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Born Geek: CoLT a firefox extension that lets you copy the html tag in firefox. I am welded to Safari because of the similar function that comes with Safari Stand this makes it much easier to copy links and use them in a blog or in a html editor.I am posting this with Performancing .com another nice firefox plugin that lets you post to a blog from firefox.

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I’ve been writing this post in my head for a week or so and it is nowhere near finished, but I need to get it out of the way to clear my brain, if you read this blog I don’t do too much reflection so this is an unusual post (apologies in advance for rambling).

I’ve been blogging with the children in Sandaig for over two years now. I started off with little knowledge of the edublogosphere, just wanted to bring a tool I’d found useful elsewhere into school. I’ve always been keen on children publishing and a blog seemed a good idea at he time.

As time went on I read other educators blogs and though about what blogging was doing in class. All the eduWeb2.0 ideas about audience, purpose etc made sense.

At first our blogs didn’t get too many comments, or they came in flurries, they were powerful aids to the whole process, real people (and a real poet) commenting on the children’s work valuing it and encouraging them. I didn’t think too much more about them, sometimes the children replied and got into short conversations, sometimes not.

A lot of this was limited by time, timetable and having 2 internet machines in the classroom. Occasionally we would get a real flurry of activity.

Recently Andy posted Help Wanted and started a scot-wave of comments, my class wrote some comments and got comments back from the Aberdeen guys and Andy himself. At the same time our fairy blogmother started some lovely conversations over at Sandaig Poets.

(most of this has been masterminded or loosely connected by Scots blog wizard Ewan)

This has been wonderful, but it brings up a couple of thoughts.

The comments by children here and by my children have been of a pretty good quality, the children are taking blogs a lot more seriously than say think.com, but as conversations develop it become harder to organise access and time. I don’t know if this would be easier with individual blogs that would be aggregated on a mother blog in a lab situation, but I’d like to try.

My class have made me proud with their commenting so far (another nice example).

Keeping up conversations amoung 10 year olds will require a bit of support, I am having difficulty reading all the comments (need to check if PIVOT has a feed for comments, wordpress does), keeping up with my classes comments on other blogs hmm!

The more conversations children have the more interesting teaching points will come up. The problems with being public but not seeing facial expressions and body language have be pointed up in newsgroups, mail list and blogs. Today Ewan the most experienced scot-edu-blogger provided an example here and here, if adults have trouble understanding each other children will too. (This might not be a bad thing, think teaching point;-)).

I keep saying we are only scratching the blog surface here, and am getting a bit worried about interested in supporting it all as we are getting a bit deeper, practical examples of supporting long term conversations in a two computer primary classroom wanted?

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I think I’ve added the right stuff to the comment template to make cocomments work here:

http://www.cocomment.com/integrate#pivot

I changed:

var blogURL = “Fill in your own website”;

to

var blogURL = “http://www.sandaigprimary.co.uk[[home]]”;

which should hopefully point to the correct subweblog (say here, or the otters)

More info for Pivot users on the forum here: coComment

Could someone let me know if it works?

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Steve gives some alternative views of the first UK Edublogger Conference.

his final post calls for Revolution

It’s the only way to change the education system as it is

From the bottom up. Getting a massive installed base of blogging schools. Aggregate, aggregate organise. Work around the slow system.

… john’s snip…

Revolution is fast and furious. And comes suddenly, before anyone is truly aware. Blogs are the answer.

I’d prefer something gentler, I don’t think of blogging as a revolution, it is a natural extension of normal classroom practice. We try to give children purpose for tasks, we display their work. The world wide wall display is a new way of doing that, providing purpose and a bigger audience.

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I’ve redecorated a bit. borrowed some javascript to expand and collapse some of the bits on the side. Only tested in safari and firefox mac as I left the pc in school this weekend, if you see this before monday from a pc and it looks wrong let me know (I obviously don’t mean wrong from the design sense, just if something is blasted off the screen).

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I have been quite jealous of the use of BubbleShare on the Interactive Chatting Teddies blog, but it is blocked at school at the moment. I’ve not asked for it to be unblocked, but I am trying a couple of homespun alternatives.

1. Photos in iPhoto, record audio in Garage band and add to iTunes, export Quicktime move from iPhoto with the audio as the ‘music’ : Amy and Bradley – country in the city

2. Record audio in Audacity, import photos and audio to flash file, children can create slideshow with crude effects: Daniel and Nicole – country in the city/

At the moment, the second has the best possibilities, more for the children to do, and smaller file size. I helped with the saving of audio and importing to flash, but given a bit of practice the children could do most of that, they organised the images and tweened them in flash this time. the flash file is also smaller than the quicktime one, though that may be down to my ignorance of QT.

Both files are a bit big to incorporate in a blog, but it might be possible to have some sort of flash file that would dynamically load images and sound just like bubble share. Is this worthwhile, giving pupils a voice, or just toys for this boy?