Tag: blogging

Posted on
by

Bogle

I am just back from a weeks holiday. While I was away I had just about no connectivity. I had packed my laptop and iphone, but there was not internet access I could find and I had to walk about a mile to a nearby cliff top to get a mobile signal!

I gave up on following RSS, twitter and getting email and left the laptop shut. I did do a bit of photo blogging from my phone to my posterous account, and this worked very well.

The new iphone software allows you to mail up to 5 photos instead of just one, posterous makes pretty galleries of sets of photos. The mail app on the iphone allows you to create mails and then will send them later whenever you get a signal, this turns out to be a great feature in comparison with other iphone blogging applications.

The results are on John’s posterous, photos from my camera rather than iPhone were uploaded to flickr when I got back.

Posted on
by

I’ve not posted here for a bit longer than usual. I am not sure why as I’ve got a few posts running round my head at the moment. I did have some time this week but that was eaten up by sorting out a few backend things on this blog. Last weekend I updated the blog to PivotX – 2.0.0: beta 12j and I must have made a mistake or two. In the new version of pivot some thing have changed (Upgrading from previous beta releases). By the middle of the week I had noticed a few funny things going on, individual posts were giving 404 errors. I tried uploading the files again but due to the careless way I had originally installed pivot I had to be careful not to over write my templates. I them made things even worse. To cut a long story short I uploaded a clean version of pivot, and move my data across then deleted the old directory. Hence the change of theme.

I suspect that the root of the problem stems from the way I move the blog to here from the Sandaig Primary site.

I could probably footer around and put the old theme back in place but as I had never really finished that one I was not too sad to see it go. At the moment I am using the bare bones theme which is designed to be customised.

Flatfiles

One of the main reasons I use Pivot (which is now officially pivotX) is the fact you can easily customise the theme of you know a little html. The original reason I picked it was it was the only blog I could find that used flat files rather than a database. PivotX now gives you the choice to use MySQL if you want. At the moment I am sticking with flat files.

I also quite like the barebones theme, I’ve always like fixed width or maximum width webpages but flexible is beginning to grow on me.

I guess I’ll tweek away at the template and css, but I now have a much cleaner starting point to start from.

Another thing that seems to be fixed by the clean install is the MetaWeblog API which I had managed to break in the move here so I am now back to blogging with TextMate which I am delighted about (or will be if this post works when I hit ?-?-p).

All I need now is a bit of time to tweek and some more to actually blog, for today this will depend on the weather.

Blogged from tm

Posted on
by

sandaig home

This post consists of some notes and information to go along with a short chat I will be having with folk at the North Lanarkshire business meeting in Modern Languages at the invite of Robert Dalzell QIO International Education.

Disclaimer, a quick scan of this blog will prove that I’ve not mastered my first language never mind a second. I have no real knowledge of MFL except that I read quite a few MLF blogs and I have talked to MFL teachers before.
Not much of this post is specfic to MFL but hopefully the examples I give on the day will be of practical use to the audience.

Why Blogs?:

  • Easy low bar technology:
    If you can type you can blog. Recent blogging systems deal with text, and multi-media is a very simple and straightforward way. Low cost or free. Modern blogs handle media and organisation automatically in ways that used to be open only to skilled web developers.
  • Community & audience:
    There is already a widespread network of educational blogging you can join. For pupils blogging can make learning real and purposeful.
  • Dissemination & Aggregation:
    Through RSS (really simple syndication) it is easy to keep up with a large number of blogs and easy for your blog to be widely read.

Further reading on OpenSourceCPD:

Ways to use blogs in education::

  • CPD
    Blogging has become a powerful tool for professional development for many teachers and educators worldwide. By reading blogs you can keep up with some of the latest ideas in education and join in discussions of these ideas.
    I’ve put together some ideas about this at OpenSourceCPD- Reading Blogs as CPD and there are some links to mfl teachers blogs below.
  • Teacher to Pupil:
    Teachers can publish homework, revision, extra material. This can be text, files such as pdfs, audio (podcasting) or video.
  • Pupil Publishing:
    (This is my favourite bit) A static website involves a fair bit of work and distances children from the publishing process. Weblogs allow children to become more directly involved in the publishing process without delving into time consuming html skills.
    Allow children to ‘write the web’ as opposed to reading it.

    It is another wall display

    To give the children a wider (one of the widest) audience for some of their work, increase their sense of ownership and responsibility of their work and gain feedback and co-operation from others. Working in small groups on a shared text/media encourages peer feedback and co-operation.

    Hopefully it should inform parents and even allow children to understand aspects of class life. Scanning down the blog show a surprisingly wide variety of activities recently covered.

    For many children working on the computer still has motivational value and this is surely increased by the fact that we are publishing for the world.

    Many types of media; images, comics, audio, video, animation can be used by pupils as well as text. Starting Blogging in the Classroom

Further Reading:
Blogs tagged MFL on ScotEduBlogs:


LTS: MFLE – Information, support, ideas and resources for modern languages teaching

Posted on
by

When I heard I was going to be working in north Lanarkshire one of the first things I did was to check ScotEduBlog’s list of blogs to see if there was much blogging activity going on, I found one: Our Lady’s High School.

in the few months I’ve been there I’ve heard of many more, but the other week I overheard my colleague Ian unblocking a blog, this turns out to be Mr Mallon’s Video and audio media part of Mr Mallon’s Physics Site which has a great url http://helpmyphysics.co.uk/. The site contains a pile of resources for physics and science including a podcast and video recordings by pupils. I has a listen to a podcast and pinged a mail to David Noble for the Podcast Directory his review says:

Very professional production from this North Lanarkshire teacher. Mr Mallon mixes a range of topics and approaches with humour and educational songs. Links to fun and helpful resources to enhance learning are provided.

I discovered a few more blogs this week when Robert Dalzell a North Lanarkshire QIO mailed me to ask if I’d have a word at the Modern Languages business meeting about blogs and blogging. He already has an example blog up and pointed me to euroblog from Coltness and Modern Languages @ Dalziel. I’ll be looking forward to getting into my comfort zone (not the mfl bit obviously) and talking about blogs.

If there are any other North Lanarkshire blogs out there please let me know.

Posted on
by



Wu wei – No action
Originally uploaded by ????

I’ve been a fan of posterous since it started and have been amazed how the service has added features as quickly as they have been suggested. A couple of days ago the announced public group sites with post by moderation. This allow you to open up a blog to posts by anyone, but you get to moderate the posts.

I imagine you could use a group posterous for a inter school poetry blog (for example) between schools allowing children to concentrate on their writing and the evaluation of their partners.
Or a a zero setup class blog if your pupils have separate email addresses.

Posterous of course is blogging by email, with zero setup. Posterous takes just about any sort of media and deals with it in a sensible way. Posterous also sends you posts to other places (twitter, flickr, blogs etc) automatically if you want.

Garry Tan one of posterous’ cofounders had set up a public blog Posterous Recipes for Recipes and I though I’d give it a spin. All I needed to do was to drag a couple of photos from iPhoto onto the mail icon on my Mac’s dock, up popped a mail window with the photos attached, I put in the address post@recipes.posterous.com and clicked send, it was that simple. No resizing of photos, posterous presents them beautifully without out me having to think about them.

Posting my recipe, Posterous recognised my email and linked my recipe to my own posterous. And as I posted to post@ rather than posterous@ it picked up my settings and tweeted for me and posted the photos to flickr too!

Although the main way of accessing Posterous is via email, the web interface if beautiful for example, commenting in posterous is a very sweet, no opening the post in a new window, just an ajax reveal of the comment box: simple and clean without confusion.

The guys at posterous are incredibly responsive, I’ve mailed and tweeted them a few time and always had replies within hours, give the time difference this is really impressive. They are improving posterous almost all of the time; on one occasion in response to a blog post elsewhere, taking suggestions, acting on them and reporting all in the comments!

The fact posterous deals with blogging sorts of media without the user having to think. This echoes a Chinese philosophical phrase act without doing; ? ? ?; wei wu wei (wei wu wei: “action without action” or “effortless doing”).

This reminds me of When the technology gets boring, then things get interesting socially, a quote I saw in a comment on Ewan‘s blog, originally from Clay Shirky. Elsewhere (I think) Ewan talked about email as an example of this. With posterous you can use email, a tech you can use without thought, so that you can concentrate on what you are posting, the teach not the tech (Ewan again). Or for pupils the learning not the ict skills.

Last week I had some Glow training, I am starting to get quite excited about the possibilities of pupils using Glow. The potential is there, but the tech needs to become less obvious. Posting video to glow involves using a browser, then an ftp client, and then back to a browser. Coincidentally the previous night I was testing a flip video camera and popped the result onto posterous by simply dragging the file onto my mail app, filling in the to address and hitting send.

The Flip camera and posterous are both effortless technology, in education both could help by lowering the bar so that learners can concentrate on the learning and not get caught up in the tech. Glow has incredible ambition and potential I hope it becomes an effortless tool in the same way posterous and the flip camera are.

Posted on
by

I’ve been thinking of how I’ve used digital camera in class over the last few years. I know this is not a very ‘new’ topic for a post but I think my experience and thoughts are worth noting. I blogged about the use of cameras as part of activities countless times but I want to work out of a sort of practical overview here.

When I started blogging with my class at Sandaig, I was assuming that quite a lot of our visitors would be on dialup and kept photographs on the blog to a minimum. A year later we were adding photos but keeping the size down. At that stage I was often taking the photos and certainly helping loading them onto the computer. Another year on (2006) we had settled for 400 pixels as a good with from the blogs and all of the posts had at least one photo, the children were using MS photo editor to resize the photos.

By the time I left Sandaig I had the children taking photos every day for different purposes.

I know that this is still relatively unusual, in many classrooms it is the teacher, or PSA who takes photos or children use cameras under tight supervision. I think we need to relax that.

First you need a purpose for taking photos, I had a rota of class bloggers, even if they never finished their posts they usually took photos and transferred them to a pc.
We also had a photo a day section on the website How does our Garden go a simple image gallery, were a different pupil would take a photo in our garden each day, rain or shine, of anything they liked (within reason). This activity linked to our eco schools efforts, but its main purpose was to give the children practise in taking photos so that they should then use them in other areas without thinking about the practicalities.

By linking the activity to public display on the school website you immediately have an excuse to talk about appropriate images and responsibility. Children of course want to take ‘silly’ photos of their friends grinning and fooling around, discussing why we would not use these when reporting on a class activity cuts down on time wasting pretty quickly.

The only time it is worth a member of staff taking photos is when the children all want, or the teacher wants them, actively engaged. In these cases the photos can become part of a follow up activity.

Once you have your photos they can be used in many ways. These ares some I’ve used.

  • In a one computer classroom photos of events or activities can be printed as part of a template for children to write reports on. you can do this on the fly as groups of children finish a practical activity.
  • As a stimulus for writing, a slideshow of images, promotes discussion and can be run during the actual writing. If the writing is word-processed photos can be added.
  • For blogging, as part of a post, writing of any type, or as a slideshow made with various online tools (oneTrueMedia example).
  • For comic-life, a great way to motivate those children reluctant to write, for quick sequencing etc, etc. Examples: Eco Ninjas, 3D Shape.
  • To make ‘movies’ on movieMaker or iMovie (with one computer this can be a class activity, each child dealing with one picture, titling and adding transitions, the whole class discussing sound tracks.) individual examples, whole class example.
  • After an art lesson I often had a pupil take photos of all of the work for a web gallery (example), I think I’d now have each child take their own. These could be used for a portfolio, say in powerpoint with 2 stars and a wish, building up a record of all the art produced in a year. This ould be part of the clean up routine, clean brushes, take photo…
  • As a quick and dirty scanner, taking photos of drawn work to incorporate into a report, not necessarily the cleanest looking pictures, but effective: for example.

All of these are pretty simple ideas and the list could easily be extended. What, I think, makes the difference is the attempt to make use of the cameras an everyday activity, owned by the pupils, and familiar enough so that they use technology transparently. Using the images in blogs and wikis etc gives the task an audience and makes it real and purposeful.

Posted on
by

One of the things I am missing about not being in the classroom at Sandaig is the day to day updating of what feels like my baby, the Sandaig Primary Website and it associated galleries and blogs. I was a wee bit concerned that the blogs would grind to a halt, but it looks like I need not have worried. One of the Staff, Mrs Wright, has developed an interest in iMovie and starting with video of her own primary 2 class has organised some primary sevens to film various school events for the blog. The primary sevens have been blogging their class work and some weird pictures. On the train yesterday I was delighted to see a note on the otters blog pointing to some WWII Cinquains on the poetry blog (you might like to have a look and leave an encouraging comment).

Mrs Crum, a PSA ,has taken over the Pictures from Sandaig gallery and seems to be adding content much faster than I ever did, she also provides support for ICT round the school and oversees the blogs. Martain the peripatetic music teacher has been keeping the Sandaig Jukebox up and running with new GarageBand creations from the children. I wonder if by being, in the words of Ian Stuart, ‘just the man’ I held back the spread of the use of the site at Sandaig to other members of staff?

It is quite strange watching this happen, a bit like seeing my daughter leave home for University. Like Christine it looks like blogging at Sandaig and doing very well without me. I am still paying attention but obviously am not necessary to progress.

Posted on
by

I’ve been quite interested in finding out how my iPhone could be used in teaching and learning. last week I and my class making GPS MathTracks inspired by the LearningTracks flickr group and Tom, Andrew and David‘s ideas about Art tracks and spelling with a trackstick. I also read Ollie’s post about Geography Fieldwork with the iPhone.

What I did

Yesterday I was going for a walk and tried out a few ideas with the phone. This is not of course the same as using it with a class but gave me some food for thoughts.

The first thing that I did was record the point of the walk with SnailTrail with which is is simple to collect points and mail them out of the phone. these can be put into a kml template to create a kml file that you can view in google earth or upload and show in google maps. The google map example here show that one or two points went astray. It is easy enough to review these in google earth and remove them. (edit example).

I took a series of photos with the iPhone, these were uploaded to flickr today and automatically placed on the map: Glengoyne to Earl’s Seat set on the map this is a pretty straightforward was of getting the photos onto the map. You could also use the flickr description to add text, the note facility etc as well as discuss the pictures with the comments.

Next I took the photos got the location from the Exif data in the files, I used this to create a kml file and combined that with the snail trail. I also added the time taken and an occasional title to the kml file. I am not sure of the best way of doing this, I made a wee supercard project to script most of this.

Which produces this kml file and looks like this in google maps

The project is pretty rough at the moment and I am sure there are applications out there for doing this, but I wanted to learn a little more about kml files. This sort of thing could be a way of displaying findings for a trip or outdoor activity.

I tweeted occasionally while walking, this produces a list of tweets on Twitter Search as I was using twitterific it was easy to add locations and photos to the tweets, I guess the RSS feed could be parsed to show the pictures and locations or mini maps.

I also added a few notes with YouNote, this application lets you take photos, write notes, record audio and even sketch with a finger. Which would cover most of what you would need on a field trip or excursion. Future editions will let you email notes to get them out of the phone. At the moment you can sync or backup your notes via a desktop application. This results in a zip file on your computer, inside are folders for each note containing multi-media material and xml files with descriptions this information includes geo locations. I suppose that a script could be written to combine this media and xml to create a web page/ map / kml file.

I feel younote is approaching what I would like to see in an iPhone application, if it was combined with a blogging facility or export to a webpage with media it would be ideal.

So what I would like to see would be a combination of the thinks I’ve tried that saved and exported in a usable format. I’ve looked at a few of the blogging application but not found one that does what I want yet.

What I want

My idea application would allow the recording and combining of information in many forms, text, photos and audio recording. It would automatically add location and date and time information. These could be published to a blog and geo rss feed, either on the go, or at a later time if connection to the network is poor. It would be match with a desktop publishing application, this would get the data and media from the phone and allow additions, editing and mashing up, it would output in a multitude of formats.

I’d also like some additions to the iPhone itself:

  • Copy and paste
  • A camera that can take close ups: I often take photos of flora, fauna, fungi and bones I’d like to take close ups, it might be worth testing putting a magnifying glass in front trick.
  • Video
  • Temperature recording
  • A compass on the Map application
What I’d use it for

The obvious thing is geography, but I would be more likely to use it for art and maths tracks as mentioned above. It could also be used to record any outing, not one that covers space on a map. I’d love to do a poetry or painting walk, where a class would record reactions to surroundings, typing would probably be limited to haiku(ideal for snapshot poems), but longer ones could be recorded. A class trip to the beach could spark drawing, writing and photos to produce an online gallery.

In the huge number of iPhone apps now available my ideal application may exist, if it does let me know.

Posted on
by

I am moving from John @ Sandaig to John’s World Wide Wall Display. The RSS Feed url will stay the same.

I’ve been blogging at Sandaig since February 2005 and worked at Sandaig for over 15 years. I’ve had a wonderful time working there but am now moving on to take up a post as an ICT development officer with North Lanarkshire Education. At Sandaig I had an amazing opportunity to playfully experiment with emerging technologies. As you can imagine such and enabling and supportive environment is hard to leave, not to mention the feeling of leaving a class mid session. I am not sure what the future will bring but I hope to continue blogging about education and technology from a slightly different perspective.

I hope that the children at Sandaig will continue to blog about their learning and fun and I’ll still be trying to support that effort remotely if I can.

I could have continued to host my blog with Sandaig but feel that might lead to some confusion.

I am not sure how this move will work out from a technical angle, I’ll leave the old content were it was and I’ve copied it over to the new place. I’ve replace the comment box at Sandaig with an explanation. The RSS feed now points to the new blog.

If you are kind enough to link to me I’d appreciate it if you updated your links.
In a week or so I’ll replace the blog page at Sandaig with a redirect of some sort.

Posted on
by

 
the sevens
I’ve got the the end of a quick first week back at school. The first time in a couple of years I’ve had a class to myself, year before last I was doing ICT and last year involved a lot of learning support and team teaching. I am also back in Primary Seven.

A shock to the system as all my mushroom boxes have vanished and I need a quick trip to Pound Land.

I am beginning to get the classroom they way I want, I have a projector and a big bit of white paper on the wall along with a gyro mouse and wireless keyboard. A networked xp laptop and non-networked mac mini are positioned beside the projector so that I can easily switch back and forth between platforms. So far I am missing the ability to draw quickly on the board but enjoying the shadow free screen.

The children have used ICT in the previous year a fair bit, mostly research, word-processing and powerpoint and I worked with them on the wiki for a Sound & Light project.

I always like the first week or two of term and other times when the timetable and curriculum is not so fixed in stone and decided to get the children introduced to online tools, cameras blogging etc.

We got the Photo -a-day How does our Garden go galler off the ground to start with.

Next we started with the Simpsons Movie site making avatars which, I hope, will be used throughout the year as signatures on blogs and wikis. We had to use a horrible amount of kluding to work around the fact that we do not seem to be able to download the files on the school pcs (unblocking popups not withstanding). This become a good exercise in lots of things: print screen, cropping in picture manager and exporting as jpgs, allowing me to harp on about files etc. I had to download the saved images at home to slap together the pic at the top.

The children had more cropping to do to get a nice wee head shot of their avatar too.

We worked on one of my favourite start of session lessons, Bio-Poems, these use a strong template and give the children a lot of fun, this year we blogged these with the Simpson head-shots on the Sandaig Poets blog which give everybody a chance to blog. If you have a minute please leave some one a comment.

Finally, have talked about adjectives and watch a couple of youtube downloads on the subject earlier in the week, we made a quick photo movie about Feelings today giving the children more practise with the cameras and their first use of iMovie, it was also a great way to end the week as non of them though they were working.

Next week we start with a trip to Ayr so fingers crossed for the weather.