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Delicious Applescript Blog

A while back I stopped splicing my daily delicious links into my RSS feed via FeedBurner, a couple of folk told me they did not find it very helpful. I’ve been wondering if a weekly list would be of interest?

To make it a little simpler I made a AppleScript that downloads the RSS from my delicious links, creates some html and posts it here using the MetWeblogAPI. It is not an elegant bit of code but I’ve put it up on my wiki: week in delicious in case anyone wold find it useful. It would be easy to tweak for a different number of days or just to pickup a particular tag.

I am not sure if I am going to use it, if I do I’ll probably only post a particular tag but I could not resist the temptation for a little auto blogging.

The script could be changed for other autoblogging tasks too. I’ve put it with few other Apple Scripts that I find occasionally useful on the Wiki.

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Webpages I’ve bookmarked on delicious this weeK:

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On Thursday I took part in a Glowing Thursdays event, presenting about podcasting, I’ve put my slides together with an audio recording of the event. I’ve done a little editing mostly to cut out a phone call interruption (I left in the first ring to explain the subsequent loss of my train of thought) and to add the answers from the Q&A at the end as I failed to capture the audio of the questions. Anyway here is the video, click to play.

I’ve also uploaded just the audio

or download from my iDisk. There is a larger version of the movie here: MobileMe Gallery – Podcasting Glowing Thursdays

Here is a list of the links mentioned:

Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike photo by Seven Morris

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This week on my Work blog:
DSi at Dykehead Views from the pupils at Dykehead Primary on using DSi in class.
Cathedral Podcast in Cathedral Primary School demonstrating podcasting to Mrs Shearer, Emma and Olivia from Primary Seven, they will be podcasting soon!

I was also delighted to listen to this podcast: The Egypt Topic P3 I had worked wish some pupils at Woodlands Primary School in an after school club, producing some podcasts, this is their first independent episode and I hope to listen to many more.

AudioBoo: Podcasting in the Classroom an audio extract from my Glowing Thursdays presentation (the whole thing will be published later).

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I guess this will be blogged and tweeted a fair bit, 3 years ago I hopeful posted:

Unfortunately I have found navigating the discussions very clunky. lots of scrolling and clicking, neither of the two views let you read and respond with out a lot of clicking.
It is hard to follow discussions that you have started and taken part in, as there is not ‘my discussions’ or even a search. There is no recent discussions list either so to see if a discussion has be updated you need to dig down into the various threads. The date on the threads is not the date that the last addition to the tread or sub thread was made.
I really hope that this can be improved on by the time the portal goes live.

Today I woke to a barrage of tweets about glow forums. Glow forums are are forum setup on glow using the popular phpBB Open Source forum solution. Like many other internet users I am already familiar with phpBB which is a vast improvement over Glow discussions.

Of course this will have training implications for glow users who have spent time getting their heads round Glow discussions but I for one will be a lot happier showing folk how to use the new forums than I ever have been waffling round the previous tools shortcomings.

With blogs and wikis due to be added this session I will not have much room to moan about glow anymore.

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It has taken me a while to get round to the second post based on a morning at Glencairn primary working on the ipod touch project. In fact the pupils have beat me to it: Comic Twist.

After syncing the ipods I did a wee bit of work with the class on their new apps.

The first app was Comic Twist which allows you to create comics with up to 3 panes a little like Comic Touch, the Comic Life for the ipod/phone. I went for comic touch as it is cheaper that Comic Touch and does 3 panes in a comic.

The second app is i think going to be a great one, it has been sitting in front of my nose for quite while, firstClass. FirstClass is the email and communication systems used in North Lanarkshire Education and I have been rather slow to realise its potential for all sort of things. It is a great way to have discussions, share files etc. I’ve used the mobile client on my iPhone a lot mostly for email, it is amazingly quick even in an area with a very poor mobile connection.

I just had not thought of using it with pupils. The weekend before the iPod touch conference it suddenly dawned on me that we could use it to pass files around the classroom, messaging etc. At the conference the children from the Friezland iPod Project were using firstClass in this way. So when I got to return to Glencairn I synced the iPods with new software and showed the pupils their new firstClass account. We are only using one account for all the ipods to share but the children could easily upload images (created with comic touch) and join in a discussion. The images and discussions can of course be accessed on a desktop or via the web. This makes it very easy to get text images and files onto and off the iPods. We could add movies to a file store in firstClass on the desktop and access it on the touches. We even quickly tested exporting a keynote presentation that some pupils were working on and uploading it, it worked a treat.

Click on the thumbnails to see bigger versions of desktop and iPod views.


I think FirstClass is going to be very useful for working with iPod touches in the classroom.

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Parasync

This is the first of a few posts based on my morning today at Glencairn primary helping with their ipod touch project.

I started syncing and adding a few apps to the iPods. When I had originally set up the ipods with apps it took an age, syncing them two by two to my macbook and I was not looking forward to repeating the exercise. In the meantimne I’ve become a middle man between the Consolarium and a north Lanarkshire school to trial Taptale, this involves LTS lending the school sone ipod touches and a parasync. While we are waiting to get that project up and running I borrowed the parasync to update the Glencairn iPods. It took about 20 minutes to sync all of the iPods. The only glitch was the fact that I had turned of installing apps in the iPods restrictions. Once I had reset them all the update went flawlessly.

A parasync costs about £800 which is probably outside most school budgets in current times, but when weighed agains the time that it takes to sync 20 ipods two by two it is to my mind worth considering. It might be worth several schools owning one together using it for major updates and just recharging the ipods with 4-Port USB Chargers.

I was delighted to see that most of the children had personalised their ‘screensavers’ with drawings, photos and even lunes!

More about the apps I’ve added to the touches soon.