Digitalkatie is describing Lesson planning and planning and planning and some of the reasons things can go astray in ICT. Some great plans thwarted.

In the last couple of weeks working in our new media room I’ve had this pleasure, old machines in a new room mean I’ve been reporting a few faults. One of the most interesting has been the refusal of a few machines to show thumbnails of jpeg files. This is a bit of a show stopper for children trying to figure out which of the cryptically named files from the digital camera they took the day before. We watched as a remote technician tried for a morning to get it working (time for some bad teacher halloween jokes). In the end another tech had to visit and replace the hard drive.

I’ve been reading Jonesieblog the Blog of Robert Jones for a while now and always find interesting things there.

His subheading changes regularly, probably one of those fortune cookie plugins, but todays gave me a smile:

One of may favourite words after serendipity. Fair cheered me up after a day at work.

Our ICT Suite now called the Media Room was open for business this week. So we have stepped up the blogging. In our 2 primary seven and 2 primary sixes classes we have set up a rota where 2 children in each class are the blog team for the day. during he day they are supposed to decide what is interesting and blog-worthy, take photos and note. At the end of the day I pull the photos off the cameras and put them on the computers. The next morning from 9:00 -9:30 they come to the Media Room crop and resize the photos and blog. This way we should get every child in 4 classes blogging every 2 or 3 weeks and fill up Sandaig Otters. It might be time for a little blog reorganisation. Children are chosen pretty much at random with the idea that the less able writes will have peer support. The idea is that missing the first half and hour of normal curriculum will not be too detremental. At the moment 30 minutes is a bit tight, but should improve as the children’s typing speed improves. Hopefully after a few weeks they might be blogging from their classroom computers too.

Ian’s Space: Flash Training has a good set of links to Flash learning. Ian is asking for more. Coincidently yesterday I was watching some flash tutorial movies at gotoAndLearn.com which Ian recommends and was thinking about flash for the first time in a while.

I’ve a hodgepodge or related flash link in my Flash del.icio.us links. and a wee while I go I found: IFBIN Moock: IFBIN 2.0, hundreds of free, open examples.

Testing:

This is an old flash file I made a few years ago. It seems to work fine in Safari, hopefully it will be ok in IE and we can use it for the children’s creations. If you try the link and have problems, please let me know.

k12 Online conference has started.Alan Levine demos a pile of web 2.0 tools using those tools, for example his What Can We Do With flickr used flickr.

There will be a lot of content going online at the k12 conference over the next 3 weeks including a couple of Scots contributors: Ewan and John Connell, see the agenda of all events for the 2006 K-12 Online Conference.

technorati: k12onlineconference ewan johnconnell

There has been a fair bit of discussion in the scot-edu-blogs world of the use of Flickr in the classroom. David especially has produced a pile of great ideas and examples. Also under discussion has been the access to flickr in schools, many local authorities block flickr and similar file sharing/storage sites.
I’ve been thinking about getting more blogging, maybe on an individual basis, done in class and in using flickr images as a source of illustrations or starting points; so I have been working on a crude workaround for the blocking.
I’ve made a wee SuperCard project that takes a word, downloads the first couple of hundred thumbnails of photos tagged with the word and lets me select them. After I’ve reviewed and selected them the app downloads the small and medium sized photos, makes a webpage displaying them along with a snippet of credit showing the license.
example: red, example: glasgow.
The idea is I would then take the folder into school on a pen drive and put it onto the local network so that my class could select pictures to use on the blog or other places.
It also will give me a chance to talk about creative commons and attribution.
As far as I can see, this should be legal from the copyright point of view (I am only using photos with creative commons Attribution or Attribution-NonCommercial Licenses) and as I have reviewed all the photos it should be fine with the authority. I’d welcome any opinions on this before I start using it.
The children miss out on using flickr and all the associated tools but we do get access to a pile of inspiring photos.

A while back I read Andrew’s’ post Fighting Addiction about spending too much time reading his feeds and working outside school hours and it has been nagging at my brain for a long time.
I don’t blog or read other blogs in school time I mostly do it from home. Same goes for most of the development of the school website; writing the html setting up blogs etc. I spend a lot of my free time in front of my mac, no one asked me to, but that is how my life has developed.
Some of it is spent on non educational things, I do a bit of web-development and even used to write simple shareware and freeware (ok that was educational).
For a while I though blogging might develop my career but that has not happened.So I have started paying attention to how much time this eats up and it is a lot. On a free day (weekend, holiday) I get up early, email, feeds, follow links, comment, follow links, write a post, check a few class blogs and try and comment, email again, write a post, check feeds and so on and so on. It is always interesting, but it is unproductive and pays no bills.

So I am starting to think this blogging is getting in the way of

1. Real life
2. Other parts of my computer-life I enjoy and occasionally makes a wee bit of money (Web-dev, not shareware)

So I’ve started to analyse what is taking up all the time, what can I give up to free up time for fun and profit. Time sucks:

• Reading email, reading email as my mailer beeps, looking for stuff I need to do in my inbox.
• Reading Feeds, following links (recursive), looking at my aggregator when growl tells me to.
• Blogging, writing posts, this take a really long time, especially posts where I think as I go, describing a process and look for a conclusion, linking things together.
• Going between several jobs in a random fashion, driven by mail’s beep and Vienna’s growl

I got to the stage where I was talking to Ewan the other day and I am thinking of stopping blogging, popped out of my mouth. Since them I’ve been mulling it over weighing up the pros and cons. Making a plan:

• Email Keeping your email inbox under control in the Saturday Guardian a very simplified version of Gtd, I’ve been reading about this at 43 folders for an age and Ewan has be going on about it for a while but it looks way to complex for my needs, but Oliver Burkeman‘s Guardian piece was simple enough to carry out:

  Before:
  
  After:
  

  I think I am off to a good start on this one, i’ve got 3 messages in my inbox and half a dozen in my ToDo folder after a week of testing this out.
  The other thing i am trying, is that if I have some computer work to do, I don’t open mail.app until I’ve done an hour.

• Reading blogs I am going to try a similar sort of simplification. Read my aggregator once a day, flag, mark as read ruthlessly, unsubscribe from a lot of major edu bloggers (mainly in the usa), I’ll pick up their interesting threads from more local friends. I get more out of practical teachers blogs than the theorists/keynoters (over simplification, but I don’t need evangelised). I’ve unsubscribed from a pile of news feeds as I read the paper every day and I am looking to cut down on the feeds I just skim.
• Blogging I’ve got so much out of blogging in the last couple of years I don’t want to stop, but it is probably the biggest problem. The posts that take the most time are ones sparked by other blogs, where I am thinking out-loud trying to make sense of things. I’ve realised that these posts litter my Hard Drive, but don’t usually make it to the blog (when they do they usually don’t make much sense). So I am going to stop writing those ones, I can think about them, but I don’t need to type or spell check them.
  Mainly I want to share what my class/ school are doing, hopefully gaining them an audience, document practice; test things out that might be useful; point to other interesting things on the net. So that is what I am going to blog about, short and hopefully sweet posts.

So I am set for a more effective, productive and diverse online life, I hope so.

http://www.miniature-earth.com/ via Stephen Downes who got it from presentation zen which leads to this this YouTube link and this inspirational story.

This came out from following some discussion about the K-12 Online Conference by Stephen including Selling an Idea which I found in my feeds here.

So I started with some squabbling and ended with some hugs. I didn’t even know there this note of discord in among edu bloggers.

If you have a moment the http://www.miniature-earth.com/ is well worth a look, old information i know but beautifully presented.