Absolutely nothing:
Ewan would be proud of me (as long as he did not notice the disorganised folders in mail.app ), I often have hundreds of messages in my inbox, I am not quite at the GTD stage but it is a start.
And This:
I might even get a nice desktop picture now I can see the desktop.
Andrew Brown’s site whereisab? :||: the digital home of andrew brown has had an upgrade. There are lots of interesting new sections. The most exciting for me is the Most Asked Questions, which is accessible from the left side of the homepage.
Beautiful wee screencasts explaining many aspects of blogs, rss and more, the one that had me most excited was What is scotedublogs.
Of course I read about Andrew’s changes on ScotEduBlogs.
It is amazing how stupid technology can make you feel.
After school I was testing our video conferencing unit trying to connect to our Dutch friends De Rank via the LTS Hub.
First try and I can hear but not see, a quick call to the ever patient Stuart Oliphant at LTS enable me to see and here Suzan in Holland. Unfortunately she could not here me, more phone calls to Holland and Stuart had Stuart joining in the conference and trying various thing, we all left and joined the conference a few times, I held up helpful hints to Suzan like ‘Turn up you volume’ on A4 paper. Eventually I though maybe my mic is muted in some way, as Stuart and Suzan could both hear each other and not me, this made me to look for my mic which turned out to be still in the box
My first video blush, I am only thankful that I didn’t have a class of children watching and can only apologise to Stuart and Suzan. I’ll remember to plug in the mic on Friday.
Wonderful explanation of web2.0 YouTube – Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us via cogdogblog and Ewan. I image it will be everywhere pretty soon.
A example of distributed working from TechCrunch.com/: Help Find Jim Gray With Web 2.0. After Jim Grey went missing at sea Amazon has stored digital satellite images and is asking for help on Mechanical Turk to spot Jim’s boat. TechCrunch says:
I hope that new web technologies will make helping people more common in the future. When tragedy strikes, people may be able to help in an effective and organized way instead of simply watching events unfold on their television.
I?m off to look at satellite images of the water outside of the San Francisco Bay. Please come help me.
Me too.
If you subscribe to this blog via http://www.sandaigprimary.co.uk/pivot/jjrss.xml you might like to change over to my new Feedburner feed http://feeds.feedburner.com/johnjohnston.
I might be moving to a new url to separate me from the children/school a little. If you subscribe to the feedburner feed, now in the sidebar and in the alt link for the blog you will be able to keep up with me wherever I go if you so wish.
Joe Shaw just pointed be to a very nice looking idea St. Mary?s Bannockburn Blog. It is a homework blog with the work posted in comments which are both approved until the due date, some nice varied examples of fun homework tasks including finding the meaning of Scottish words Scottish Meanings – P7H and looking at art work: Homework – Andy Warhol.
Food for thought, I am very tempted to try this. I think joe said that they get over the digital divide by allowing time in school to do the tasks if pupils want to (before school, lunchtime, I am not sure).
We had a great morning at School today Mrs Pericles and Mrs Dyer from Sydney, Australia. Mrs Pericles’s class blogs at 5/6P AllStars so it was great to have real contact with someone we had read about so much.
They were our very first Guest Bloggers on Sandaig Otters. The children were very impressed, although professional that I am not, I’d forgotten to tell them to think up good ‘Australia questions’ when I had told them of the visit. They manged to think of a few and put the allStars on the map for us.
Interesting too that Mrs P had many of the same ideas, concerns and interests as I did. She told me a wee bit of their 5/6P AllStars » Game2Learn Project which sounds very interesting. I’d love to give this a go and will be trying to find out more, maybe Derek can point me in the right direction.
Hopefully we can organise some slightly more organised online connections with the allStars maybe involving the fluffy kangaroo that Mrs P left. Strangle none of the children suggested Skippy for its name, but I’ll work on them. I think we might start with a blog a school tour with ‘Skippy’ for the allStars and maybe post them an otter. It would also be great to organise some sort of game creation link, but I need to learn a bit about that first.
In the latest edition of Radio Sandaig the final segment was Teacher’s vs Pupils were a couple of staff take on a couple of children in a pupil generated quiz ( a draw this time).
I was encouraged in looking at the ScotEduBlogs news front page earlier today to see that most of the last 10 SEB posts were from pupil blogs.
It has always been a worry to me that there are many more teacher’s blogs in Scotland than pupils ones. 186 to 33 in October 2006 according to the scotedublogs wikispace.
Of course by this time in the evening the teacher’s are dominant again, but I think this is a good sign as every blogging teacher could support several children’s blogs.
I don’t usually ask questions here, but I’d be interested to see how many folk agree with my gut feeling that pupil blogs are more important than teachers ones?
Geo-Names webservice and data download
returns a list of postal codes and places for the placename/postalcode query as xml document:
http://ws.geonames.org/postalCodeSearch?postalcode=G11&maxRows=10
One to mash up with google maps.
The costs of trying to maintain a highly ordered system often outweigh the benefits, they say. A messy desk, like Einstein’s, can be “a highly effective prioritising and accessing system”, since it will develop an emergent structure modelled on how your specific mind works, not some externally imposed schema.
from Oliver Burkeman: A right mess | Weekend | Guardian Unlimitedhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,1998329,00.html
