I’ve joined the International Edubloggers Directory although I am probably a good deal scruffier that the folk on the graphic.
A Picnik with with a little help from an API
Athole recently blogged about the online picture editor Picnik. I had noticed that flickr now incorporates editing with picnik and it is fitted into the up and coming version of pivot PivotX.net the blog software we use at Sandaig.
So I was quite interested in trying it out in school. Unfortunately we cannot use flickr in school and when I tried to upload files at school it did not work. I think this is to do with the protocols allowed in school being http only which stops the flash uploaders from working. We have had problems using other flash based tools.
somewhat despondently I mooched about the picnik site when I spotted the API whixh of course is the clever stuff that lets flickr and pivot connect to and work with picnik. A quick look convinced me that this would make it possible to work around the flash uploader quite easily. I signed up for an API key and basically copied and pasted an example to make a very simple form.
This form allows my class (or anyone else) to upload a photo to picnik bypassing picnik’s own uploader or to load a image on the web in picnik.
We had a chance to try it out this afternoon, I asked the children to use picnik to add titles and speech bubbles to some of the photos taken on burns day, and they did.
Picnik preformed very well with just a couple of children having problems with the flash interface sticking.
The uploading and editing of the photos was surprisingly quick and the interface was easy for the children to use. The only problems they had was selecting text placed over a shape and I missed the ability to move objects forward and backwards (maybe that is in there somewhere?).
Picnic looks as if it is going to be a useful addition to our ict toolkit, we don’t really have a image editor that can handle layers on the school pcs and i can see how this might be very useful. I am also thinking about how I could use the API for a photo gallery in school.
A Jukebox and a Wiki
There has been hardly a tweet from me this weekend, not because I’ve been away from the box but because I’ve been too busy in front of it. Apart from working on a non educational site and doing a bit of editing on the second edtechroundup podcast (this is not quite ready yet but will be out soon), I’ve been playing with a couple of new bits of the Sandaig Website.
Firstly I, created a new section to show off the children’s garageband productions. I blogged some GarageBand Plans a while back and since then I’ve been working with some children at the computer club, some from the Primary Six classes and got our music teacher involved with other classes. They have been making quite a few short songs. The Sandaig Jukebox is a work in progress, but it allows you to choose a playlist and listen to the songs. I hope to replace the Quicktime player with a flash one, have a comment or rating system and a few other goodies figured out at some time in the future. It might not work for everyone at the moment, I’ve not bypassed the click here to allow active x stuff on some windows systems, but you can get the idea.
The other thing I’ve been preparing is the Sandaig Wiki this will be my first venture into using a wiki with children. I choose PmWiki mainly because it seems easy to configure and install. I had already briefly tested it and it seems to work very well, I am especially interested in the fact that you can add features from the cookbook for example I’ve tried some Media Tests and even managed to adapt the Yuan.CC Flickr Experiments.
Anyway I hope to start work on two sections with the children this week: Sound and light where Primary six T, who I take for Science, will record there Science topic. and the Primary 6 Project which is for a group of primary 6 children who are learning to work together and cooperate. At the moment these children are involved in a Garageband task; creating music, designing CD covers and doing some psd work. The children will have a page each on the wiki to display some mindmaps, embed their music and art work.
Well that is the plan anyway, but we know where the best laid ones go. Hopefully I’ll have some success to report soon.
Starting to get things moving
A while ago I was moaning about not managing to get the kids blogging, this sessions class are a very different bunch than last years and I’ve been struggling to get them posting to the blog regularly enough to get familiar with the tools.
The answer turns our to be, same as last session, to get the children to organise the rota, two children organise the random selection of a couple of others to choose what to blog about, take photos, and blog the next day (I download the photos before school).
Radio Sandaig has also been less than regular in its output. I’ve been trying to organise it by getting children from 4 classes to write and record segments, as teachers and children are busier than ever, it is getting harder and harder to find the time. Last session I was out of class teaching ict across the school and could make some time, this session I am back in class and have been using my NCC time. It was not enough, especially as the children had to write in their own time at home. This month I think I’ve solved the problem, on Thursdays I am having a Radio Sandaig Working Lunch this involves opening our media room up and letting the children write. We probably now have too much material. Interestingly this session I have more children wanting to write about outside school activities, mostly TV and movie reviews, than class work, I guess this is because they feel more ownership of their segments.
Next session I think I’ll take the podcast back inside my own class and develop it as a talking, listening and reflection tool as part of our language and pse program.
So despite a few frustrations (mostly with tools I’d love to use being unavailable for technical reasons or filtered out) I am feeling pretty positive about using ‘social media’ and online tools. I’ve also got a nice new project to unveil soon and a couple of interesting ideas (well interesting to me anyway) to blog about, more frequent posting ahead.
EdtechRoundUp
EdTechRoundup is a new podcast from an open group of UK educators which I have become involved in.
EdTechRoundup is a place where a group of UK-based educators come together for discussion and collaboration around the use of technology in education. We believe in pedagogically-sound uses of educational technology, but don?t believe in ramming Web 2.0 (or anything else for that matter) down people?s throats?
The first podcast is out. This one sees David Noble and Sinclair Mackenzie at the controls with input from Joe Dale.
They discuss tools for the classroom including ClassTools.net: Flash Templates for Educators and the problems of online content being blocked in schools. Joe Dale provides his top 5 reasons to use blogs in class or school.
The dual presenter with input from a guest is going to be the pattern for the show with a different set of presenters taking over for each show. A fair number of UK educators are involved (see the edtechroundup » Contact Details page) and the podcast is open to anyone to join in. In good social media fashion the podcast has been organised on a wiki and a series of FlashMeetings. The Meetings are announced on the wiki so it is easy to join in.
Apart for planning the podcast the meetings have been good fun and a lot of interesting areas of tech and social media discussed. If the first show and these discussions are anything to go by EdTechRoundup should be a good feed to add to iTunes or other podcatcher.
Tom Barrett and myself will be hosting the next podcast which should be out in a couple of weeks.
News Reading, New Tweeting
I think I only managed one blog post over the christmas holidays. I did tumble 8 times, post half a dozen links to del.ic.io.us and do a fair bit of tweeting.
I didn’t read my RSS reader at all. I was a bit busy putting together a non-educational site, incorporating flickr, youtube and blog streams, I wish I could use video and flickr on our school site in the same way.
Last night I opened my reader and basically just marked all as read, I didn’t feel too bad as twitter had been giving me as much reading as I could deal with, lots of links for various edu (and other) bloggers and of course I subscribe to tweets from Scotedublogs which kept me up-to-date with my fellow Scots. I don’t know that I’d like to rely on twitter all of the time but it gave an interesting tilt to things and another tilt back tonight when I opened Vienna.
There seems to have been and explosion of twitter tools and addons using the and one nice one is Twitter Stats this is a perl script which you can run from the terminal in OS X and a numbers template to paste the results into after the perl script copies them to the clipboard, here are my twitter stats:
Coincidentally today my class were doing a little charting of there own surveying the communication tech they have at home as far as I recall this show a huge increase since last year.
2007 Roundup
As the year draws to a close I’ve been egoistically surfing my own blog to see what I got up to over the last year or so. Last December I collected some of the posts I’d made over the year, and I am doing so again, although I’ll limit myself to one post this time. It is an interesting exercise and one I’d recommend to other teacher bloggers. One of the nice things about blogging with a class is looking back over the previous entries and noting that you have done quite a lot.
I started making a month by month list same as last year, but it is maybe more interesting to group some of my old post thematically.
Blogging (and social media) tools
This year I branched off and tried some other blog tools:
The microblogging tool twitter is pretty interesting. I signed up and though about uses an mashups in August. Had some fun in October. More seriously I’ve set up twitter accounts to use with twitterfeed.com: ScotEdublogs on twitter which tweets links to all the ScotEdublog’s posts and one teachmeet07 which collects posts from technorati tagged teachmeet07. There are a lot of very interesting twitter mashups (collected at Twitter Fan Wiki ), I’ve played with the twitter API (in an amateurish way) and it is pretty nice.
Tumblr I thought about it and then got a Tumbelog I’ve really been enjoying tumblr which is a great way to quickly blog about something in a more visually appealing way that twitter. I also got a kick out of refashioning my del.icio.us links into a kind of tumblelog: A Tasty Tumble (sort of).
These alternative type of blogs (harking back to the original style of weblog, e.g. robot wisdom, broken link, see the robot wisdom weblog or How Jorn Barger Invented Blogging | First Site Guide hat-tip to Ogi) are pretty handy tools for storing or sharing ideas and links.
del.icio.us for structural storage, twitter for chatter and tumblr for sharing and storing text images, video and links in a very accessible way (I love the Archive).
A couple of days ago I found kwout (Through a tweet and a post, see the post) which is a brilliant addition to tumblr (or other webpages/blogs). Kwout lets you take a screen shot of a webpage and clip and post it to your blog/tumble, it also creates an image map producing links for the links on the original page in effect letting you embed a bit of a webpage in your blog.
I am looking forward to using these tool in the coming year and seeing how they develop and how they might be mashedup.
2007 was of course the year when the ScotsEduBloggers started facingbooking, I tagged along but am not convinced that it is the place for me (I I still didn’t really get it in October).
Tools for School
I looked at toondoo which is a fantastic tool, and used it with my class but there are to many sweary words in the cartoons and comments to keep using it.
We joined Voices Of The World. VOTW kepts us busy trying new tools in class. Voki in September’s Task,was difficult as was October’s Task using Animoto. I had already played with animoto and decided it was lacking in creativity. The October Task proved me wrong the tool matched the task well. The problem with these tools was that we can’t use them in school, the flash upload is based on the RTMP protocol and that is stopped by the network in school. I had also tested voicethread during the summer and though it had great potential for use in class, but it didn’t work on the school network either.
The problem of using new social media tools in the class room should not be underestimated, time invested in testing at home often backfires on school networks and network admins can pull or change access.
For this reason I tend to favour keeping things desktop based then publishing to the blog. This year I’ve started using garageband, made a lot of use of comic life on Sandaig Otters and developing ways of posting wee movies made with iMovie.
I puttogether a simple page to produce code for posting movies to the blogs: weemovies, it will also let Sandaig Pupils upload movies to the site and produce code for the blog.
I also like the opportunity of using home made hacks that allow me rather than the pupils some creativity.
Mashups
I played with the google and flickr APIs quite a bit this year: My Maps, lickr maps mashing and some GPS questions and Maps Again. I have all my geotagged flickr photos on a map and have started mapping the voices of the world participants: Where are the Voices of the World.
I also enjoyed playing with rss and the del.icio.us API. I messed about with the twitter API too, automating posting and tried to sort followers and following.
Moaning
I did a fair bit of this for example: This week we have been mostly 403ed, moblogging as a solution to technical problems and Errors & Frustrations.
ScotEdublogs
I posted about SEB nearly every month:Scotedublogs – A New Hub for Scottish Educational Blogs or have a look at the my scotedublogs tag cloud!
ScotEduBlogs news: index is as near to a homepage as I have and a constant source of good thing. The mix of Scots Education blogging, from movers and shakers to infants in primary schools (movers and shakers too) never stops educating and entertaining me. I am really looking forward to seeing ScotEduBlogs expand over the next year.
Conclusions?
Having taken the bet part of a week to get this post into its current form I should have come to some sort of conclusion.
Well I seem to have had a lot of fun playing with the toys, frustration with things beyond my control (along with some within it) and kept up with lots of friends.
I imagine that next year will bring more of the same, and I am afraid that the frustrations will keep these tools out of the hands of children in a lot of classes. I count myself as quite savvy for a teacher but still bumped my head more than is good for it this year.
While I am typing this two things I read struck home:
- Nick Hood commenting on Ewan‘s post and warning that glow is still a long way from being a mainstay in the classroom. Until it is (and I hope afterwards) we need better access in our classrooms. If the children had the same sort of tools and toys we enjoyed at TeachMeet07 and are enjoyed by educators across the continents, what would happen?
- Tom Barrett’s post on enjoying the thinking time that holiday’s bring, to exploit the social web, it might be that teachers need a bit more thinking time?
Happy New Year
Possible Copyright Lesson
A while back I was involved in a discussion about copyright on John Connell’s blog, I’ve just had another though about teaching copyright.
I occasionally look through the stats for the school website and see were links etc are coming from. today I noticed some connections to youtube and myspace. I followed a couple up and found that they were using images from Sandaig blogs as background images. My first though was to be a bit annoyed about the use of our bandwidth. Then I started to wonder how the children would react. How would they feel about their images being used on someone else’s site without attribution. I don’t know if I’ll get a chance to discuss this with the class (my p6 from last year), but it might be an interesting example to spark some discussion.
for:troutcolor, thanks John
I just discovered The Whiteboard Blog which looks like a very useful source of information for folk with smartboards.
I read about it in my RSS reader vienna. One of the RSS feds I subscribe to is the feed for del.icio.us/for/troutcolor, del.icio.us links tagged for:troutcolor. These are thinks that people have though I would be interested in. In this case it was sent by John Sutton of creative ict .
Much appreciated, as are the other links John has sent me. I am not user how many folk use this function of del.icio.us, I occasionally send out links like this, but probably should do so more. It is pretty simple, as you tag a link you just use the tag for colon username format to send the links to whoever you think would like it.
I must admit I never notice the links for me when I visit the del.icio.us site, but once the fact the links are sent out from del.icio.us in aRSS feed makes the difference.
Wee Movies
I’ve been thinking bit more about getting children to make and publish wee movies. I was working with a couple of children on one recently and thinking about making a simple system for blogging them. I’ve used the Anarchy Media Player on our wordpress blogs (Test Movie) and on Edublogs blogs, Edublogs does not implement the rather nice feature of Anarchy where a image file with the same name as the movie plus the extension is used as a splash. I don’t think I could use Anarchy without breaking some older stuff here, so need another solution.
This got me thinking as did embedthevideo.com – Video Pop-Up Link Maker which I’ve used on the Sandaig Blogs before.
I wanted something like both, a splash screen without a popup. Quicktime movies can be embedded in html with a link to another movie that will load in the same place when the first movie is clicked. I’ve knocked up a quick and crude webpage that takes a movie and an image and produces the html fragment to use quicktime to load the image and play the movie when the image is clicked.
The movie above is a screencast of the webpage in use producing the html that show the movie.
The setup also allows Sandaig pupils to upload images and movies and optionally produces an embed link to the tool to allow others to then embed the movie (I do not suppose that anyone will want to do that but it was interesting to play with.)
So the weemovies page would allow anyone to produce the html fragment if they know the url of a movie. The script is not very portable or flexible, but I hope it will be useful. We have got a wee movie in production which should see the light of day next week.