(if you only know me through my blog)
I’ve been tagged by Tom.

1. I used to be a zoo keeper, at the now defunct Glasgow Zoo. I worked in the carnivore section and co-authored AFAIR a few articles for various journals mostly about behavioural enrichment. I’ll leave others to decide if this experience helped or hindered my teaching.
2. I have played tai chi for over 16 years. I manage a few tai chi websites.
3. I entered the teaching profession for financial reasons when working as a zoo keeper (my daughter was born), I though I’d give it a go for a couple of years (about 15-16 years ago).
4. Unlike many edu bloggers I had an instinctive dislike for computers, until my head teacher ‘made’ me take an apple mac lc475 home over the summer. I bought my first computer in 1995 a Performa 630. This is considerably later than most folks entry to ict. HyperCard was the application that got my attention.
5. I have had poetry rejected by a poetry magazine, entirely justified I hasten to add, a very short lived ambition.

I am tagging David, Andy,Bob, Robert and Pete.

Robert has moved the ScotEduBlogs news project on a bit. He is now using Ruby and in a remarkably short time has got tagging, categorisation by authority and a “news” of the latest 10 posts from anywhere in the scotedublogs world working. More details on the scotedublogs » SEB aggregation wiki page.
The blogs listings are coloured coded to let the viewer know how fresh they are. Tags are added and the last few posts on the blogs shown with a nice Ajax/javascript way.
Robert says

The site should really be labelled “alpha” rather than “beta”, but if you do get the urge to add any tags, they will not get thrown out as the project develops. Let me know what you think

I think this is a great start which should really show people how useful this sort of tool can be.

technorati tags: scotedublogs rss aggregation

So was am feeling pretty grumpy during the last post. After that I made a quick check of the school blogs. This afternoon, we had a quick quarter of an hour or so in the media Room, looking at some other school blogs (leading to the previous post) and then I let the children finish some posts to their individual blogs, as we were short of time I let others blog a Wizard or ninja for a bit of fun and talked about blogging safely as some of the children had been asking if they could blog from home. I explained that they could as long as they were very sensible. Anyway I was encouraged by this wee flurry of after school posts even if most of them are ninja with little educational value.

i am not sure if this will work out in the long term, but I’d quite like to try some blogging homework for the children that have access at home.

We have been getting a lot of comments and contact from a few other Scots school blogs (Loading ?take a look inside?, Primary 7 and Primary 7v Class Blog) along with 5/6P AllStars from Australia and more. I’ve been getting a little frustrated when trying to return the visits. Different blogs used different tech, some use flickr some bubbleShare, some Google Video and others file storage that we cannot download. Some of the other schools can see our Quicktime but not Flash.
I can fully understand why Authorities block various sites, but it can get a bit frustrating.
The second moan today is about bandwidth. Since we started podcasting our monthly bandwidth usage has been many time that allowed by our web host blacknight. Blacknight provide free hosting for primary schools and have been very generously allowing our misdemeanors. Recently when I thought to expand our podcasting into video files at Sandaig Television, I decided to use some dot mac storage that comes with my family pack. This worked ok, then was blocked in school by Glasgow, who immediately sorted it out when I asked. So tonight I was surprised to see none of the images or video files apearing on the blog. It seems we had gone over half our monthly bandwidth of 3GB before half the month of December had passed, so they cut us off:

If you are close to exceeding your monthly data transfer limit, you will receive a message from the .Mac team. You can use up to half of your monthly quota during the first 15 days of a month. If you exceed your data transfer limit, any site, blog, or podcast associated with your .Mac account is turned off and service will not be reinstated until the beginning of the next monitoring period (the 1st or 16th of the month, whichever comes first).

my italics, pointing to the fact I didn’t get a message.
I am fairly fed-up about all of this. The sandaig account is part of my dot mac family account, so I guess I could use my main account that allows 10gb per month, or i could scrap the account and spend the money on some real bandwidth.Perhaps both these moans are connected, maybe we need a Scottish service, trusted by the Local Authorities that would provide flickr, google video like storage. I know that not everybody thinks this is a good idea and I can understand the reasons, but in a practical sense it would move us and let more interesting sharing take place in Scottish schools.

Seven Habits of Highly Successful Websites (Aaron Swartz’s Raw Thought) via scot hacker?s foobar blog, well it raised a smile here.

After the discussion here I’ve added a page to the scotedublogs wiki: Scots Edu Blogs Aggregation Project.

I’ve been testing SimplePie a bit more:
An Aggregation of some scots-edu-bloggers. This is now a static page, updated every hour, or by refreshing.
This speeds up the loading of the page. Refresed from a cron job.
I’ve found some feeds don’t seem to work, e.g. David‘s first feedburner feed doesn’t work with SiplePie, but this one: EdCompCast: a podcast friendly feed does. I can’t get Digital Katies to work either.
But apart from that I am quite happy at the moment.

technorati: simplepie rss aggragator

SimplePie

SimplePie is a very fast and easy-to-use class, written in PHP, for reading RSS and Atom syndication feeds. By keeping it simple, and focusing on what?s important, we?ve built a pretty sweet little API. SimplePie?s focus has been two-fold: speed and ease of use, and has been very successful on both fronts.

I’ve tried quite a few on and offline aggregation systems, SimplePie allows you to aggregate and order entries in multiple blogs, as long as the feeds have dated items using the Multifeeds package. see SimplePie: Weblog » Sorting multiple feeds by time and date for details.
I like on of their taglines:

Feed parsing for the rest of us
So fast and easy you’d think we stole it from Apple

Here is a quick aggregation of some scots-edu-bloggers.
This is on my old G3 so don’t expect speed, compare to my lilina test on the same box.

Given time I am quite interested in making something useful for one of these aggregators the way to go would probably be to build the html regularly with a cron job so that the browser would just load a fast static page.

technorati tags: rss aggregation simplepie feeds

After watching the video, reading quite a few blog posts, especially Bob’s Sharepoint explanation I’ve having a quick look or three at the portal.

Somewhat limited by the Monday to Thursday school only access, I’ve still not got to grips with it.

There has been some interesting discussion on Ewan’s and John’s blogs.

Kind of boils down to: ‘do we need glow if we have Web 2.0?’ John and Ewan seem to be saying we need both (and a pile of other stuff too).

I am sure they are right (both posts are well worth reading more than once).

The only thing I can really say is that glow feels different than most of the web 2 stuff I’ve played with over the last few years. Glow doesn’t feel playful. I think I might need a manual. I’ve picked up a dozen blogging systems, a handful of wikis, flickr, del.ico.us etc and never felt lost. Glow feels more hierarchical , professional and business like.

It will be interesting to see how this develops, with only so much time available, will both cultures thrive?

glowscotland