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Two days into term and the days are seem shorter, blog reading is pretty limited.

At the weekend, I tried to get WordPress Multi User and Lyceum to work on the Sandaig Site. I don’t really want the hugely scalability of WP MU but I would like to set a class or three up with individual blogs this session. I want to do it on our site, to keep control and safety in my hands. I want children to be able to choose some of the features of their blogs, even if it just colour and header image, and I want to be able to set up the blogs quickly. Needless to say it has not worked so far. I am casting around for other ideas, setting up one blog with a category of each child would I think lose the ability for each child to have a theme in wordpress and if we used pivot changing themes would be a little too hard for 10 year olds.

Not that we are ready for full scale blogging, we have one pc in the class at the mo, and the classes with the new cabling are not switched on yet (mine should not be, but the mitel guy told me how to make a temporary link from one router to the other).

In an attempt to distract myself from all of this and my forward plans I’ve been playing with different ways to post to the blog, hence all the weird short posts of late. I am thinking of quick ways to put up information in a standard form, say flagged blog posts in my feed reader, or children collecting data of some sort (weather say). I’ve had various partial successes, but I probably need a little help with the technical details.

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Started a new session today, and got my primary six class down to blogging straight away on A bigger Sandaig and Class Rules I am hoping to set up a scribe system first in my class and them in others this session.

The ICT Suite is moving on:

The guys from Mitel came in at the weekend and configured all the PCs that came over from Barlanark. They also told me how to wire up the connection to my room on a temporary basis, hence the blogging. I am beginning to get my head round a few ideas for extending the Sandaig media empire, turning more work over to the children.

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glow doesn’t seem to be a good technorati tag.

Andrew’s post about glow has a nice image at the top, generated by msig.info having spent some time figuring out how to do this in fireworks, I wish I’d seen this earlier. A pity the page has a wee bit of text that is not suitable for the classroom, if we got round to individual blogs it would have been a useful tool for generating header images.

TeachMeet organisation is moving on a pace, wine and dinner seem to be organised, but we need a wifi sponsor.

technorati tags glow ssdn teachmeet06

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I’ve just checked out Glow which is the new name for SSND. There is a Glow: the movie (19 minutes) to introduce teachers to SSDN Glow. Some interesting stuff wrapped in a ‘wee drama’. took a bit too long to get it’s message across. There is a transcript too:

GLORIA

Who are you?

A glowing hand reaches in and beats her to it. Gloria looks up to see the GATEKEEPER – a handsome man in a white suit who appears to glow. She jumps back in shock.

hmm.

I think we could have a laugh watching it in an inservice.

Strangely enough the Mac Version QuickTime movie: Glow: the movie (high speed) didn’t work on my my mac, just opened QT player which showed an endless connecting message. The Windows Media video: Glow: the movie opened fine using Quicktime in safari (I’ve got flip4Mac installed) .

If this is what we are going to get it looks pretty ambitious with a good toolset. All sorts of collaborating and content.

I was please to see a wee RSS icon floating by on the screen, I wonder if glow will allow the publishing and pulling of rss to the www or just within glow.

 

Also the words after school club video podcasting on another screen.

The mention of ‘glowgraphics’ (I think) sounded interesting as does the Intellectual property page at LTS.

The ssdn would seem to solve (in school at least) the bandwidth problem, but I wonder how powerful a class pc needs to be to see mutli user video chat?

I also worry about the idea of pupils connecting from home, the digital divide is still a problem in some areas of Scotland.

In the example the wee girl was online in her bedroom out of the parental line of sight, maybe she should have had a bed made up in the living room and her dad could have kept an eye on her while he did the ironing;-)

I am also curious to see how open to the rest of the world the ssdn glow will be, will we be able to pull in content from outside glow, rss, flickr photos etc? Will we need to? If it is closed will it make Scotland insular, or could we bring in international partners?

Andrew is blogging glow too.

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