I’ve seem reference to TeachersTube in a couple of my feeds (CogDogBlog today)
Looks like an interesting idea, a safe youtube. I don’t know if it is suitable for solving our bandwidth problem, but I joined up and have sent an email asking if uploading children’s work is appropriate.
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.
http://www.sandaigprimary.co.uk/pivot/images/031927120127.jpg” alt=”031927120127.jpg” />
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
The image didn’t come through last time, this time I am going to send
a ‘window friendly attachment with mail’.
from mail.app
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
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.
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.
(Title recycled from Ewan)
The system/organisation for blogging on Sandaig Otters is that 2 children per day from each of the primary seven, primary six and now primary 5 classes are randomly selected as bloggers for the day, their job is to choose something blogworthy, maybe take a photo and the next day to come to the media room between 9 and 9:30 to blog about it.
I am quite please with this system although it relies on me not being class committed so it probably will not last longer than this session.
This week from Wednesday to Friday we had no connection to the internet until about 10 am (403 Forbidden), hence the blogging slow down. quite a few posts were saved in word to be blogged later, but I don’t know if that will happen. I logged the problem with the help desk each day but I don’t know if it will do much good. One operator told me it might be do do with the switching of the primary network between mitel and dell if so there might not be much on the Sandaig Otters blog until after the holidays:(
Particularly disappointing as I had 23 bloggers in the room on Thursday, full to capacity and nothing blogged.
After messing around with pivot’s moblog settings for a while I eventually gave up. I know it worked in the past so I think I’ve probably just messed the config files about so badly that I’ll need to up load another one.
I decided to try another tack. I set up a flickr account for the school/phone and an email address to post photos to flickr.
Flickr is blocked by websense in Glasgow schools, so I used the Flickr API and phpFlickr to pull the photos from Flickr: Photos from sandaigprimary and download them to the sandaig site. The photos are then shown of a web page: Sandaig MoBlog. The page is pretty crude at the moment but I think I can add some features as we go along( pagination, sorting by tag, maybe HaloScan commenting ).
A couple of children in my class posted a photo today and managed to add a description pretty quickly, unfortunately I had not set permissions on the server correctly and we go a page full of very odd characters. I think I’ve fixed it now that I am home and will try a relaunch of moblogging next week.
I had put my own sim card in the phone but it looks like my virgin payg account is not the cheapest way to send email. I talked to someone in the T-Mobile shop and bough a payg sim from them. According to the salesperson, data cost so much per kb but it is capped at £1 a day. I though this would work out well as we will mostly use the phone on school trips and should be able to fire off a bunch of photos for a pound a trip.
I also asked about emailing from abroad, but this seems a lot more expensive, I wonder if I could buy a sim card in holland to fire off photos for the week we were there, if anyone knows anything about mobile provides in Holland please let me know.
