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.
• 
  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:
  
• 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
  
• 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.

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.

Listening to the latest Booruch, which was a chat between David and geeky pete and watching Robert in action over at ScotEduBlogs news has brought open-source very much to the forefront of my mind.
I’ve also noticed a couple of good posts on why using free services that are not open-source might not be a good ideas: the developers might pull the rug from under you at any time. Unfortunately I’ve lost those references but found this example: O’Reilly Radar > Google Deprecates Their SOAP Search API.
In a practical rather than ideal way these problems might be solved by some sort of national edu storage space. This would also solve the problem of flickr, bubbleshare and youtube being blocked by some authorities. I know the social aspect of these sites are very important, but as far as I can see most pupil/student blogs are mainly using these sites for file storage and to simplify displaying multimedia on their blogs.
as I see it, it would be simple enough to provide a basic server service that would allow the upload and linkage to files. a wee bit more effort could provide a video player (in the google/youtube style), flash mp3 player and slide show tools. The only problem in doing this would be the cost of the bandwidth, I guess that would be nothing to a nation, anyone know?

scotedublogs

(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.