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It is about 7 am, I’ve been up for a while with pre-presentation nerves and am pretty excited about what the next couple of days will teach me

It is quite hard to focus on what I am going to be doing and yesterday’s prep found that I’ve double booked myself a couple of times today.

I’ve arranged to meet a few folk here and there and set up a few lightweight tools for keeping in touch.
My mobile will be on (it is not usually) and I’ll set twitter to tweet to it. I’ll be carrying a laptop and will have a few things at hand:

The best thing about the Scottish Learning Festival is the conversation, I am really looking forward to catching up with folk I know and meeting new people, and it is nearly time to go.

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Ottercubs tn

We have a new blog here at Sandaig: Otter Cubs The blog of the youngsters at Sandaig. Primary 3 made their first post today. The posts will appear on the Sandaig Otter’s blog as well as the Otter Cubs.
I don’t expect the primary 3s will be posting frequently until they have a bit more practise but please pop along and give them a comment if you have a minute or two to spare.

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A frustrating afternoon.
I’ve not managed to get blogging embedded in my class this session yet, although we have dipped our toes in a little.
I have been working with our primary sevens, my class from last year and the other p7 who are starting to use our new wordpress setup.
I am out of class on Friday afternoons this session to work with other classes and so far I’ve been trying to get the blogging habit going with the sevens.
Last week the p7m guys ran out of time before many of them posted there first blog to wordpress. This afternoon I was determined that they would do so and some would get a second post with an image. They got their text ready, resized the images and then began to run into problems:

MYIPROXY ERROR: connection refusedwww.sandaigprimary.co.uk refused to accept connection on port 80
________________________________________
While trying to retrieve the URL: www.sandaigprimary.co.uk/

I think we had some other errors too. At this point I though it might be a problem with the wordpress setup as I had not stress tested it, but the internet seemed to be generally slow.
The second half of the afternoon I was working with Primary Seven S on their pivot blogs, and while some of them managed to post we got lots of the same error messages. so I started to think it was a problem with our site, maybe because 20 children were all logging on at once, but when some of the children went to some edublogs.org blogs to read other school blogs they got slowdowns and the same errors.
The biggest problem seemed to be with blog sites, more straightforward pages just loaded very slowly. I’ve raised a speculative fault, but don’t really know enough about how network errors work to guess what is going on. Any hints or advice welcome.

Earlier in the week i had more frustration as I came into school early to upload a bunch of pictures to voicethread.com and it didn’t work, I got one up but kept getting authentication dialogs popping up. I guess I’ll have to try uploading photos from home and getting the children to add audio in school.

I usually feel technically savvy enough for a primary teacher, but I do not know much about the ins and outs of the network, I guess I need to find out.

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Water liliesThis is just a wee test of windows live writer I am thinking of trying it out with the children, if I can get it installed on the machines at school. It looks as if there are some useful features, especially for adding and resizing images. It looks like it is going to impress me, especially the bit for wrapping images and adding a drop shadow.

Live writer also lets you preview and the preview looks great.

Map image

Apologies

for the image I am on my old Masterclass PC and had to reinstall the system, only got the sample images on it at the moment.

Oh look Virtual Earth!

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Today I started a bit of work with garageBand and a few primary sevens.

In the summer I visited Lori Ramsay to find out about The Mothership. Lori gave me a great intro to using GarageBand to create tunes and I left with a set of her notes.

I’ve added some screenshots to these to use with the children, using Pages. It was the first time I’d used Pages and it seems a pretty simple app to create pretty and simple documents.

This is the first version of the worksheets, and I’ve not used them with kids yet, but I’ve uploaded them if you want a look. Feedback and suggestions are more than welcome.

Update: After Mark‘s comment I realised that there is an easier way to lay the loops out in a long strip, here is a sheet.

Blogged from tm

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After all the fuss last year testing WP and Lyceum here with pretty poor results, I now have a working wordpress mu setup: Sandaig PupilsI’ve not got any children started, just trying to get the setup ready, so far all I’ve added the Anarchy Media Player and put together a widget to pull the links for the rest of the Sandaig blogs in.
I hope to run this for one of our primary seven classes while the other one uses the pivot blogs set up last year now renamed Primary Seven S

Hopefully I’ll be able to do some comparisons between Pivot and WPMU.

If you have any good wordpress mu tips, please let me know. I am especially interested in being able to set up site wide widgets by default.

Blogged from tm

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Yesterday I was at the Apple Store Glasgow opening. Fun was had by a lot of smiling people. As I mentioned I was interviewed by Mark‘s ex -piecast team The MacCast. I would guess I’ll end up on the cutting-room floor as I mumbled and probably blushed, but the questions made me think a bit. They asked about my favourite apple applications, this got me started, my favourite applications are not apple ones. Of course I use the iLife tools and would not be without them, I’ve just started using pages and keynote and like them. But some of the ones I like most come from elsewhere. Here is a wee bit about 3 of them, why I like them and what they do. A sort of 3 favourite applications after I’ve skipped past iLife, iWork, email, browsing and Web 2.0 etc.

SC Icon

SuperCard is cousin of the old mac essential HyperCard a simple but powerful tool for building applications and scripting on a mac. SuperCard has a simple english type scripting language and can tap into the power of appleScript and unix shell calls. I use it everyday. In the past I have created fairly useful teacher and teaching tools but now I mostly use if for avoiding repetitious task. Eg. most of the gallerys on Sandaig Classes such as this one are run up with a SC project. I blog about Supercard at Bad Poet and have some resources for teachers and others on the site.

Comic Life is not an application that I use everyday, but it is a great tool for children and epitomises a type of good mac application. The way it fits in with the iLife suite, making creating comics a simple task, drag and drop. By tapping into core mac ‘stuff’ the graphics, gradients and shadows are beautiful. I believe there is a windows version in the works, I’ll be interested to see if it is as slick as the mac one.
 

TextMate is an amazing text editor for macs. I probably only use a tiny fraction of textmate’s facilities. Aimed mostly at programmers TextMate is still useful to folk like me who write a bit of html, css and occasional snippet of php, it has a ton of keyboard shortcuts to do all sorts of thing. for example if you are writing on a html document and select a bit of text and hit command-control-shift-L textmate looks up the selection on google and creates a link in your document. textMate is extensible via bundles, there are bundles for all sorts of things, different programming languages etc. I am blogging this with the blogging bundle, I can preview and post this to the blog without leaving textmate. I drag an image onto the Textmate document and it is uploaded to my blog and the html snippet inserted. you can define your own snippets, I type seb and hit tab and a link to ScotEduBlogs is created (like that). Drag a swf onto the document and the code for inserting the flash file is created. It would take months to explain everything textMate can do.

I’ve just realised there is another wee application that I am beginning to depend on almost everyday ImageWell which is wonderful for quickly doing what you want with images, annotating, dropping a shadow, resizing and uploading. I just used it to create and upload all of the images in this post, in no time: command-shift-4 in the finder to get a screenshot (hold the)

So those are my 3-4 left field must have applications I would be interested in yours?

Blogged from tm

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After hearing Mark and Mr W twittering away, I woke up early and decided to pop along to the new Apple Store that opened today and see if I could get a t-shirt.

This one was snapped with photobooth and quickly uploaded here from one of the macbooks in the store:

Here are my flickr photos tagged with applestoreglasgow

Not too much to say about the event nice to briefly catch up with Mark and Neil, shop looks as cool as a mac, crowd happy.

I was interviewed by a couple of Mark’s pie crew who were making a podcast for The MacCast, I don’t think I made much sense but it gave me an idea for the next post.

I ran some of the photos through the A N I M O T O online slideshow tool:

I must say I am a bit disappointed with animoto, the end result looks very slick, but I had nothing to do with that. The interface is excellent, good looking and easy to use. You just upload photos and the online app decides on all the crops and transitions, the only thing I did was choose the music (I didn’t really spend much time on that).

Although this is a quick way to make slick shows there is a lack of creativity on the users part.

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I’ve been a lot slower off the mark getting my class blogging this session, by this time last year we had several posts on the otter’s blog. My class this session are a little different, bigger and it will take longer to organise them into practised bloggers. I am hoping that my class from last session will continue to blog with their new teacher and they and Skippy have made a start.

So I’ve started tidying up the blogs a little, the Primary Six SJ blog has become the Primary Seven S one, and I’ve just added an interesting blog to the children’s side bar: Al Upton and the miniLegends. If you are running a class blog that children write on and would like some sort of informal connection to our guys, let me know and I’ll add a link. I’ve not started checking links and testing to see if our blog friends are blocked yet but that will need t obe done before the children get going.

I am also beginning to think of the links we hope to make this year along with strengthening some loose bonds. I hope to join the Mothership at some point. Our peripatetic music teacher has spoken to me about learning GarageBand so I hope he can help me improve the sound of Radio Sandaig, I’ve also joined Voices Of The World an interesting looking podcast project organised by Sharon Tonner. I a mlooking forward to finding out what sort of tasks the project will set, the fact they are going to be about producing one or two minutes of audio makes them very doable.

Blogged from tm

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Since the last post I’ve continued to messing around with twitter.
My facebook and twitter script has stopped working, due I think to changes on facebook, but I’ve become more interested in twitter. It is not much use in school, because it is blocked in Glasgow primaries, but it has been interesting watching the tweets spring up when I am at home. I’ve installed Twitterrific a sweet, free, desktop app, to view and post to twitter. I am beginning see the use for firing off quick informal questions but even more interesting are some mashups.

The most educational of these is twitterlearn :: micro language-learning from the Radio Lingua Network. Basically you can follow learnitalian on Twitter, it will give you tweets of short phrases to translate into italian and a link to provide the answer in a blog post. So in the twitter feed you see:

Translate into Italian: “I’ve already visited Rome” http://tinyurl.com/2osa6g

Clicking on the link will take you to the answer.

twittermap

The nice thing about twitterlearn is that it uses another service twitterfeed.com which posts RSS to twitter automatically. so the questions are produced automatically from the blog posts that combine questions and answers.

I’ve used twitterfeed.com to post this blog to my Twitter and created a new twitter account for scotedublogs.org.uk : ScotEdublogs on twitter, if you follow the ScotEdublogs tweets you will know when new posts arrive at SEB. (there is one for teachmeet07 too).

I’ve also looked at twittermap which allows you to set your location in a tweet and places you on a google map, via the google maps api. This is connect to twittervision which show tweets poping up all over the place and provides pages for users showing where they are: twittervision: johnjohnston

I am still unsure where twitter would fit into a primary pupil’s learning but there are lots of interesting things being done with twitter now.