A Quick and Dirty celebration of National Poetry Day was organised on Thursday this week.

based on the The Keepers Poetry Project and the original Keepers poem by Phil Whitehead.

All the children in primary 2 to 7 attempted to write a verse in the last hour of Thursday. Primary Seven pupils types the poems up for the Sandaig Poets blog. apart from the odd file going astray this was a success: 150 verses written.

On Friday we recorded a podcast for Radio Sandaig with some verses from each class. for the sake of speed I did the editing on Friday evening and Saturday morning. This was the first time we have recorded children out side of p6 and p7, great excitement, but all the children took the recording very seriously indeed.

Next time we try this, it would probably be better to start before 2 o’clock, so that the children could see their poems online straight away, the primary seven typists just finished at 3 o’clock.

Two thoughts, one how easy it was to do the blogging involving a lot of children. Next time I’d be tempted to create a blog just for the day and have a category for each class so that the children see their poems go up one at a time. The second thought is that it would have been pretty difficult to do the podcast if I was not released from class. Classroom podcasting would have a lot of background noise, I was able to record the children (or let the older ones record themselves in the music room). Mind you the Radio Sandaig team can now handle recording without help, so maybe next time they could do the whole thing.

We have started recording the October podcast.

Goodbye lunchtimes for the next few days as we get the recording done.

The podcasters are incredibly enthusiastic, popping ideas all the time.

After this show we will really start to listen to ourselves and work on diction. Still having trouble with explosive Ps, I need to do some research on that, I think I saw one solution involving stockings, but cannot remember where.

I also need to start getting some more boys involved, the majority of the volunteers are girls at the moment.

We also hope to do a very short one-off podcast on Friday connected to our National Poetry Day event on Thursday.

I am testing WordPress at edublogs.org

http://cpdinict.edublogs.org/

and at blogsome john tests wordpress there seems t obe one or two things at edublogs which are not quite right, the themes editor doesn’t show many of the themes, a few broken links I guess.

The blogsome set up seems to offer a few more of wordpress’ features. Blogsome blogs come with google adverts, but tey are fairly samll. You seem to be able to turn them off, but they hosts ask you not to. I suppose that turning them off on a school site might be a good thing.

Andy Carvin’s Waste of Bandwidth: Creating the $100 Laptop

… a presentation from Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab. Negroponte discussed his $100 laptop initiative, in which he is working to produce a low-cost laptop for mass distribution in k-12 schools in the developing world

This might link to the discussions at SETT about the SSDN . The problem with having all the wonderful digital resources for learners seem to be the uneven distribution. In Glasgow with a fairly low percentage of households with internet connectivity maybe we need a £100 or even £200 laptop initiative for children.

This also links into the digital native argument somewhere, some disadvantaged children will not grow up using the technology without thinking about it, putting them at an educational disadvantage compared to their better off peers in the city.

tags: Scottish Learning Festival Andy+Carvin Digital Divide

Before SETT I though it was just me, Ewan and David.

But there seems to be a lot more, David has posted about Exc-el weblogs in East Lothian.

In the podcasting round table at SETT, we met someone with several (still can’t find my notes).

It would be nice to find some more or them all.

Sandaig’s main blog is listed at Scottish Blogs but I don’t see any other education blogs there.

Maybe we could start a Scottish Education Blog list somewhere.

I’ve started tagging Scottish Educational Blogs with scot-edu-blog at del.icio.us/tag/scot-edu-blog. If you are a del.icio.us using Scots Educational blogger or know one please tag it.

If you can think of a better tag than scot-edu-blog, please let me know in a comment.

Scottish History Glasgow Map

slick google maps style map in flash.

Scottish Learning Festival

I am sitting at SETT talking to Heidi about podcasting and blogging, this is wee demo.

Last one of the morning before I head off to the Scottish Learning Festival again.

At the podcast round table Ewan and I found we were mistaken about the number of Scottish Edu Blogs as another member of the group has a few! (URL when I find my note book)

There is also a LTS Weblog with quite a lot of posts from SETT yesterday.

I took a pile of notes but left my notebook in the Taxi home.

Among other things he said:

Every child should have a blog.

Every child should have Skype.

He also said secondary pupils should not have any filter between themselves and the internet.

technorati tag experiment: Scottish Learning Festival SETT

I took part in the Scottish Learning Festival organised by Ewan at the table was Andy Carvin!

The session seemed to last about 30 seconds. Andy had an Olympus voice recorder that looked good, not too expensive and easy for children to use.

Andy has already uploaded a podcast and the powerpoint of the presentation he gave earlier. I guess this is the first real adult digital native I’ve talked to rather than read on the web. Pretty much his whole holiday in Scotland is on his blog, along with a fair bit of content from SETT I wonder if Ewan recorded the round table as there was a huge mike on the table, if so I hope he will edit out anything I said.

Ewan turns out to be a digital native too programming a Spectrum from the age of six.