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SEB Stats 1.12.07
Fairly unrelated image.

My blogging here seems to be grinding to a once a week post again. There just doesn’t seem to be enough hours in the day. I am still struggling to embed blogging into my class this year, the children are no where near as independent bloggers as the ones last year there were 38 posts from 01 Nov – 30 Nov 2006 , this year 17 in 01 Nov – 30 Nov 2007 . I was also setting up individual blogs for my class at this time last year, I’ll not be doing that for this years.
There was a bigger emphasis on writing last November, this year more comic Life, movie and photos.

I have been joined by two other members of staff who are blogging fairly regularly with their classes, one in the lower school Otter Cubs and one of the primary seven teachers. The setting up of the individual blogs for one of the primary seven classes was probably a bit too hopeful, but I am hoping the wordpress mu install will be useful later on.

Synagogue 07 Copy 1

In my own class I have mostly been blogging comics and things that need a bit more teacher help (comics are made on non networked computers, children need help/time to move and resize files, movies need export settings etc), but are visual, exciting and don’t involve too much writing. This years class is bigger than last year, has a much wider range of abilities, 2:1 boys to girl ratio and are more challenging to organise generally. They don’t take to whole class blogging very well so the process of teaching them to blog individually is taking longer.

You would think that after 4 years blogging with children I’d have figured all this out, what is interesting is that the goalposts are never fixed in teaching and the groud is constantly shifting.

This lack of blogging on my part has not stopped me planning several magnificent and ground breaking posts in my mind. My book marks and feed reader is full of flagged posts I wanted to write and more importantly think about.

For example I’ve read David‘s post EdCompBlog: Fear of falure at least 5 times with a pile of stuff bubbling up in my mind. I think part of the answer to David’s question is to do with time. In a comment Ewan mentions that he finds managers more open

to take risk. Where the group is student teachers or teaching staff, there is no desire to take risk (for fear of failure and all the managerial pressure that comes with that)

(As an aside I’d say that I find teacher lead risk taking more interesting that top down initiatives.)
The pressures are illustrated by John Connell‘s post Subverting Scotland?s Simplified Curriculum and the feeling I get from talking to my fellow teachers; more and more initiatives that have to be carried out.

Anyway, Next week I am going to be attempting to get a rota of a subset of my class blogging on a more frequent basis. Maybe a wee push on the Book Review blog would help too.

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Gower Bell telephone

© National Museums Scotland. Licensor www.scran.ac.uk.

I am delighted to have noticed that the wonderful folk at scran have improved their blog this facility.

I noticed this a while back, but at that time it just supported scribble and elgg, I suggested this could be extended to a flickr like blog this, or even giving an html fragment. It now does, and I am testing it out.

Here is an interface screenshot:

I had a wee bit of difficulty with some of the links, but it looks like this could be a great tool of children to write blog posts about the images on scran.

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Pmwiki 32

I’ve spent sometime messing around with PmWiki

PmWiki is written in PHP and distributed under the General Public License. It is designed to be simple to install, customize, and maintain for a variety of applications.

PmWiki seems very east to install, only requires php, no database is needed and is easily skin-able. here is my test install.

One nice idea behind pmWiki is that the core is kept small and lots of features are available as add-ons. For example, I’ve tested the quicktime recipe and the rss one. There are a pile of interesting looking recipes on the PmWiki Cookbook.

I am thinking of installing this on the Sandaig Website firstly as a tool for myself, but perhaps as an alternative way for pupils to contribute to the website. I am not too sure how they would get on with wiki style markup, but I am sure they could manage the simpler stuff. I need to play around with the configuration and user authentication before I think about that.

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iMovie 7

I read quite a lot about the new(ish) version of iMovie, a lot of it negative, for example this Wired.com article lists the things that the previous versions did that iMovie 7 (which ships as part of iLive ’08). Apple seem to understand that no everyone is happy, the new version does not overwrite iMovie HD 6, and you can download iMovie HD 6 if you have the iLife ’08 version.

I had not really given this much thought, most of the dv editing my pupils have done is with older versions of iMovie (version 2!) or iMovie HD 6 (see Sandaig Television for examples). So I though we would just stick to the old version. I did install iLife ’08 on one macbook and had a quick look at it. As many have noted the new version is radically different; no timeline, little audio control and no plugin support! We didn’t use any plugins, but had messed about with audio and I saw the timeline as the ‘main idea‘ in iMovie.

This quick look left me with the idea that I would stick to 6 in class. I then though about the way we have started to use video on the Sandaig Otters blog, posting very short clips taken with digital still cameras as an alternative way to post science reports, e.g. Gears, the children took the movies and then I would quickly edit them together with Quicktime pro.

Imovieclips

Last week we were working on our electricity topic on Resistance and when recording the experiment, a few children used comic life and a couple recorded a few seconds of movie with a still camera, instead of me editing the movie I gave Jack a shot of using iMovie. The new version is perfect for this sort of activity, links with iPhoto, grabs the clips, and allows you to very quickly crop and drag and drop them into a movie, titles are a snip and we could add some garageband music easily. Jack put this 16 second clip together in about half an hour: variable resistor. more over I was able to ‘teach‘ him how do do it without having used the new version for more than a few minutes.

Given the time constraints of the curriculum, it is hard to fit in much dv work, I’ve been thinking more and more of using wee movies of this sort as an alternative way of presenting information, the new version of iMovie enables the children to be more involved in this process that using Quicktime pro. hopefully I’ll be able to do a little more of this over this term, but I think the new version of iMovie is a nice addition to our blogging toolbox while being glad the old version is there if we do a more complex video project.

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Tumblr crop

I’ve mentioned Tumblr before, and of course link to my tumblelog in the sidebar here.

On saturday I saw that Tumblr 3.0 was announced with “Over 400 new features, fixes, and improvements“.

A tumblelog is a sort of quick post a link, video, photo, quote sort of tool:

Tumblr Menu

Not the place to post long thoughtful blogs, but a pretty easy way to found objects from the net. The presentation is nice too, huge fonts, auto imbedding of flickr photos and youtube video, this facility has be expanded to Tumblr will now take any video or Flash embed code and scale it down proportionally. The new feature that really impresses me is the way tumblr shows my Archive (like the screenshot at the top of this post). Very sweet in my opinion. tumblr now does audio upload and has tied in with Vimeo to allow video upload. also included with tumblr 3.0 are tags, markdown, channels (which is a move towards multi-author tumblelogs) and a pile of other stuff, best read on the announcement.

I don’t know any other teachers using tumblr yet, but I’d be interested in playing around with this, so let me know if you want to post to the edutumblrs channel and I’ll invite you in. No link as yet as channels are private at the moment. I am also on the lookout for folk interested in the same sort of things as myself to follow in tumblr.

At the monet I post wee links to games and fun that I think my pupils will like to a sub-weblog here, which appears in the side bar of Sandaig Otters and as a web page encorporated int othe main sandaig site: Links for Children and Staff at Sandaig, but this could be a lot prettier as a tumblelog.

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Aberdour

I am sitting on the train on my way home from Hillside school in Aberdour in Fife. I’ll probably not get this online until tomorrow. I have just spent the day on David Noble’s course on Using the Social Web to develop the Four Capacities.

Aberdour is a pretty looking village and we had a nice autumnal view when we took a minute to look out the window.

David took participants through a gament of Web 2.0 tools explained there use in theory and in practise; participants created an edublogs blog, a mp3 recording (which was uploaded to the blog), took part in a flash meeting, explored flickr, youtube and discussed many other web tools in a packed day.
As in listening to David’s booruch podcast you get the feeling you are in the safe hands of someone who not only has a leading edge grasp of the new technology, but can walk the talk, incorporating the tools in his teaching regularly over an extended period of time. He explained the tools, suggested ways of using them, pointed to good practice and reinforced them with his own practice. I was comforted by his reference to aCfE and the four capacities, it looks like some of our efforts to use the social web will support the aims of aCfE.

I was particularly interested in the use of Flash Meeting. David had organised a meeting with Lisa from England and it was the first time I had seen Flash Meeting used. Flash meeting is a free to education tool supported by the Open University. A browser based video conferencing application, whch includes a shared whiteboard and chat, it reminded me of Marratech which I’ve used in the Glow trials. Flash Meeting seemed to have the edge over Marratech o the video quality and in the fact that it is a flash/browser based application. I hope to be able to use it in school, just need to check to see what protocols it uses and if these are usable on the Glasgow network.

David Whiteboard

I also enjoyed David’s presentation, instead of powerpoint, David used a series of del.icio.us pages for each segment of the day: tagged with “3Nov1” on del.icio.us through to tagged with “3Nov7” on del.icio.us, this method of presentation was obviously very flexible due to a pile of excellent links.

Throughout the day David touch on pupils safety issues in a light way but constantly reminding us of its importance. He is in the unusual position of having services often filtered in Local Authority networks available and has to deal with the risks in a professional manner. This also meant that I could plug my laptop in and be online without any problem.

Hillside School is a residential school for boys aged 11-16 with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties David’s experience made a clear link in my mind between pupil motivation and the four capacities. David’s work shows that Social media will help us both motivate pupils and to help them move towards becoming successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors.

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We have just published the first podcast of the session on Radio Sandaig. A new bunch of children and as usual a scramble to fit it into the day. A few lunchtimes and some non-class-contact time got it done. (The children are not all in my class, so I guess this is NCC).I decided to use garageBand instead of Audacity this year, just to see what the differences are. I’ve already started some children off making some simple music using Garageband, and our peripatetic music teacher has joined in working with a few children every week. So we have incorporated one of the pieces of music into the podcast.

For the first time with GarageBand, I took a lot more control than usual of recording, mostly to figure out what we are doing and these are first impressions. Garageband has a pile of useful loops, jingles etc built in, these are easy to review and pull in. For the rest of the session I hope to find time for children to make jingles that will be used regularly, this should make the show sound a bit more professional once we start to really think about this. The auto ducking is also nice, with audacity the children hand ducked the background track as they organised the segments.
One of the things I really liked about audacity was the way you could record segments of a podcast in any order and then the children could easily move them around as they made the final edit. We recorded each segment on a separate track. With GarageBand you get a male voice and female voice tracks, jingle and music tracks. This means we will have to plan out the podcast in more detail and record it in order, this will present a bit more of a challenge to my organisation. At the moment I invite children from 4 classes to contribute so have to find time when they are available at the same time as myself (playtime, NCC time), some thinking to do.

Anyway please have a listen and if you like the show you might like to leave an audio response on the Radio Sandaig page, give us our first review in itunes or on our new Scotcast.net listing. Thanks to Tim Geddes of Glaitness School for pointing me to Scotcast.net. Tim helps the children with the TV Glaitness Video Podcast, which is well worth watching.

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Halloweenpoemsicon 08

One of my favourite pastimes is messing about with supercard an easy to use application development system for macs. One of the toys I’ve been working on for a few years is Halloween Poems. I am rushing out a new version this week. if you have a mac (OS 10.4) you might like to give me a wee hand and download my new beta.

Halloween Poems is a simple game for primary children. It lets them produce illustrated spooky poems. Features:

  • Scary word bank; click on words to insert.
  • Halloween Clip Art palette.
  • Spooky sounds.
  • Acrostics starter.

More info and a screenshot on the last version’s download page. The app is freeware and just a wee bit of non Web 2.0 fun, if you do download the beta let me know about any problems via email. If it seems to work I’ll post a final tomorrow in time for halloween.
28 Oct 2007 updated beta at: Halloween Poems_b_2.app.zip as good as it is going to get this year. next year metaweblogAPI integration.

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Herald on Sunday : Cyberbullying Originally uploaded by cx1uk

I just noticed Neil‘s photo on flickr.

Article from The Herald on Sunday about cyberbullying. Includes recommendation that teachers should join Facebook.

I’ve had a facebook account for a wee while now and am pretty ambivalent about it. I am not really very keen on the closed nature of the network. Most of the web 2 stuff I’ve found useful (rss, blogs, flickr and I dare say twitter) are open(ish) networks, anyone can see what you have to say.

Someone, maybe Ewan, explained that facebook could be a place to get away from the openness and post more personal things that they would not like all to see, but now teachers are being asked to be ‘friends’ with pupils on social networks which would remove this personal aspect.
Personally I’d not post anything onto facebook or anywhere else that I want to keep secret.

I know facebook groups can be useful, teachmeetperth on Facebook, but in my opinion a wiki is better.

Neil has a great post Are You Going Far Enough? Or Too Far? on this area and I agree that in the case of your own children you need to discuss and reach agreement about access to their social space. Fortunately (for me) my daughter is too old for this to become a problem, I’m her friend on facebook but not on Bebo and for a 17 year old living away from home that is fine.
For pupils this is a different matter, I can’t imagine that many would be happy with teachers befriending them on their space and I don’t think I want to sneak in by faking my age or claiming to be a pupil.

Better in my opinion to:

  • try to teach sensible behaviour and safety with open tools (blogs anyone)
  • model good behaviour and give the children a chance to practise this
  • discuss social software, relating that to real life (cyberbullying = bullying) with the same principals (tell someone)
  • take online behaviour as seriously are offline

and hope/expect that understanding and behaviour transfer to other online areas.

On the topic of facebook I did get an interesting invite the other day:

Facebookinvite

I just wonder how to accept it;-)

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I’ve not updated here for a week, but have been quite busy elsewhere.Teachmeet 08 North tn

After reading Neil‘s announcement of teachMeet 08 North, I popped over to the ScotEduBlogs Wiki and started a new page: TeachMeet 08 North for folk to join in the fun. It looks like it is going to be a great event, over 50 edits on the wiki page on the last two days shows a deal of enthusiasm for TeachMeet.

I bumped into Suzie Vesper while following Ewan‘s ULearn07 adventures in NZ on twitter. Suzie hads a great wiki: educational software and web 2.0 which covers nearly everything I’ve heard of. After a few tweets this morning, I’ve started adding an Adobe Flash page to the wiki. Hopefully it will be of some value, the rest of the wiki certainly is.

Flash eg

Coincidentally, I’ve become involved in another flash project; as I was invited to join the Teachers sharing their work with Flash blog.
Teachers sharing their work with Flash centres round the work of Geoff Dellow. Geoff has done an amazing amount of work with flash in schools. He tells me he is retired but he has certainly not slowed down (a quick google will tell a lot). Geoff promotes the use of flash 4 in primary schools and provides free over the phone tutoring for teachers. I first met Geoff at SETT before it was The Scottish Learning Festival. He had children creating animations in flash at his stall which had me hooked.
I hope I manage to do some work with flash again soon so that I can share it on the blog.