Draft MOODLE Course on Blogging from Andy in Aberdeen.I was delighted that Sandaig got some link love, but apart from that this looks like a great intro to blogging for Scottish(or elsewhere) teachers.This is a step by step guide to educational blogging using mainly Scottish examples.The steps are set out in a clear and well ordered way that would allow any teacher to get the idea of educational blogging and get started blogging.In andy’s hands Moodle looks like a great tool for online cpd.

powered by performancing firefox

That last post was just to show the Heads of the primary schools in our learning community how easy it is to blog. The poor souls listened to me for about 90 minutes and the upshot is we are going to try setting up blogs for the other 5 primaries in the Bannerman New Learning Community for next session.

I am quite excited about this, I hope to set the sites up over the summer and then do some cpd with my colleagues next session.

I’ve got a few ideas about using the blogs that I’ve not inflicted on them yet, I’ll wait until the blog bug has taken hold.

As the final term of the session slides into sports days and clearing up we are doing a couple of interesting things at Sandaig.

The recent romans podcast is Educate’s podcasting directory’s featured podcast.

As mentioned below I started a World Cup 2006 blog. If you have a minute, please give the blog a comment.

It has been hard for the children to get time to post much, as we are busy with filming The Dream Dragon. Based on the Keepers poem for National Poetry Day October 2005 written by Sandaig children and turned into a play by Carol Fuller, an American high school theatre teacher in Austell, Georgia in the southern United States of America and pupils at South Cobb high school.

The production is pretty lo-fi, no costumes or scenery, only a few props. Focusing on the performances and how to stage it. The children are shooting the video taking turns at being cameraperson, director and gofor.

They have come up with some pretty imaginative suggestions for how to frame and stage scenes. I’ve uploaded quicktime movies of Scenes 2 to 7 to the internet archive, these are linked from the The Dream Dragon blog.

This whole project has lasted most of this session (and it might not be over yet),

sparked by The Keepers Poetry Project which was based on a poem by Phil Whitehead and run by Peter Ford our poems were original published on the Sandaig Poets blog and podcast on Radio Sandaig.

This was blogged by Ewan McIntosh and spread via Anne Davis, who was Spellbound by a Podcast.

It was then picked up by Carol Fuller from Ewan’s blog , her students wrote a play based on the verses. Carol has also become a frequent commentator on Sandaig Poets producing some wonderful conversations. I have a lot more to say about this whole process, but for now i need to thank the poets, blog magicians and fairy blog-mother Carol for everything.

With only a short time left, I’ve started a new blog for the class:

We have a new blog:

Sandaig World Cup 2006

Comments appreciated. Already the children have been quite creative in the sort of posts they are writing. Completely unprompted.

Later by unprompted I mean I’ve not really talked too much to the children about the form of their posts, I am too busy with this. The children have come up with a couple of really imaginative ideas for postings, short at the moment, but IMO sweet. Children who have not been all that interested in the blog are coming to the fore.

I got a trial account, but am having some problems loading a 92k csv file I uploaded, seems to hang at about 7 percent.

Better luck with a smaller file 5 columns 29 rows.

In school I’ve mostly used spreadsheets with my classes to produce graphs, there doesn’t seem to be a charting facility in google spreadsheets yet.

There is I am sure a case for making simplified versions of these web 2.0 online tools for children covering spreadsheets and databases. Full-blown applications are overkill for most primary needs.

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.