I always think that the end of term will allow me to squeeze in some extra ict lessons and activities. As usual this year I was wrong forgetting how busy Christmas is. I’ve hardlt had time to post here at all.

The December Radio Sandaig podcast is out at last. Lot of trouble with this one and I ended up doing most of the editing myself. Audacity managed to lose all the children’s edits.

After enquiring on the Podcasting-Education mail list and searching the audacity-users list it seems that Audacity can have problems with losing data if you move the original files.

This seems related to the file format preferences, and how Audacity imports:

Make a copy before editing(safer)

Read Directly from the original file (Faster)

The second, which is AFAIK the default, is what I use and seems to be a problem.

The solution seems to be to use the safer import and save a wav file at the end of each editing sessions as a backup.

Anyway the December podcast doesn’t even have background music due to lack to time and having to redo the whole thing.

An other interesting ict activity we did was a little experimenting with Comic Life. This is a wonderful app to quickly create comics, I’ve read a lot about it on the web recently, but just got round to trying it out.

Emma B in primary seven produced this comic of the Radio Sandaig Christmas Boys Vs Girls competition for the Sandaig Otters blog.

Blogging as content management

Now I know the webmasters of the world may call this heresy, but any tool that gets a student (adult or child) closer to becoming a contributor to the web rather than just a consumer is a good tool.

From Art Gelwicks’s blog at edtechtalk.com.

I am finding some good stuff I didn’t know about at the The Edublog Awards 2005

Seems to be a beta linked from here: Is a Mac Version of Google Earth Coming Soon?

Worked ok on my home mac here:

Update: also via Remote Access Neave Lab > Flash Earth

Trying to add the feed for ToProbationAndBeyond to the Scottish Education Blogs SuprGul feed and I get this:

I am finding my lilina test a lot more useful than Suprglu

I guess Suprglu is really designed for pulling a few feeds from the different services of one person rather than a mini aggregator.

If you try my lilina let me know if it works for you.

Great comment on Getting Heard by a teacher on the benefits of blogging

Getting Heard is an exciting project by Anne Davis linked from Anne’s post Turned a corner! where she talks about inappropriate comments on student Keithel’s Blog.

Keithel’s Blog turns out to be very interesting but one of the comments I read was way over my line.

Secondary school is obviously a different environment than primary, I wouldn’t even start a conversation with children on some of this stuff in my class (We do talk about comments). I am rethinking my position on moderation, again.

At the moment I pre moderate the posts by my class, not heavily, just a quick spell and sense check, for the same reasons as I would make suggestions and corrections to a piece of work that was going on the wall.

I post moderate comments, (I’ve very rarely had to remove anything, mostly spam) we want to encourage comments which moderation might discourage. I check comments several times a day, but if we started getting the kind of comment Keithel received I’d move to pre-moderating comments pretty quickly.

The whole idea of opening a primary classroom to the world is powerful and scary, I really want blogs to be in my classroom for all the reasons in the comment lined above, to keep using them I need to keep them a safe place for 10 year olds. If blogs are going to spread to other classrooms and maybe teachers who don’t spend the early hours reading blogs they need to be demonstrably safe places.

iPodagogy

Staff blog for the Gracemount High School iPod project.

http://ghsipods.blogspot.com/

via Ewan‘s side bar.

Feeling green.

This is a wee demo

Looks like the Poetry Pizzeria which hosts the Keepers Project had a face lift and more project could be in the pipeline. I’ll look forward to the new ones, our Keepers poem for National Poetry Day October 2005 is one of the most rewarding thing we have done online so far.

At the Naace conference last week a few folk mentioned using an iRiver iFP 790 to record podcasts. i think they are out of production, amazon uk has a second hand one for £60.

I was pleasantly surprised to find them at my local argos for £39.99.

First test the recording seems pretty good even without an external mic. Interface is pretty poor compared to an ipod, way too small.

Found the software for mac too: iRiver Music Manager for Mac. For some reason the iRiver does not mount as a disk.