cameraperson, director and gofor.

They have come up with some pretty imaginative suggestions for how to frame and stage scenes. I’ve uploaded quicktime movies of Scenes 2 to 7 to the internet archive, these are linked from the The Dream Dragon blog.

This whole project has lasted most of this session (and it might not be over yet),

sparked by The Keepers Poetry Project which was based on a poem by Phil Whitehead and run by Peter Ford our poems were original published on the Sandaig Poets blog and podcast on Radio Sandaig.

This was blogged by Ewan McIntosh and spread via Anne Davis, who was Spellbound by a Podcast.

It was then picked up by Carol Fuller from Ewan’s blog , her students wrote a play based on the verses. Carol has also become a frequent commentator on Sandaig Poets producing some wonderful conversations. I have a lot more to say about this whole process, but for now i need to thank the poets, blog magicians and fairy blog-mother Carol for everything.

With only a short time left, I’ve started a new blog for the class:

We have a new blog:

Sandaig World Cup 2006

Comments appreciated. Already the children have been quite creative in the sort of posts they are writing. Completely unprompted.

Later by unprompted I mean I’ve not really talked too much to the children about the form of their posts, I am too busy with this. The children have come up with a couple of really imaginative ideas for postings, short at the moment, but IMO sweet. Children who have not been all that interested in the blog are coming to the fore.

I got a trial account, but am having some problems loading a 92k csv file I uploaded, seems to hang at about 7 percent.

Better luck with a smaller file 5 columns 29 rows.

In school I’ve mostly used spreadsheets with my classes to produce graphs, there doesn’t seem to be a charting facility in google spreadsheets yet.

There is I am sure a case for making simplified versions of these web 2.0 online tools for children covering spreadsheets and databases. Full-blown applications are overkill for most primary needs.

After the fun of the first ScotEduBlogMeetup there is another one in the planning stages the New Meetup is planned for 20th September 2006 to coincide with SETT. The program is evolving on the scotedublogs it looks a bit more ambitious than the first one.

Born Geek: CoLT a firefox extension that lets you copy the html tag in firefox. I am welded to Safari because of the similar function that comes with Safari Stand this makes it much easier to copy links and use them in a blog or in a html editor.I am posting this with Performancing .com another nice firefox plugin that lets you post to a blog from firefox.

Now out for mac. Looks interesting but the System Requirements of Video card with at least 16 MB of RAM and 1 Ghz or faster processor leave me far behind on my G4 400 with an 800mhz upgrade. I need a summer job to buy a new box.

After that last one this is a bit more like it, if you’ve used Flash you’ll be laughing out loud.

I’ve been writing this post in my head for a week or so and it is nowhere near finished, but I need to get it out of the way to clear my brain, if you read this blog I don’t do too much reflection so this is an unusual post (apologies in advance for rambling).

I’ve been blogging with the children in Sandaig for over two years now. I started off with little knowledge of the edublogosphere, just wanted to bring a tool I’d found useful elsewhere into school. I’ve always been keen on children publishing and a blog seemed a good idea at he time.

As time went on I read other educators blogs and though about what blogging was doing in class. All the eduWeb2.0 ideas about audience, purpose etc made sense.

At first our blogs didn’t get too many comments, or they came in flurries, they were powerful aids to the whole process, real people (and a real poet) commenting on the children’s work valuing it and encouraging them. I didn’t think too much more about them, sometimes the children replied and got into short conversations, sometimes not.

A lot of this was limited by time, timetable and having 2 internet machines in the classroom. Occasionally we would get a real flurry of activity.

Recently Andy posted Help Wanted and started a scot-wave of comments, my class wrote some comments and got comments back from the Aberdeen guys and Andy himself. At the same time our fairy blogmother started some lovely conversations over at Sandaig Poets.

(most of this has been masterminded or loosely connected by Scots blog wizard Ewan)

This has been wonderful, but it brings up a couple of thoughts.

The comments by children here and by my children have been of a pretty good quality, the children are taking blogs a lot more seriously than say think.com, but as conversations develop it become harder to organise access and time. I don’t know if this would be easier with individual blogs that would be aggregated on a mother blog in a lab situation, but I’d like to try.

My class have made me proud with their commenting so far (another nice example).

Keeping up conversations amoung 10 year olds will require a bit of support, I am having difficulty reading all the comments (need to check if PIVOT has a feed for comments, wordpress does), keeping up with my classes comments on other blogs hmm!

The more conversations children have the more interesting teaching points will come up. The problems with being public but not seeing facial expressions and body language have be pointed up in newsgroups, mail list and blogs. Today Ewan the most experienced scot-edu-blogger provided an example here and here, if adults have trouble understanding each other children will too. (This might not be a bad thing, think teaching point).

I keep saying we are only scratching the blog surface here, and am getting a bit worried about interested in supporting it all as we are getting a bit deeper, practical examples of supporting long term conversations in a two computer primary classroom wanted?