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My class are working on a bit of their Scotland topic researching cities. I had planned that they would use Wikipedia for research and was even thinking of using a wiki for presenting there results. Unfortunately we still have only one pc as the suite is still in progress. Anyway we had a look at Wikipedia with the projector and white board, compared it to our old classroom encyclopedia, hmm nothing on PSPs or IPods in the old book. We talked about who put Wikipedia together and how quickly it could change. We talked about accuracy and reliability of information. We had a quick look at the Tyrannosaurus page, and then the page about Glasgow. We had a quick chat about licensing and the fact that we could use the dinosaur photo if we liked. Covered a lot of points which will need further discussion and clarification.

Then I gave groups of children printouts of the Wikipedia pages about Scottish cities and highlighter pens, they went through the entries highlighting bits of text which will become note and then their own texts. Steam-powered Web2.0. good fun was had by all and the children ended up with some useful starters for their research. There should be a child’s eye view on the Sandaig Otters blog tomorrow.

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I will be talking to folk from the schools in our Learning community tonight these links are for me to talk about.

Sandaig Blogs:

ScotEduBlogs Wiki Links to the Scots Edu Blog world.

A couple of tutorials on using wordpress (interface might be a bit different)

A list of a few other school/class blogs

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My class are beginning to get the hang of blogging, this week we appointed two class scribes each day to blog each day, they are given the digital camera, and snap away then blog whatever they choose over on Sandaig Otters.

This week the children, who are pretty much new to blogging, need a bit of support with the technology as well as the writing but I think this is going to be a regular feature of the class this session.

I am also going to try to expand it to other classes. I kidnapped a few children from Primary seven to do a wee bit of blogging yesterday. If this expansion happens I’ll need to get busy figuring out how to present the posts as they will be dropping off the bottom as fast as they appear.

Again this week I have has sterling support from a pile of off site teachers and friends who have been commenting on the work. Apologies to those who have not had a follow up comment from the bloggers, we have still only one pc in the class as the suite is not ready yet. I’ll be delighted to return the favour and also link to other primary blogs if you let me know.

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I think this blog is unique in the ScotsEduBlog world in that it runs off Pivot.

The reason is that 1. I was familiar with pivot when we started blogging at Sandaig as I had blogged for a few years at Bad Poet my non-edu mainly SuperCard blog.

and 2.Pivot is one of the few blogs that did not need a database on the server, and we did not have a database with our hosting package at the time.

Pivot has in my opinion, proved to be great, very flexible with a pretty good toolset.

It has enabled us to run 18 weblogs for a variety of purposes. The theme settings are not as slick as say wordpress, but it is easier to customise using basic html and css, the blogs here may not be the prettiest but they are distinct from each other and some are cunningly disguised as parts of the main site (example: HT News or Sandaig News).

The main thing that has held me back from wholeheartedly recommending pivot to other teachers is its lack of pre-moderation of comments, so I was delighted to read about the new 1.40 beta on pivotlog.net, which has Comment Moderation and Greatly improved Metaweblog API support.

I think I’ve already been testing the metaWeblog stuff here as I uploaded some cutting-edge files from the pivot forum recently, but with moderation I can now recommend Pivot to any teacher with a smattering of html and css that would like to run a blog from a web host rather than use a blogging service. wOOt as the young folk say.

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I was talking to a colleague in another primary school recently. They mentioned that a cpd opportunity in blogging had been offered round in their staff-room, the reaction from the staff was along the lines of that is all very well but we have real work like spelling to get through.
I am a wee bit worried about this, and unfortunately I doubt the message is going to get through very quickly via cpd. A/the problem is that folk seem to think blogging is out with the normal day to day curriculum when it could be an enhancement to it.

A less than best practice example: this week I did a couple of sessions of McRone cover in our two primary seven classes. As it was only the second week of term, I just did my own thing rather than follow the class routine. I decided to do a wee poetry lesson using a basic template to get the class started blogging. The lesson turned out to be about a lot more than blogging. We started by reviewing nouns, verbs and adjectives and introduced antonyms, we discussed powerful vs weak words, the importance of audience and getting our spelling right.
The children wrote poems and blogged some of them on Sandaig Poets, things got a bit frantic and some spelling mistakes were made, eek! Poems were blogged, and over the next couple of days, thanks to Ewan‘s linkage, and comments from Bob, Andy, Neil and Steve, the children’s interest was maintained.

I popped back into one of the classes later in the week (my own macrone) for a follow up. We discussed spelling mistakes, slang, text messaging, audience and the ideas given by the comments, some of which served to increase the class vocabulary. We went on to cover internet safety, audience again and a few other things.

The time spent by pupils on the computers was about 10 minutes each. Most of the work involved, discussion and writing, the odd picture was drawn, nothing out of the ordinary.
Blogging provided some extras (audience,context and purpose) for real work.

After reading Gordon’s post Too much hassle I think the problem is that some teacher do not realise that it is not really much hassle to dip a toe in the web 2.0, but we need to give enough time, training and practice to let them know that. Same as any other aspect of teaching and learning really.

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Over the last few week I’ve been blogging happily from TextMate and feeling quite pleased with myself. I even wrote a crude command from the blogging bundle to convert a set of selected words to technorati tags. Unfortunately I didn’t check it out properly and the links produced were broken. So this morning I fixed it and used textMate to retrive the posts fix the links and repost them, not noticing until I had finished that that set the date to todays. I’ve reordered them now, but it looks like I went mad blogging today.
This is my code, it is important to note I know nothing at all about shell scripting so just used google to figue out what to use:

echo  "<p class="ttags">"

tt="<a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/thetag/" rel="tag" target="_blank">thetag</a>"

str=$TM_SELECTED_TEXT

for word in $str; do echo ${tt//thetag/$word}; done

echo "</p>"

Hopefully the next paragraph will show it works: