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

Today when teaching the other primary six class ict in the media room we tried a wee experiment, instead of uploading an image and writing text we uploaded an image and recorded a short mp3 about what the children had learned: Black and White Grid Art .

Pivot allows you to upload files and then let the browser open them in a new window.

I though that a flash player embedded in an entry might be a little nicer, so I took an existing Pivot extension snippet Flash and modified it a bit to use a wee flash mp3 player I knocked up previously:

I am not too sure how robust this will be, I can’t really remember my original flash code and modified it in a hurry, the snippet relies on my poor at best php and probably would affront anyone with some php knowledge. I’ve only tested it in Safari so far, I’ll check this on the school pcs tomorrow and would appreciate a comment if you don’t see a flash player in this entry.

But if I can get this to work reliably I’ve got a useful tool which doesn’t require any external services. (I need to make the flash file look a bit nicer too.

All the children will need to do is upload a file and then change this:

[[download:test.p3:icon::]]

to

[[flashmp3:test.p3]]

technorati tags: flash blogging podcasting mp3 pivot

A week or two ago I set up a new set of blogs, one for each of the children in my class: Primary Six SJ. They are now open for business. We have managed a few posts and some of the children have a fair handle on how it works other don’t yet.

We have our ‘week’ in the media room this week, the class is timetabled for ict for an hour each morning Monday to Thursday, Monday didn’t happen because of a whole school event, Tuesday I bit off more that we could chew asking the children to do far to much. in one session, some confusion resulted. Today we had more success, a simpler task and about half the class finished in time to upload their work to their blogs.

Already some of the class are asking if they can post to their blogs from home, and I’ve told them soon. A bit more discussion and a rule card to take away and then I’ll let them loose. They are also asking about customising their header graphic so we need to work on that too.