Tag: blogging

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I’ve been aware of Radiowaves for a long time, it was one of the inspirations for Radio Sandaig and started me podcasting. I have not followed the development of the site with a great deal of attention but have been aware that it has been evolving in interesting ways. This is what they say about themselves:

Radiowaves is the social learning environment that provides social media for education. It enables schools to create and safely share videos, podcasts and blogs. With a free Radiowaves website you can easily start school blogging, join national campaigns and develop digital literacy skills.
…
Over 50,000 pupils use Radiowaves regularly to broadcast their school podcasts and videos to friends and family via the safe social network.

I’ve also met Mark Riches CEO at Radiowaves (and founding director of NUMU which looks interesting too) a few times over the years and he talked about RadioWaves on EDUtalk at BETT. At that point he told me that they were working on an iOS app and I asked him to let me know when it came out. On Friday he did. I am really impressed with this free app.

I’ve not really got my head round the Radiowaves site, its features and how teacher and pupils sites work together, but I love the app and though it worth posting some information about it.

You can get a free account at Radiowaves, this allows unlimited blogging for a school but you are limited to 30 minutes of audio and video. I created a free account to test this app. I didn’t read any of the help or explanations either in the app or online, just clicked around.

Makewaves

Makewaves 1

The app is called Makewaves (iTunes link) and is free. It runs on an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad. On the ipad it runs as an iphone sized app but can be used at 2x size to fill the screen.

I really like the look and feel of this application. Simple and straightforward.A lot of recent apps that I’ve downloaded seem to be simpler and cleaner looking, less 3d drop shadows and gradients, more space and less colour.

The app is split into 5 main sections accessed through the toolbar along the bottom:MakeWaves, Buzz, Post, My Stuff and Settings.

The MakeWaves screens shows three streams of posts from the site, primary, secondary and Things to Do. Clicking on thumbnails lets you access the content on the app.

The section I was really interested in was the Post one, but before I went there I need to visit the Settings and add my account details, this was straightforward although I didn’t notice the setting for default item which was story rather than blog. I am still not too sure of the difference between the two.

Makewaves 2

As soon as I saw the Post screen I liked it. 4 simple buttons at the top to upload media, Pictures from the camera roll, video, audio and the camera. The video button lets you choose from the camera roll or take a new video.

In seconds I had taken screenshot, used the Photo button to choose it, written a line of text and posted it.

I followed by testing the audio button, the app lets you record a sound and upload it, again a very straightforward process.

I then tested Video, and used an iPad and iPod Touch as well. All preformed beautifully.

Later on I used 3g to post a short audio file from outside. It worked a treat, uploading quickly.

An interesting feature of the app and radiowaves generally is the teacher approval. I was acting, I think, as both teacher and pupil so had to approve my own posts. The process is pretty simple on the radiowaves site and there is a in app purchase (£1.49) that lets you approve your pupils on the Buzz screen.

The My Stuff screen gives you a view of your stories and blogs, lets yuo know the ones that are still awaiting approval and the work of others in your station. You can also see if anyone liked your work.

The setting screen is straightforward, the place you can log in, easy too to log out and allow the same device to be used by more than one pupil.

I am extremely impressed with this app. It is the first one I have seen that allows posting of images, video and sound. (When I saw the posterous app I immediately put in a feature request for audio recording).

The application, when used on an iphone or ipod touch, is not built for long form blogging, but it is ideal for the much more interesting, in my opinion, mobile and group publishing of rich media. This is done in a way that minimises the technical barriers allowing users to concentrate on digital storytelling.

This could be an amazing tool for trip blogging. It should even be possible to have, say, several ipod touch out on a trip using one iphone’s tethering to allow mobile blogging by a group.

Finally having struggled and mostly failed to find a simple mobile blogging method for glow blogs it would be great to have a similar app in he new glow.

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As usual at this time of year I’ve been looking back over the posts. In the past I’ve tried to summarise a few, but this year I though I’d take a different view.

Posts Per Month

Posts per month

In May I started posting interesting finds via one of my posterous blogs, these are shown in yellow. My posting to my main posterous blog (archive.org) has decreased this year and turned into a stream of iphone photo walks, but I’ve been posting a lot more to enviable stuff (archive.org) which in turn gets auto posted here, these posts haven’t garnered many comments but they get the odd retweet and as I enjoy posting them I am assuming they are worth doing;-)

Comments are down I think, this has never been a blog with lots of comments but except for the odd post not much discussion has taken place this year. I don’t really write for comments, a lot of posts here probably drop between stools (eg code to weird for educators and to poor quality for developers) and have a very small interest group

Titles

Titles 440

Putting eduscotict and glow together would probably make my two main interests in the year glow(and its development) and edutalk. I was interested to see that update stands out.

Tags

Tags 440

The tags point to a obsession with iOS devices this year. I’d bet most of the video tag will be on iphone posts.

The stand out tag is community which reflect the stand out tile words, eduscotict and edutalk. The second biggest tag in this blogs history, classroom is dropping back as is my most frequent tag blogging.

ds106 is starting to rear its head, I expect it will grow as I learn next year joining in the digital story telling class.

I hope eduscotict will be growing a bit next session as glow develops into its next stage, I hope too that my posts about glow can move from critical friend to fan;-)

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Last week at work (North Lanarkshire Educational ICT & Technical Services) we were being supported by Oggy East of Semantise, who is helping update the setup of our school websites. Oggy is an expert in FirstClass which NLC uses for emails, collaboration & school websites.

My colleague Ian suggested that Oggy entertain me with his interesting career path. This passed through doctoral study, pub management and educational technology.

At one point Oggy started telling me about an educational project he had worked on. This involved collaboration between pupils in the UK and France. They used text based chat to talk (alternating languages), translated each others horoscopes, passed audio and video files back and forth helped each other produce CVs and more. As I was becoming more and more excited about the project Ian suggested that Oggy tell me when this happened: 1998.

Edutalking

I got Oggy to record a quick podcast about this project for EDUtalk which you can listen to: Dialogue 2000 Electronic Village

Oggy is also involved in the wonderful Not School 1. I got a podcast out of Oggy about this too: Not School – EDUtalk.

Repeating

The fact that Oggy was successfully involved in the kind of project that is still seen as innovative 14 years later is telling. I remember in 2005 feeling very proud of jumping of the blog wagon with my class the previous year and meeting Peter Ford who had pupils blogging several years before that. We had a flowering of blogging in Scotland in 2006 and this year pupil blogging has been hitting the headlines again.

What is interesting is that quite often these bit of innovation don’t seem to be connected, wheels are reinvented.

I wonder when ideas of audience, purpose, collaboration and connection using technology will really become part of the mainstream. Perhaps Glow, with all is faults, is driving this in Scotland. I certainly hope so.

1.I became aware of not school when I went to Be Very Afraid and was very impressed by the Flash skills of the a Not School ‘student’. ↩

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Blogsy is a new iPad blog editor that has a lot of useful features. It allow you to blog photos from Flickr and a couple of other photo sites, video from YouTube and also to load a webpage and drag images into the post.

You type in a code view:

And then swipe to a preview combined with some text formatting and the drag and drop interface. You swipe again to go back to the code view. The text formatting works in both views.

You can also use the built in browser to add links to as well as photos from other sites.

A wee problem is that the app doesn’t upload photos to your blog but hotlinks the ones dragged in. This might give problems if the image is removed and also does not attribute the images in any way.

Blogsy works with wordpress.com, self hosted wordpress blogs and blogger ones. I could not get it to work with my pivot blog although pivot supports the MetaWeblogAPI. 

I am going to try to post this to a wordpress and blogger blogs using the settings (a couple of test blogs). I got an error trying to post to blogger. Since the HTML links to images and is nice & clean I’ll post it to My World Wide Wall Display blog by copying the HTML and pasting into Safari. Pivot’s mobile interface is nice

. 

If Glow blogs get the metaweblogAPI sorted out this could be a useful app for class blogging in Scotland.

Update: pasting works in a glow blog too, but the wordpress backend is not optimised for mobile (at least in the glow version) as pivot is.

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For historical reasons and to give myself some sort of illusion of control I tend to write blog posts in html. I use TextMate and its blogging bundle which does all sorts of nice things to simplify the process: for example dragging an image onto TextMate’s window, uploads the image to the blog and inserts the html code to put it in the post. What is even nicer is that you can drag images from ImageWell after a quick resize or edit without saving it.

I also use SafariStand which added copy html tag to the contextual menu when right clicking on a link and to Safari’s toolbar:

Copyhtmltag

I also save the TextMate files to my dropbox so that I can edit the posts on different boxes.

On the iPad

I am not hoping for the power of TextMate for editing html but wanted to do some blogging from an iPad. I’ve managed ok using the Notes app, and using dragon dictation to ‘write text’ but hadn’t found a solution to some other features. After a bit of testing I’ve now got a fairly useful toolkit.

Dropbox integration, html editing: Textastic allows you to open and save to dropbox, does syntax highlighting and to easily type various characters that are normally buried in the iOS keyboard.

Textastickeys

Images, there is not a way to upload images to the blog that fits in with html editing, but it is easy to upload images with the flickr app to flickr. Unfortunately neither the Flickr App or the mobile version of Flickr do not provide the html code. however toy can switch to the full site which works fine on the ipad. This can be pasted into Textastic. That makes posting images simple if a little long winded: Screenshot, edit in an app, save to camera roll. Open flickr app and upload, open Safari and grab html code, switch to Texttastic and paste.

Getting links, was the last piece of the jigsaw, as well as grabbing html link tags from Safari Stand or CoLT in FireFox, in TextMate you can select some text and press command-control-shift-L and TextMate will use google to provide a link, not always the right one but very useful. Getting links on the iPad was a bit tedious, switching between Safari and Textastic and typing the code, pasting in the url. I did a bit of a google and came up with nothing. I’ve now come up with a simple, if crude, system. I’ve created a bookmarklet that adds a bit onto the top of a webpage with a text box in it, the textbox contains the html tag to link to the page:

Linkhtml

The bookmarklet link has the following code:

javascript: (function(){document.body.appendChild(document.createElement('script') ).src='http://www.littlefishsw.co.uk/link.js';})();

I added the bookmarklet to Safari on my desktop which syncs with my iPad. The bookmarklet uses this JavaScript File, if you care about JavaScript I would not look at it;-) I just kept changing things till it worked for me. I can now add a link to Textastic by switching to safari, loading the page and clicking the linkHTML link on Safari’s toolbar. The switch back to Textastic and paste. As I mention the code is not exactly slick, I couldn’t get mobile Safari to pre select the link (it works in a desktop browser) which would save a couple of clicks but it does work well enough to use if I want to blog but only have an iPad.

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iPad stand by tim_d
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License

I was pretty impressed with the iPad 2 which was launched this week. Some nice new features and the speed bumps especially in JavaScript sound good.

I’ve continued to test an iPad and this week I spent a wee bit of time using it to access glow. I’ve talked to a few pupils who access glow at home using an ipod touch, and have occasionally used my iPhone, but find it a bit of a strain on the eyes (The pupils I’ve talked to don’t seem to have the same problem).

On an iPad Glow works pretty well. The iPads limitation on now allowing file (picture) uploads in the browser is a bit of a draw back but a lot of the other feature are fine. Editing webparts works as well as it does on Safari on a mac. The text editor continues to frustrate me but I am resigned to avoiding it use by now.

I successfully posted to my glow blog: iPad Glow blogging without trouble. Again I could not upload photos, but it is easy to workaround using flickr, I used my flickr CC search toy which did the job and sorted the attribution.

The WYSIWYG editor did not work, but I was please to see that the html editor respected line breaks, adding paragraphs. typing <p> with an iPad is a bit slow.

I also tried using the iPad to edit a wiki page. Again WYSIWYG was turned off and this time there was no auto paragraphing. Again I could paste in the embed code for a flickr photo. The font size was a wee bit small for me, but would be fine for most youngsters.

What it would be nice to see would be support for the MetaWeblog API in glow blogs, this would allow the use of various apps to post to a glow blog. I guess it is hard to enable this due to the way glow accounts are matched to wordpress ones through shibboleth, if RM can manage this it would be make glow blogs a powerful tool for mobile learning.

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Republished due to a wee bit of bother with the backend of my blog.

At the weekend Robert added a new feature to ScotsEduBlogs: ScotEduBlogs Professional

ScotsEduBlogs exists to help educational bloggers across Scotland to find each other and to talk to each other.

It has been created by members of the blogging community, and is kept up-to-date by its users (that means you!), who can add blogs and tag blogs.

It also allows anyone to keep up with what is being said across all Scottish educational blogs at a glance.

You alway could subscribe to a set of blogs via ScotsEduBlogs RSS feature, for example ScotEduBlogs tagged glowscotland or physics but these are RSS feeds. Now there is a page for professional blog posts, separate from class, pupil or teaching blogs. This could be used for cpd or just to keep an eye on other teacher/consultant/whatever blogs. If you visit SEB less frequently you will be able to see the ‘professional’ posts less chance of them being buried by class blog posts.

Recently with twitter coming to the fore as a way of keeping up with online community there have been new Scots Educational bloggers who have not added their blog to SEB now might be a good time to do so. If you do and you consider yourself an educational professional be sure to tag your blog Professional.

Sebbloglisting

Glow Blogs

There has been an influx of new blogs since glow has added blogging to its toolset. Unfortunately the glow blogs rss feeds do not play nicely with ScotEdublogs. They don’t play with glows own xml web part either.

There is a workaround, if you use FeedBurner to republish your RSS feed you can use that feed in ScotEdublogs. Feedburner is a google service now, you need to have a gmail account. You visit Feedburner sign in and fill in your RSS feed address.

Feedburner 1

Your RSS url will be the url of your blog with /feed tacked on the end, for example my test glow blog’s url is:

https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/nl/JohnJohnston/

So its RSS feed is

https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/nl/JohnJohnston/feed/

After I put it into Feedburner I get a feedburner URL for the feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/org/NCnY

This last I can use to add my Blog to ScotEduBlogs:

add_a_blog

If you are a ScotsEduBlogger please think about adding your blog to ScotsEduBlogs and remember to tag it Professional if that cap fits.

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This post is the third in an attempted series about getting started blogging loosely linked to the launch of glow blogs.

Conversation by Rishi Menon
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

I’e always considered blogging to be 3 pronged activity, providing purpose, gaining an audience and starting a conversation. All of these factors can motivate pupils. Blogging can be seen as a ‘real’ activity, writing for a world outside the classroom. It has a real audience who may start a conversation through comments.

Back in the day when I first started blogging at Sandaig there was not a lot of other classroom blogging going on, none at all in Scotland. This gave my class a bit of an advantage in gaining comments and we picked up a few folk who my class felt they had a relationship to. ‘Andy from Aberdeen’ who regularly added a good number of comments to our new blog and after a while Carol Fuller who became our fairy blogmother!

Comments added a lot to our blogging and podcasting in those days. Now with blogs popping up all over the place, the landscape has changed a bit. One one hand there is a bigger potential audience than before but that audience has more choice.

For a teacher who is already active online gaining an audience is not to difficult, they can publish links and requests for comments on their own blog or through twitter. If you get picked up by the right folk you can gather a lot of comments, i recently and responded to a twitter request for comments on a pupil blog as did many others, in a couple of days the pupils 68 word post had 45 comments!

A lot of the new blogs that are popping up now are not necessarily being run by teachers who have spent a lot of time in creating an online network so how do they get comments for their class? I’d suggest a few basic ideas:

  • In the process of explaining blogs to the class visit other blogs and as a class make comments.
  • Once your class are blogging confidently have them individually comment on other blogs.
  • As a teacher visit a couple of class blogs every week, leave a comment or two. Think of this as a sort of cross marking exercise.
  • As a class visit a particular blog regularly, find one that ‘fits’ in with your class and perhaps some sort of regular commenting will build up.
  • If something on another blog stimulates your pupils curiosity , ask questions, try out the activity, blog about it( example).
  • Respond to comments on your own blog. Often this will provide a useful learning activity and some fun.
  • Get in touch with another blogging teacher, do some lightly joined up planning.

In all of this commenting activity leave the url to your blogs in the URL field of the comment form. Teach the children to copy and paste this rather than typing it in, it is easy to make a typo, or put a semi colon instead of a colon and break the link.

Don’t assume that because children find the technology simple that they will write good comments, in the same way as with blog posts, they need advice and modelling. Some teachers might like to provide rules or a check list:

  1. Is the comment relevant? is it worth saying? (just cool is probably not).
  2. Is it generally positive & friendly? I suggest 2 stars and a wish for classmates work.
  3. Would you like a comment like this?
  4. Is the spelling and punctuation a good reflection on the commenter?

Anne Davis provides some comment starters: EduBlog Insights » Blog Archive » Thinking about the teaching of writing which are well worth sharing with pupils, I think I used to have them displayed on the wall.

If you are looking for somewhere to find blogs ScotEduBlogs aggregates blogs from across Scotland.
Glow blog list can be found for each local authority, for example the url for North Lanarkshire is: https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/nl/ each of the other LAs has its own initials at the end of the url (full list).
Further Afield Tom Barrett has be collecting primary class blogs on delicious which provides a great list.

If you know of other ways to encourage commenting you could leave me a comment;-)

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This post is the second in an attempted series about getting started blogging loosely linked to the launch of glow blogs.

Have you see this:

This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress.

Portrait Of The Unknown Saxophonist by an untrained eye
Attribution-NonCommercial License

anywhere recently?

The above quote gets me 751,000 hits on google if I search for it. Why? Because it is the out of the box About Page on a wordpress blog.

Most education blogs I know are wordpress ones, and a fair number of them have never edited their About page. I don’t think this need to be seen as self promotion, just politeness to your reader. When I see a link to a blog post and end up on a blog I’ve not visited before the chances are that I’ll be interested in who is writing it and something about them. I click on the About link.

Schools blogs too, I want to know the sector, who the authors are, age & stage and where in the world the schools is.

We are expecting a new batch of educational bloggers in Scotland this session as blogging become simple to set up via glow I am hoping that these new bloggers will add themselves to ScotEduBlogs and I’ll be able to read them and to find out a little about the writers.

As an aside, I’ve twitter set to send me a mail when I get a new follower, often these are folk who have not tweeted much, if I can tell from their tweets and they do not have a description or a link on their twitter page I often don’t follow back.

My own About John page may not be very interesting or even spelt correctly, but it is there.