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I spent the afternoon at BarCampScotland BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment.

Organised by

and others it was the first BarCamp in Scotland. Interesting for lots of reasons. The idea is that everyone there should present a short session.

I was there with

to talk about ScotEduBlogs (my slides).

Robert Jones and John Johnston

Originally uploaded by Edublogger.


and I met for lunch at Susie’s Wholefood Diner and had a wee yack about ScotEduBlogs, it was great to accually meet Robert after a few months of online collaboration.

I pretty much stuck to education presentations:

Ian Stuart talking about Islay High School amazing project to embed ict in all areas, give all the children an UMPC and lots more. A really exciting project. I had a quick play with one of Ian’s UMPCs which was a great tool for children, nice handwriting recognition, they looked really usable and portable.

Digitalkatie talked about giving all the children in her school mobile devices too, another exciting and motivational project.

One of the problems I had was not writing down the location and time of all the speaker at BarCamp. So I was a few minutes late for Tess‘s discussion of Glow her report of how her pupils took to glow was very reassuring as was the screenshot of the primary pupil view of the portal. I feel a lot more positive about glow after hearing from a real classroom. I am still a bit worried about losing our international audience.

I also watched a couple of nice podcasting presentations and a very interesting higher edu blogging one, unfortunately I didn’t get a link from these, due to lack of attention to the speaker boards and the fact I did not take a laptop with me.

Flickr: Photos tagged with barcampscotland

barcampscotland: Technorati

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Just testing a wee snippet I’ve made for the blog that should let children publish video with less intervention from me.

It is still a bit convoluted:

Upload a jpg with the image tool.

Upload a flv file with the same name as an enclosure.

Change:

[[download:butterfly:icon::]]

to:

[[flashvideo:butterfly.flv:320:240]]

Where the size of the video is 320 by 240 pixels.

Given the infrequency of video being published I don’t know if the children would use this independently, but it will at least save me having to open up an old post, copy out the html to embed the flash swf, image and flash video file for any video posts.

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Well I thought I hadplanned a good session the Tasks were all set, the class had been asking all the time, when are we going to the media room and then WebSense struck.

Of the tasks I had set up. One site I’d linked to was blocked by websense, another blog where I’d asked the children to look at a powerpoint was accessible but the filesharing site the powerpoint was on was not. (update: and of-course one blog I pointed them too was using bubbleshare, I should have remembered we cannot see that:-() And most of the other tasks just took a little too long for an hour in the media room.

I need to rethink a bit, simplify the tasks, check them out in school and repeat.

We did get the podcast finished and my next wee tasks for the evening will be to upload it to Radio Sandaig.

The other interesting conversation I had was with a boy in my class who had posted a comment to our blogs with his PSP, an argument between several experts about if you can upload images or not followed, much hot air but no facts we will investigate when time allows. Unfortunately I can’t see us getting permission to get PSPs on our network anytime soon.

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I’ve just this minute started a new sub-weblog Tasks – Blogging Tasks For Primary Six for my Primary Six class.

Hopefully they will carry out some of the tasks on their next visit to the media room.

my idea is to have slips of paper with a task and distribute them at random as they go into the room.

I’ve set the blog up so that it only shows one entry at a time in the hope of minimising distractions. The next step to post some help blogs for common tasks, taking screenshots, linking and commenting. I’ll then work on simplifying the template a bit more.

If you have any good ideas please let me know and I’ll add them to the list.

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One of the big plusses of the ScotEduBlogs site is the production of aggregated, time sorted rss feeds. I’ve just added this feed to my sidebar on the left. If you click on the ScotEduBlogs Latest link on the left it will a list of the latest education blog posts from around Scotland.

In Pivot I add this by putting [[rss:http://www.scotedublogs.org.uk/blogs/rss]] in my template.

If you are using wordpress (like a lot of Scots Edu blogs) you can use the RSS Sidebar Widget as I did on the scotedublogs aggregation blog.

(thumbnail)There are all sorts of other ways to use the feed, from subscribing to it in your feedreader to grabbing it in other applications.

I’m playing with the Dashcode Beta and have crudely adapted the RSS desktop widget to display the ScotEduBlogs feed. Click on the image on the right to see the widget in action.

It still needs some testing and the application of some graphics, but if you are using Mac OS x 10.4 you can download it and try it out.

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Cluster thingy
Originally uploaded by Lenny & Meriel.

I’ve been reading Ewan’s post about play and Mrs. O’Neill’s too. Lots of good thinks to think about. Ewan’s post is one of a series about failure which has given me loads of ideas that are not full articulated yet, limiting myself to the play idea has me thinking about play and time.

To allow children to play with the new toys (tools) takes time. Time away from other things so we need to justify it in some way, I don’t have too much a of a problem about that, but I am thinking of the amount of time it takes to blog, podcast or create a video.

For the Sandaig otters blog I usually have pairs of bloggers coming from 4 classes to the media room between 9 and 9:30 in the morning, so we should get 4 posts a day. Quite a few fall by the wayside. Even if the children make it to the room they quite often do not finish their post in the 15 or 20 minutes they have (they need to select a photo, resize it, write a post and blog the lot). Sometimes they get time to come back and finish, sometimes not (the children have also spent time the previous day taking photos for the days post).
This is an in theory way of working, it has not happened since Christmas as I have been back in the classroom fulltime due to staff absences, some children have been posting independently.

On the Primary Six SJ it has been taking up to an hour to carry out some tasks and again some children do not finish. As I am trying to take primary 6SJ to the media room once a week for ict, and we don’t always blog (spent an hour commenting on other blogs last time) it is quite hard to give the children enough regular playtime. I want them to have enough time to make the tools transparent and to get into some real collaborative fun.

Anyway I am interested in how other teachers manage this. If you blog with children how long does it take children to post? How much time do you give them to read other blogs? For people making bubbleshare slide shows and the like, how long does it take for children to put these together?

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I just posted some news to the scotedublogs aggregation blog but it looks like there might be a wee problem with wordpress.com:

So I am going to post it here too and Andrew might be best staying with self hosting after all;-)

I posted about the new feature

has added, a Stats page. This looks as if it might be useful analysing what goes on in the SEB world. The first thing I noticed was the post dinner peak you can also see the dip at the weekend, when I do most of my blogging.


has also added a ScotEduBlogs Wiki to the ScotEduBlogs site.

I was also going to post about the mockup for the ScotEduBlogs.org.uk site which I’ve just updated.

Since we have had no entries over at scotedublogs » ScotEduBlogs Logo I made the logo myself. Please let me know what you think about the design here or join in the discussion at the scotedublogs development group.

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Absolutely nothing:
inbox zero
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:
empty desktop
I might even get a nice desktop picture now I can see the desktop.

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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.