Ewan, David and I have been working with a bunch of Masterclass teachers, talking about blogs, podcasting, wikis etc.
We set up a Masterclass New Technology blog and the participants all set up there own http://edublogs.org blog.
I was delighted, if slightly green, to see James Farmer linking to one of the new blogs: pc pod.
Congratulations to the pc pod team.
I just had another flurry of comment spam, over 100 comments to delete on Friday night after school. They had arrived between me leaving school and arriving home, nothing offensive, but a waste of space.
So I upgraded the pivot black list extension 
to 0.9.3 and implemented the spam quiz, This adds a trivial question to the comment form.
And it seems to be working nicely:
I had a great day at Communicate.06, thanks to Ewan for inviting me (and for organising the whole thing etc. etc.)
Peter Ford gave a great keynote ending with a performance of Taylor Mali‘s poem http://www.taylormali.com/index.cfm?webid=51 (MP3 of Taylor Mali reading the poem) I am sure Ewan had a mp3 of Peter reading on his blog, but I can’t find it.
Peter quoted me, which made me feel pretty good:
In the education timeline blogs have only been around for a millimeter or so. The possibilities are endless and many still to be discovered. It seems to me far to early to decide what a blog should or should not be used for. Certainly no one should be laying down rules just yet.
Modern Languages teachers seem pretty nice too, even though I don’t speak their language.
The thing that Peter said that interested me most was …every now and then be creative… .
As well as giving a really entertaining/educational keynote, he dotted lots of is and crossed the ts of using ict in an adventurous way, letting us know that it is ok to do just a bit.
There was also a group of student, who where associated with PIE recording video and audio very unobtrusively in the background. I guess they have be involved in quite a lot of creative ICT, they did an excellent job of providing a video to close the conference and a great example of well judged confidence when they were speaking (I hope some of that confidence comes from the creative use of ict).
The really great thing about how the conference was arranged was the built in extended support that will be available to the folk attending on the MFLE site which fits in well with Peter’s Why I am not a blogvangelist? post and Ewan’s busy schedule of getting into schools (example on his blog ) to do the podcasting business. I came away with the idea that the Modern Foreign Language teachers would really take this on.
Links…
Google Page Creator seems to be out: http://johnhjohnston.googlepages.com/home, I seem to have got one because I have a gmail address.
I noticed a link in Macromedia XML News Aggregator to http://tonyweeg.googlepages.com/ checked out http://pages.google.com/ found Safari was unsupported so I switched to firefox.
Its seems pretty east to fire out a page.
I’ve been keen to get the children in my class commenting on other blogs. This has be a bit hampered by WebSense, time, lack of pcs and my classroom organisation. We had a few folk off dancing today so I though I could use some language time for this today. Showed some children the Blakedown C of E Primary blog I just discovered and their entry on a day in life of year 5 got a few children to co-operate on a similar post A day in the life of p6 and then comment on the Blakedown blog .
I also had a few children blog about the Downs FM TV show.
I am trying to engineer a sense of connection between my class and children elsewhere and hope a little is better than nothing at all. Time consuming stuff though, 30 – 45 minutes for the children involved to get the job done. And we have not got round to posting the snow haiku and snow reports we wrote on Monday.
National Writing tests for the next couple of days, but I hope to get a bit more of this done soon. Hopefully the children will like Interactive Chatting Teddies as much as I do.
A nice thing about tags in a lot of web 2.0 stuff is the fact that they can be pulled together, pulled apart and re mixed.
tagged with Communicate.06 is a simple page that parse the RSS feeds that are tagged with communicate.06 from del.icio.us, technorati and flickr .
If you are going to/interested in Communicate.06 and you use any of these services you can tag stuff with communicate.06 and it will appear on the page. There is a load of services that do the same sort of thing (KickRSS and suprglu.com/ for instance) I’d guess Harnessing the Web will cover some of them.
Interactive Chatting Teddies via edublogs a brilliant blog/communication idea that really extends the travelling soft toy idea to include video conferencing and blogging.
I tried to start something like this except with an otter of course. But we always seem to forget the otter. Even though blogging is at the front of my mind there seems to be countless occasions when a child say to me: ‘we should have taken a photo of that for the blog.’ just too late. I would guess with younger children you could really develop the idea that your furry friend just had to go everywhere with the class, and he/she could carry the camera.
When we started blogging we hardly ever used photos on the blog, now we hardly have a post without an image. This makes the process a lot more interesting for the children.
Yesterday I was blogging with one of our primary fours, about a recent visit to the sports centre. No pictures, but one of the children came up with the goods suggesting a photo we could take in the class and use.
I’ve been doing a lot more whole class blogging this session. I know some folk would not consider this authentic blogging, but I think it is quite a useful way to carry out a lesson. It is really shared writing which is what we spend a fair bit of time doing in primary classrooms, the children suggest and refine their text, lots of discussion, group thinking etc. the same thing as we do countless times on big bits of paper or the blackboard. Class blogging covers all the same ground and it add a real purpose, the possibility of a conversation and keeps a record. My typing is also a lot clearer than my handwriting and catching typos on the whiteboard keeps the children on their toes. This sort of lesson can also be a useful way to review and record new learning. Finally it is a lot easier than getting a whole class to blog if you only have two computers in the room.
Just opend Vienna for the first time in a few days, I’ve been slipping back to reading blogs in my browser. Noticed some activity on the scotedublogs a good few more blogs in Argyll & Bute. Lots more reading. As well as a blog Andrew M. Brown’s site has a ton of ICT advice:
The Collected Ramblings of an Education Support Officer (ICT).
Seems a great idea especially with such a large area to cover. Of course even if you are not in Argyll and Bute there is a ton of stuff to borrow.
I hope we can use Cinnamon Crunch Cereal! in school. I found it via Remote Access in a post podcasting breakthrough which has more interesting classroom/podcasting links. It describes using Cinnamon Crunch Cereal! to get round a lack of macs and GarageBand and let children mix podcast backgrounds. Having the same problem and no musical knowledge it looks like something I could point some children at, and they might come up with something for the podcast.
