I mentioned I had tried the Beta.

Just downloaded the final from ‘Get Google Earth‘

And I though that my terms planning was well under way.

How blogs can make the link and Podcasting: a case study both on an education guardian.co.uk/ micro site quote me. Hopefully this should increase the number of comments the children’s blogs are getting. It certainly cheers me up a bit, valadation for afar, just like comments on the children’s blogs.

When I am not eating, drinking, visiting updating webpages or walking along the canal in the mirk, I have be mostly browsing and avoiding writing 7 things(I’ll try this soon David).

Interesting stuff I’ve found:

retrievr – search by sketch via Tim Lauer

Weblogg-ed Tech Tools For Learning links to a nice pdf.

Tools for the TEKS: podcasting intro

another podcasting intro

A ton of posts at: 2 Cents Worth almost made me comment, but I am too far into the holidays to think that much.

And I have managed to switch my browser habit to a Vienna one for reading blogs.

All this means I am avoiding a wee bit of assessment I have to do before Monday.

Found a few Sandaig mentions too:

Sandaig got a mention in the “Podcasts for Educators” Weblog Highlights from 2005 where they play a snippet from our podcast along with some other school podcasts.

Anne Davis: What’s going on inside your head? says I seem to be spending a lot of time in Scotland lately. Really good things are happening there. which should be encouraging for us scot-edu-blog folk.

Dragon on its way

David Warlick’s Year End Reflections list the milestones in his development: dramatic lunges upward, as a discover something new that so thrills my sense of the possiblities that it is like being violently lifted to a new plateau

I was delighted to see:

# 1990 – Hypertalk (another programming language and even more magic)

as one of the milestones, HyperCard has been sadly neglected by Apple. Thankfully there is still SuperCard which I use every day and blog about here. Unfortunatly I can’t use it on the School network (pc, and teachers can’t install software), but SuperCard could let children to all sorts of cool things very simply (say create web pages). teacher can make fun game (some of mine are here).

I give a lot to be able to use SC in the class with a network connection.

After the whinge a couple of entries ago about the difficulty I have in reading and organising blogs and feeds, I found, in the depths of my Applications folder, Vienna.

Vienna is a freeware, open source RSS and Atom newsreader for Mac OSX 10.3.9 or later.

Vienna has a ton of features I like: Folders of subscriptions, Webkit view of pages, import of OPML (got the scots-edu-blogs from my lilina page.), flagged articles are reflected in the Marked Articles smart folder.Links can be opened in Vienna in a tabbed interface(displayed with WebKit) or in Safari

There are quite a few great looking features to play with later: Smart folders, AppleScript support and css styling.

I’ve move Vienna to my Dock in the hope that I will not forget about it again.

Found this via Tim Lauer

As Tim says Lots of interesting possibilities, Tim and I talked about using flickr for a joint school project, flickr is banned by Glasgow city filtering.

But bubbleshare is I think even more exciting with the easy to add audio. Tim had problems with adding audio in Safari, but I managed that alright. I did have trouble clicking the add image button to upload a file, but found it works if I click the bottom of the button.

I’ll be interested to see if this works on the school network in January.

technorati tags: Tim Lauer, BubbleShare

I always think that the end of term will allow me to squeeze in some extra ict lessons and activities. As usual this year I was wrong forgetting how busy Christmas is. I’ve hardlt had time to post here at all.

The December Radio Sandaig podcast is out at last. Lot of trouble with this one and I ended up doing most of the editing myself. Audacity managed to lose all the children’s edits.

After enquiring on the Podcasting-Education mail list and searching the audacity-users list it seems that Audacity can have problems with losing data if you move the original files.

This seems related to the file format preferences, and how Audacity imports:

Make a copy before editing(safer)

Read Directly from the original file (Faster)

The second, which is AFAIK the default, is what I use and seems to be a problem.

The solution seems to be to use the safer import and save a wav file at the end of each editing sessions as a backup.

Anyway the December podcast doesn’t even have background music due to lack to time and having to redo the whole thing.

An other interesting ict activity we did was a little experimenting with Comic Life. This is a wonderful app to quickly create comics, I’ve read a lot about it on the web recently, but just got round to trying it out.

Emma B in primary seven produced this comic of the Radio Sandaig Christmas Boys Vs Girls competition for the Sandaig Otters blog.