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Just added the Sandaig Otters to this UK based edubloggers directory .

Then spent a hour or so following links to various interesting things:

Pebble Blogging app (Java/tomcat)

earth-to-blogger

britcast wiki Uk Podcasting

edTechUK Josie Fraser who started the CamabanWiki

And many more blogs, not much in the primary school area, (except for our pals at Berkhamsted Collegiate Prep School) lots of tech from FE. Problem for teacher is the volume of information out there and the time need to absorb it, my head is spinning.

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I’ve just added a Tag Cloud from: http://www.tagcloud.com/ to the left of this blog.

I am going to be using this blog to play with some blog tech over the summer holidays.

TagCloud is an automated Folksonomy tool. Essentially, TagCloud searches any number of RSS feeds you specify, extracts keywords from the content and lists them according to prevalence within the RSS feeds. Clicking on the tag’s link will display a list of all the article abstracts associated with that keyword.

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http://edu.blogs.com/ great blog from Musselburgh Grammar School’s Ewan McIntosh.

I started trying to puttogether something of an introduction to blogging for Edict today, but of course ended up reading blogs. Ewan’s lead me to David Muir‘s blog and to thinking about del.icio.us again, if I am going to write this I am going have to get disconnected.

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Radio Sandaig

Our most ambitious project yet. Interviews with children and teachers, News from the school and our Holland trip, ending with a suprise musical item.

Lucy and megan from primary six carried out the bulk of the work, supplimented by News from Emma B and Darren, some Holland reports from various primary sixes and a musical item from primary seven.

We are begining to get the idea with podcasting I think, just need a bit of practice with the software to get the sound quality right. I’ve not really spent much time with audacity, which we use to edit the sound files, so I can’t teach more than the basics.

We have been learning as we go along.

The Children have done most of the scripting, recording and editing, I’ve been trying to keep in the background.

I am not sure if this is the best way to go about it, it might be better to have a more hands on approach. Hopefully next session we can expand the program a bit to include a regular programme and include more children.

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This year we blogged our trip: Netherlands 2005

The response from parents has been tremendous, over 60 comments in a week.

The tech and work flow was far from ideal, but well worth the effort.

Workflow went like this, each day we took a bunch of photos. On the bus the children wrote notes in their diaries and I created galleries of the pictures on a laptop. I then typed up some of the notes.

Back at the hotel I took the words and web pages on a pen drive to the manager’s computer, uploaded the galleries and used the types notes to paste into the blog along with links to the photos.

A bit frantic as there was little time to work online.

We had also hoped to podcast but I had really overestimated the time available and underestimated the time needed.

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Just before we went to Holland, (see the next entry) we tried to have a video conference with some children from De Rank. The were going to be the the Hague with various important people present.

Primary Six practised hard all week. We were trying to get round the language/accent problems by having our presentation simple with a fair bit of artwork and slides on the white board. Our presentation was on our plans for the Holland trip.

Unfortunately after half a dozen rehearsals, the connection did not work.

This is probably the biggest drawback of technology.

Having said that, I suppose the children are getting better and better with presenting, great improvements in use of voice and audience awareness.

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We took part in 3 Video Conferences this week.

The Primary Sixes with De Rank Assendelft and Croftfoot in Glasgow and the Primary Sevens with De Rank Westzaan. It was pretty hectic fitting it all in.

The conference with Assendelft was plagued with popping and crackling which I think was a problem with the Assendelft phone lines. We managed to present to them before we lost the signal. The primary sixes did very well, after our last conference with De Rank, we developed a more show than tell presentation which worked well.

I think our equipment, the falcon ip might be a bit better than the Dutch kit, they do not seem to have camera control. The ability to zoom in on a child or group is a great help.

The second conference with Westzaan had a much better link, the primary sevens had developed a great presentation about the Samba music they are playing in music, introducing the instruments and playing rhythems for the rest of the class and the Dutch children to repeat. Some of the children in primary seven were away at a sports event, so that made it a bit easier too, I think 15-20 children is probably a good maximum.

The last conference was with Croftfoot primary in Glasgow, much simpler to conect too as we are on the same network.

This was a bit rushed on our side and not as well rehersed as it could be. We told them about a few different thing we had been doing including a bit about our first days in school. The Croftfoot children had described their enterprise project about this on a previous conference, we then produced a ‘Radio Show’ recording some of our classes memories of P1 and now told them some of our experences. This I guess scratches the surface of how 2 classes could work together.

A lot of things to think about and some lessons learnt over the week: KISS, show rather than tell with different language groups and plenty of practice is needed.

Over the course of the session every child in my class has participated in a conference, and I think it is heping all with presentation and audiance awareness.