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I just want to point to Robert‘s post about Scotedublogs – A New Hub for Scottish Educational Blogs which is pretty wonderful news.

Teachers doing it for themselves;-)

What is great about this project, like the Scotedublogs wiki is the fact that anyone can join in and influence the project. Robert and Peter are doing the heavy lifting (code/programming) at the moment, but anyone can help with that or just an opinion on what needs to be done or the best way to do it. I am no coder, but I can put in my 2 pence worth about features, design etc as can anyone else.

Check out Robert‘s post, the Scots Edu Blogs Aggregation Project page on the Scotedublogs wiki, the discussion group and the project itself: www.scotedublogs.org.uk.

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A cross between putting my money were my mouth is and enjoying the last couple days of freedom.

Click on the left right hand side of images to advance, the left to go back. The slides sort of explain the hows, whys and wherefores. You can try the editor I hope it will be usable by the children. If not I’ve enjoyed playing with flash.

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An interesting pessimistc/optomistic post by Will

Yes, there are more and more examples of teachers and students using these tools in their practice, but the numbers of examples of students on the K-12 level whose learning is being transformed by these technologies is amazingly small, at least to me. I mean really, where are the examples of students blogging?and I mean blogging, not just using blogs?and building global networks of learners? There are some, yes, but not enough to make the case that these tools can work in the current school environment.

Which hits a few nails on the head. I certainly feel that blogging has done my classes some good but I don’t think their learning is going through a major transformation. I am not too worried though. I am not at all sure if any optimism is possible on the other global events Will refers to, but it should be for educational blogging.

First I think the methods to help children blog in the first place, fitting this into the curriculum and the school day, are developing and need to be explored before we build global networks. This will take time (more time). As a class teacher who is starting the fourth year of blogging with children I am still scratching the surface, just starting to move from giving the children an audience to letting them develop a community. I’ve seening this happen more this session than ever before.

Secondly as we slowly integrate blogging and a world wide network of children learning together it will hopefully dovetail nicely with A Curriculum for Excellence, Assessment is for Learning and other educational efforts outside the blogosphere which I think are pushing in the same direction. (Maybe extreme-learning too, but I don’t know much about that).

Thirdly a lot of the edu blogs that have started up over the last year have been professional development blogs not learner blogs. I do not see the sort of changes that I think Will wants until more children are given the tools, hopefully as teachers use the tools themselves they will start giving them to their classes and then as Will says we

will have our kids leading us further toward where we need to go?

I don’t think this will happen in 2007 everywhere, but we already know The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.

I’ve a few ideas of where I want to go in 2007 and hopefully will be planning them here before long.

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From the Akismet stats page

524,143,055 spams caught so far

1,606,961 so far today

94% of all comments are spam

The spam log on the Sandaig blogs tells me our good comments (ham according to Akismet) to spam ratio is a lot poorer than average, we seem to get 100s of spam comments every day. The trend in the Akismet graph is pretty depressing, the fact that so little spam actually gets through to protected blogs is not.

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Just when you though it was safe to go back into the water. These are my favourite posts by pupils at Sandaig.

  • Kieran Holocaust Poem Not a regular blogger Kieran wrote this in his spare time.
  • Twincas tn
    Twin Castles a great conversation.
  • So I am sitting in my class at lunch time when two girls burst in: we must have a camera, they really wanted to blog this:
    Tower tn
  • P6 TO P7 is the kind of post I do not encourage enough.
  • First Circuit Movie a first experiment making quick movies with a digital camera. Here is another movie Flick Flacks, I’d really like to streamline this sort of production. This one was valuable assessment without writing, I asked the children to set up a few second movie to show some of the aspects of how gears work.
  • Sandy in London
  • I love this picture
    Dance tn
  • this was a whole class blog and mini podcast, like the wee movies above I want to try more of this.
  • Over at Sandaig Poets bio poem by Kimberley-Jayne is one of my favourite all time posts, what a wonderful sustained conversation without any input from me.
  • This JAMES THE GIANT PEACH book review took Shannon weeks to get finished.

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I see Ewan had taken up this meme, I guess it is self indulgent but fairly harmless, I am having a good time anyway reviewing my years .
Next year, if I am here, I will not need to do this: ’cause I’ll have tagging of posts working properly. A lot of the post I write are more of notes to myself and at the moment often lost in the archives, hopefully next year they will be all lined up by tag.

  1. July: I played with Google Maps Again, improved my tracking of Teachmeet06 and disapproved of Learning styles
  2. August: I though about SSDN which became Glow. I started using TextMate, went back to school and was jealous of Ewan and AB.
  3. September: I messed about with google earth, appleScript and other ways of posting. Reported on our Media room, pointed to PodcastDirectory.org.uk, plenty of posts on SETT and teachmeet06 and some practical classroom stuff
  4. October: I went to Be Very Afraid, started getting children blogging in the media room and tried to figure out which software to use for providing individual blogs (I went with pivot Primary Six SJ)
  5. November: I reported on a short term blog and made a Flash Video player.
  6. December: I made and tested a simple flash mp3 player, used it to do some 10 minute podcasts with the children here and here, 10 minutes as in 10 minutes to plan, record and post a sub 1 minute podcast. I messed around with OPML which sort of lead to ScotEduBlogs news and I rounded to year off with a review of my blogging year part 1 and this post.

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I’ve made a very small addition to the blog setup here.

Type (star) for a (star) and (wish) for a (wish) while blogging or in the comment form.

I don’t really expect many folk to use this on my blog but it might help with peer assessment on Sandaig Otters and Sandaig Poets. I’ve managed to add it to the Emoticons popup link in the comments form too. I’ll be adding it to the Primary Six SJ blogs setup too. Pivot makes this easy to do.

Two stars and a wish is part of Assessment is for Learning

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I’ve just upgraded the main sandaig blogs to Pivot 1.40.0 and everything seems to have gone ok.

New is:

  1. Comment moderation which I’ve got turned off
  2. support for tagging and tag clouds for which I’ve still to read the docs and set up.
  3. Thickbox image popups

Here is an example popup image: of no educational or seasonal value.

The most useful feature from the school point of view is the comment moderation, I don’t moderate comments here but it is nice to know I could if I wanted to. I did turn moderation on on the Primary Six SJ blogs, I’ve not had to disallow any so far but I’ll probably keep it going there.

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One of the things I like about blogging is how posts disappear into the archive to be forgotten.
One of the things I hate about blogging is how posts disappear into the archive to be forgotten.
I thought I might spend some holiday time trawling through my archives and pulling out some posts,:

  1. January: I mostly pointed to interesting stuff, started blogging with appleScript and made the suggestion for folk to comment my class I’ll comment yours for the first of many times.
  2. February: I discovered cocomment, went to holland for a couple of days to podcast with the De Rank children, started thinking about communicate06 with a nice example of blogging and played with flash.
  3. March: I went to communicate06 and the MasterClass New Technologies Course/
  4. April: I posted a brief how to podcast overview, played with google maps and tested a few things.
  5. May: The first Scots Edu Bloggers meetup, more google maps, the children told me what they though about podcasting and I just like the photo with this post.
  6. June: started thinking about video blogging pointed to andy’s blogging course and though about commenting again.

I realise this post (or the second part) is not much use to other folk, but I found it quite useful to have an overview of what I’ve been doing, I’d recommend it as an interesting exercise.