Just watched Ewan introduce the MFLE at the Scottish Learning Festival.

Great 15 minute power talk. I almost wish I was a modern forign language teacher.

The MFLE looks like a great site for other folk too. White boards to blogs and back.

Andy Carvin was talking about blogs, podcasting Flickr etc at SETT (Scottish Learning Festival).

Showed how fast things turn up at http://www.technorati.com/. I wonder if this will

Andy coveredthe history of online community in about 45 minutes, and didn’t leave many buzzwords unturned.

Great intro, I wish I had stepped up and asked a question or two.

Most exciting site he showed us http://acroughcuts.com/.

…podcasting round table coming up very shortly….

Found this via Daring Firebal: http://xmlnanny.com/ it is a xml checker for mac. The new feed checks fine.

We have been working on a new show for Radio Sandaig. After much burning of midnight and lunchtime oil, it is pretty near finished.

Slightly more professional than previous shows, now with added background music. The Editing took an age, I did a fair bit of it at home this time and am beginning to come to grips with Audacity.

Spent most of Saturday morning tidying it up after the children had finished most of the editing on Friday.

Sunday has been spent exploring the

How To Publish a Podcast on the iTunes Music Store and working out how to make a suitable rss feed. I made a simple SuperCard project to create podcast feeds, which taught me a good deal about them. The new feed validates with scripting.com’s validation form. also using MagpieRSS to parse the rss feed to create the new Radio Sandaig home page. To get everything I wanted from the feed (mainly the enclosure url) I had to get the patched version of rss_parse.inc as described here How to handle enclosures in Magpie.

So a busy day where I pushed my slight knowledge of RSS and PHP.

the new show should be on Radio Sandaig on Tuesday.

As the children blogged we have a new podcast in production. I am hoping to do one a month this session. We got a lot of the recording done last week, but the two main presenters are off this week. As I really want it out on schedule I may step in and do some of the editing at home.

I have been in more command this time, the last show, last session was nearly all organised and edited by the children. This session I hope to get to that point with a better sound quality and a more realistic amount of content (that one was nearly half and hour long, this time we are going to aim at 15 minutes).

I am already noticing a willingness by the children to give suggestions as to content and presentation to each other, especially the ones involved last year. Their use of voice and appreciation of audience has improved too. I am going to try a podcast myself, discussing podcasting with the crew soon.

http://www.pocketmod.com/ might be useful for me, might be fun for class, maybe a wee learning log.

I was reading this entry edublogs: Sleepless in Leith in ewan’s blog and spent a while writing a comment. Then I though I was probably just ranting rather than having a conversation (see “All I do to you is talk talk”) so I though I’d stick it here, where no one will find it:

Hi Ewan,

I read your blog in a browser, am suscribe in bloglines (twice I think) and also use netnewswire.

I was surprised that as many as 1 in 10 blog readers use a feedreader, I’d think that is quite a high number. I use both, mostly Safari at the moment ( see this image). I quite often find using a reader I spend a lot of time opening the blog in a browser anyway, sometimes it feels better for me to open a bunch of tabs and click through.

I gave a blogging talk to a bunch of ict teachers (ones picked as innovators too) near the end of last session. Not even half had heard of blogging ( none had heard of podcasting). I didn’t ask for a show of hands for feedreaders

Blogging to show blog power to the masses will not work if the masses don’t read blogs. Showing teacher will not necessarily work either, the response could be:

‘cool, but where will I get the time; time to read blogs, comment, think about it, set it up, organise the classroom, find I was reading this entry on time in a increasingly full timetable for the children to blog’.

I don’t know about secondary but in a primary school these are real concerns. I know there are ways round and through them all too.

I am fully convinced blogging is a good thing, but if I was trying to do it in the time I am paid for, no chance.

Aside: Checking the UK based edubloggers directory, there seems to be a lot more FE blogging than either primary or secondary why is that?

IMO for blogging to succeed in more classrooms, we need: more networked computers (with 2 in my class it is hard to give children the time to read other childrens blogs); blogs setup ready to go; probably less blocking of link – photo – mp3 sharing sites or the replication of these services in a child safe area (SSDN?).

The Edtech Coast to Coast folk may be frustrated (I’ve not had the time to listen) but that is because they are at the bleading edge with a full toolkit but we need to be eased into blogging, the ideas from the tech-savey crowd are way ahead of most classroom practitioners, way too many buzzwords.

In the longer run we will be ok, the next generation of teachers will be bloggers without thinking anything of it. Most of the Technorati found links to our school name are mentions in ex-pupils live journals, they will be old enough to teach pretty soon.

I have been trying to listen to some of the Bit by Bit podcasts by Bob Sprankle. Great stuff full of practical teacher think about blogging and podcasting. I’ve also downloaded some of his classes podcasts: Room 208 PODCAST which I am gooing to let the Radio Sandaig team listen to for inspiration.

I’ve a huge pile of podcasts to listen to and podcasting links to follow. It is hard to keep up and teach at the same time.