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Last week we had a couple of these mice and wireless keyboards: Gyration – ProductDetail – GC1105CKM.

I didn’t get much time to try it out but I don’t think I’ll be recommending that we get any more ‘smartboards’ for upper primary.

That is probably a bit of an overstatement but the Optical Air Mouse (should that be gyromouse?) was great. I needed to charge it up overnight but after that I just plugged in a usb dongle, pressed a wee button on the dongle and then one on the wireless keyboard and one the bottom of the gyromouse and it worked. There was some software to install but I didn’t bother (well I am nor allowed;-)).

I could then use the mouse anywhere in the classroom, either on a flat surface or by holding down a button on the bottom of the mouse in the air. (It is a WII the children shouted).

I’ve not really had time to check it out with children much other than to give a couple a quick try, but I think using it on a flat surface will do the job for most of them. It should be easy to pass the mouse and keyboard round the class to be used on desks. Using it in the air is a little trickier, you need to use your index finger to hold the under button in and your thumb for the left and right click.

The advantages should be, no need for children to move around the class to get to the smartboard, no shadow or bodies getting in the way and of course you do not need a smart board, a while bit of wall or big bit of paper will do.

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lg_shine

This week I have been working with our two primary seven classes in the media room. Trying as usual to do a little too much in the time, I’ve been doing a bit of basic spreadsheet work and some work on mobile phones.
The first day we talked about communications tech the children had in their homes, it was interesting to me that last years primary 6 figure of just over 60% with internet access in their homes had risen to 85% for the primary sevens (47 children). More surprising was figures of 12 out of 47 who had WII and the just released PS3 in their homes.

(aside, I had one of my p6s post to his weblog from a psp last week)

46 out of 47 children had mobile phones of their own and we had some good discussion of the various ways phones could be used. The children were pretty knowledgeable (knew more than me) about various mobile technologies, but I managed to impress them by posting a couple of quick photos to the web site. Quick fingered kids did the text input.

We finished off today by posting a mind map about mobiles to the blog along with an audio file recorded on my mobile and bluetoothed to my mac to be converted to an mp3 (this had to be usb sticked to a networked machine to get onto the network). Done in the last 10 minutes of a lesson in a fairly off the cuff way, I think this has possibilities.

A couple of snags had to be worked around, converting to mp3 from the recorded amr file with iTunes was at the wrong sample rate for playing in flash so we needed to use audacity to get it right (the file played fine as a straightforward link, but mp3s need to be at sample rate multiple of 11,025Hz (e.g: 11KHz, 22KHz, 44KHz).

A couple of points of interest, I needed to get the LAME Audio Encoder 3.97 for intel macs from Thalictrum – Products before I could get Audacity to export mp3s from our new macbook. I’ve now downloaded the Universal Binary Installer for the Lame lib from Lame – KJams Wiki this allows export from quicktime.

For my own satisfaction at lunchtime I repeated the blog post from the macbook using the mobile as a bluetooth modem. So the workflow could be:

  • Record on mobile, bluetooth to mac
  • Convert with quicktime to mp3
  • Upload from macbook to blog using mobile as a modem.

Toys for the boys perhaps, but also a good place to get the children discussing the positive use of mobiles in education and a way to get some immediate blogging done from bus trip dead-time.

Blogged from tm

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A while ago I mentioned that I had received a LG Shine phone from the LG Shine blogger relations programme. I’ve started to investigate/play around to see if it can be of use in my teaching.

As someone who doesn’t usually use a mobile phone much I am not in a position to review the phone and compare it to others. I can say it seems pretty straightforward to use for a newbie.

The camera seems to work well except for the lag between clicking the shutter and taking a picture. The picture quality looks ok to me too, here is a random picture of my desk using the macro facility and the unusual flash (the mirror just lights up). I’ve had a few children take photos and they had no problem.

I’ve only tried the video camera briefly and have no complaints. I’ve also used the voice recorder the quality does not sound as good as my iRiver and i guess it would be best for one voice rather than a conversation. The file format is amr, I guess that would be best converted befor sending it to the web.

I listened to the latest Booruch podcast on the way home from work today and it sounded good. Flicking through audio, image and other files is quite easy with the scroll wheel.

It was straightforward to set up bluetooth with a macbook and dell latitude transferring file is simple via this or USB.

Email was again was easy to set up sending and receiving is pretty simple. It is also easy to send an image file via email.

What I am really interested in is using the phone to send stuff to the website/ blogs. I’ve tried a few approaches:

Pivot has a moblog functionality, which I managed to get working last November, but I have completely failed to do so this time arround.

As a workaround it is easy to post photos to Flickr, but that is of limited use as we cannot use flickr in school. I have been experimenting with pulling the images from flickr to the sandaig site: Sandaig MoBlog. One of my class posted a photo easily, you can tell which one is hers because it has got a long description, my texting is not up to it yet. I am not sure if this is a great idea in the long term.

The other thing I’ve been testing (see the last few posts) is BlogMailr a service that provides an email to blog solution. So far I’ve not managed to get this working, the html is a bit mangled. I am not sure why, but I had the same problem posting to wordpress so I don’t think it is a pivot metaWebLog problem.

So as soon as I can I am going to try and let the class loose with the phone, both as a tool to play with and as a way to start discussing the use of mobile phones. I’ve started collecting some links tagged with “mobile” on del.icio.us, if you know of any others let me know (tag them for:troutcolor if you have a moment).

I’d also like to know of any other free mobile to blog solutions out there.

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http://www.sandaigprimary.co.uk/pivot/images/031827211858.jpg” alt=”031827211858.jpg” />

Manual Edit: The above was posted from the lg shine via Blogmailr the image has been upload to the site, but the html seems a bit mangled

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I’ve not blogged about ScotEduBlogs.org.uk for a while now, but I use the site every day.

The site got a bit of a face lift today, Robert fixed up my latest effort at design and put it to work.

I started adding a bit of information about the site and how to use it to the ScotEduBlogs Wiki a while ago, but there is a lot more to be done before the current features are adequately explained. I hope to do some more on the Using_ScotsEdublogs page over the Easter break. If you are so inclined you are more than welcome to add to the wiki too.

At the moment the features of the site are already more than many in the ScotsEdu world will use, but as the number of blogs grows and the discussion get more diverse they will be invaluable. It is worth taking a look at the Blogs page where you can filter and sort nearly 300 ScotsEdublogs. The site also creates rss feeds for the list of blogs you filter, so you can make a set of blogs to your liking and then follow them with your RSS reader.

Robert Jones and Peter Liddle have even more sophisticated features in the works (some are documented on scotedublog – Google Code wiki, and should move to the main wiki soon. some are discussed in the scotedublogs_devel Google Group).

A request

  • Visit the wiki, search for your blog if it is not there add it.
  • Check the tags your blog is tagged with, fix them up to your liking.
  • Blog about the site. Add a link to your sidebar, you can pickup a snippet to ad a logo from the wiki Community page.
  • If you like make a better link logo, add that to the wiki.
  • Help out with the wiki, make feature requests, quite often Robert has added a request of mine with in the hour.

The reach of this blog is not far but if you read this pass it on and ScotEduBlogs.org.uk and Scots Educational bloggers will benefit.

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Via

‘s feed: an exciting looking app Scratch.

An interesting report from one of my favourite blogs birdhouse, the Will Wright Keynote Speech at sxsw discusses exploring concepts of linear and interactive narrative and Spore a new game from the sims creator. The splash page looks good and Scott Hacker says

Games are perceived as mindless toys, but they can allow us to do systemic thinking about our world, build more accurate models, give us the ability to navigate the future with more intelligence than we did before.

and lastly a strange flickr pool: Camera Toss.