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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:-S

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.

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Wonderful explanation of 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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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?

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  • http://www.bubbl.us/, flash mind mapping, I’ve spent about 1 minute on it and am convinced it would be useful in school, if we can access it. I wonder if you can create multiple accounts with one email address. if so I might give this a wee try for story planning next week.
  • dotherightthing.com here is a a Scottish story that will affect my shopping and one discussing if the site is the right thing to do.
  • I am going to point my bloggers at Sploder and Amazing Circles BETA for a bit of fun soon, I am not sure how long Sploder will be allowed in school but it looks like it would entertain at home. Hopefully using these fun tools will reinforce blogging skills that will be useful with curriculum based tasks.

  • 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

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edublog 'office'It has been a busy week, and I’ve not posted since last weekend.
We are still 3 members of Staff down at school which means that I am back in class full-time rather than teaching ICT in the mornings and with P6sj in the afternoons. This is quite disappointing but it doesn’t look as if it will change in the near future. That means that the blogging I was supervising from 9:00 -9:30 in the media room has not been happening and the number of posts on Sandaig Otters has diminished.
Having said that there has been a few interesting things going on:

  1. As a follow up to the first lesson in P6sj’s science topic Sound and Light I took the class to the media room and they played the BBC sound games. I then asked them to take a screenshot, save it as a jpeg or gif, blog about the game, link to it and comment about their learning.
    That was quite a lot to fit into three quarters of an hour but a few of them managed to do it (here is Amy’s Post.)
    Of course the tech is at the moment getting in the way of the teach a little, but after a few more lessons I hope the children will be able to concentrate on the learning, rather than on remembering how to link, or save a screenshot.
  2. I finally got round to converting the film my class made to flv format and posting it to Sandaig TV: Fischy Music. most of Primary 6sj had a hand in filming, editing or recording voice overs. I can’t wait until the 4 mini macs arrive and we can do this a bit more efficiently. I also uploaded a Sandaig Christmas video made by 4 primary seven pupils. This took an age to edit as they were working in there lunch time, which is too short to really get much editing done after eating. I am quite looking forward to sitting the staffroom next week, but Radio Sandaig will probably keep me busy.
    I am pretty happy with using the flv format to present the movies rather than quick. I do wonder if having swfs in the enclosures in the RSS feed (these don’t show up in itunes) will be a problem in the future.
  3. I had a wee bit or online R&R with the Flickr: The edublogoffices Pool I had a early lead for messiest office, but I’ve been thoroughly beaten by David
  4. A little light htmling rounded off my week.

I’ve also been thinking about a couple of things:

  1. After the flickr fun mentioned above, I was interested in David’s suggestion in this post: EdCompBlog: EduFlickr: A good year for the poses…

    I began to wonder if this would be a good exercise for schools – a photo for every day of the school year. Would that be an interesting record of the school’s life? Perhaps different classes/groups in the school could each take a picture to compare the experiences of different pupils. Or even better, two or more schools could share their photos and set each other challenges.

    Barbara has taken up the challenge: A Flickr Activity/Challenge- Are you in?.
    I commented on both post, about not being able to use flickr in school and looking for an alternative, but on reflection the goodness that would be gained by using a flickr pool, rss, comments, discussion and notes ate too big an opportunity to miss, I think I’ll be cheering from the sidelines.

  2. I have started posting task suggestion to my P6sj blog: Mr Johnston – Sandaig Primary 6 SJ for Primary 6sj bloggers to do out of school or when they have finished class work. Unfortunately I am in P6m now in the mornings and I set up the individual blogs for P6sj that I am teaching in the afternoons. I am not sure if i have the time and energy to set up another 20 blogs for p6m.
    I am also worried about the idea of online ‘homework’ if not all the class have out of school net access, is it unfair to give those that do extra opportunities? I suppose I could set up some lunchtime access once or twice a week.