Just added the Sandaig Otters to this UK based edubloggers directory .

Then spent a hour or so following links to various interesting things:

Pebble Blogging app (Java/tomcat)

earth-to-blogger

britcast wiki Uk Podcasting

edTechUK Josie Fraser who started the CamabanWiki

And many more blogs, not much in the primary school area, (except for our pals at Berkhamsted Collegiate Prep School) lots of tech from FE. Problem for teacher is the volume of information out there and the time need to absorb it, my head is spinning.

Just noticed a nice implimentation of Tag Clouds on

http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/?tc=true, clicking the tag clouds graphic re-opens the main blog page with tag coulds at the top.

I’ve just added a Tag Cloud from: http://www.tagcloud.com/ to the left of this blog.

I am going to be using this blog to play with some blog tech over the summer holidays.

TagCloud is an automated Folksonomy tool. Essentially, TagCloud searches any number of RSS feeds you specify, extracts keywords from the content and lists them according to prevalence within the RSS feeds. Clicking on the tag’s link will display a list of all the article abstracts associated with that keyword.

http://edu.blogs.com/ great blog from Musselburgh Grammar School’s Ewan McIntosh.

I started trying to puttogether something of an introduction to blogging for Edict today, but of course ended up reading blogs. Ewan’s lead me to David Muir‘s blog and to thinking about del.icio.us again, if I am going to write this I am going have to get disconnected.

Radio Sandaig

Our most ambitious project yet. Interviews with children and teachers, News from the school and our Holland trip, ending with a suprise musical item.

Lucy and megan from primary six carried out the bulk of the work, supplimented by News from Emma B and Darren, some Holland reports from various primary sixes and a musical item from primary seven.

We are begining to get the idea with podcasting I think, just need a bit of practice with the software to get the sound quality right. I’ve not really spent much time with audacity, which we use to edit the sound files, so I can’t teach more than the basics.

We have been learning as we go along.

The Children have done most of the scripting, recording and editing, I’ve been trying to keep in the background.

I am not sure if this is the best way to go about it, it might be better to have a more hands on approach. Hopefully next session we can expand the program a bit to include a regular programme and include more children.

This year we blogged our trip: Netherlands 2005

The response from parents has been tremendous, over 60 comments in a week.

The tech and work flow was far from ideal, but well worth the effort.

Workflow went like this, each day we took a bunch of photos. On the bus the children wrote notes in their diaries and I created galleries of the pictures on a laptop. I then typed up some of the notes.

Back at the hotel I took the words and web pages on a pen drive to the manager’s computer, uploaded the galleries and used the types notes to paste into the blog along with links to the photos.

A bit frantic as there was little time to work online.

We had also hoped to podcast but I had really overestimated the time available and underestimated the time needed.

Just before we went to Holland, (see the next entry) we tried to have a video conference with some children from De Rank. The were going to be the the Hague with various important people present.

Primary Six practised hard all week. We were trying to get round the language/accent problems by having our presentation simple with a fair bit of artwork and slides on the white board. Our presentation was on our plans for the Holland trip.

Unfortunately after half a dozen rehearsals, the connection did not work.

This is probably the biggest drawback of technology.

Having said that, I suppose the children are getting better and better with presenting, great improvements in use of voice and audience awareness.

This is a test of the enclosure facility in pivot. If it works we can hopefully podcast next week.