Tag: blogging

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.

Posted on
by

Flowgram is a new web-based tool for giving online tours of sets of webpages or photos. I have hasd a quick play (click the widget to see my creation) and it looks like it could be a very useful tool in the classroom.

Once you have signed up and been accepted for the beta flowgram program you can create your own pretty easily. I just watched one of the flowgrams about flogram and tested it without really reading the manual. It is pretty simple to use although I could not get the create tool to load in Safari.

You add pages to a flowgram by adding a url or uploading a photo. Or you could import a flickr set or RSS feed to create a set of pages. Once you have collected your set of pages you can add audio recorded via your browser (flash based) notes and highlight text. I managed to do all without too much bother although it took me a while to get the highlight work. If you scroll a page during recording and then highlight something it will scroll to show the highlight in sync with the audio when playing back. I found that quite tricky to do and if you watch my flowgram above you will notice a few pauses while I scroll and highlight.

The most amazing thing about flowgram is that the pages viewed in flowgram are live the links etc work for the audience. I am not sure how flowgram deals with changes in the webpage perhaps they store local copies.

I think it might be a bit difficult for primary children to use for creating a tour of websites but they could certainly make a slideshow of photos or pictures without too much trouble. For teachers it could be used to give children instructions on using online tools (or for a set of screenshots) or for blogging sites to other teachers for professional development.

Flowgram could be used as an alternate presentation tool, and feels a little like voicethread, although users cannot audio comment. You can make your flowgrams private but I can’t see a way to turn off comments which would sometimes be handy for school use. another one t otest on the nexwork next term.

Posted on
by

posterous is a new blogging tool that takes simple to extremes. To post to posterous you just send an email to post@posterous.com from any email account, the mail is posted and you get a reply. At that point you can set up a posterous page/blog and then everything sent to posterous from the same email (you can add more) will go onto the posterous page. Mine is John’s posterous.

What is really clever is how posterous deals with content.

Text becomes, well text, and image is posted as you would expect, but so is a image url). A series of images are turned into a mimi gallery. Powerpoint is passed over to Scribd and presented on the posterous page with iPaper as are pdfs. If you print a pdf frpm Safari on a mac and mail it to posterous, the pdf is displated via scribd and the links on the page are live (example). Pasting an image, say a screenshot, into your email app puts it on the blog, as does pasting code from kwout: kwout example. I managed to create 10 posts of all sorts without any problems, on a mac you can even Drag and Drop to Posterous via a simple Automator workflow.
Youtube and other video service are embedded as are mp3s.

posterous is just out the wrappers, but the developers really seem on the ball

For education, I am thinking this is a really quick way to create a blog, a series of resources for learners (rss of course), a student portfolio etc. With 1 GB of space you could use it for podcasting much simpler than many other methods.

Posted on
by

I’ve run a couple of short term collaborative poetry blogs this session. The first was part of the The Sandaig McClure Connection: Solutions – A poetry conversation. I played around a bit with the blog template so that comments became part of the poem. Comments were displayed inline and the link to add a comment became ‘add line’. The comment form was simplified by removing the email and url fields. An entry would look like this (slightly reduced):

screenshot

At the time I was reasonably pleased with this solution although the whole page layout started to look a bit odd as the poems began varying in length.

Last week we were working on the On the street where you live – An International Poetry Project I kept the blog in a fairly straightforward shape, except for the addition of the (stars) and (wishes) to the emoticons (that works in most of the Sandaig blogs) to help the children assess each other work. The idea with this blog was that the children would use 2 stars and a wish to offer feedback to the children on the other side of the atlantic. (In the event the US students didn’t get to commenting on our work, which might have been due to communication failures between myself and the us organisers).

The problem with using a traditional blog layout became apparent as the number of posts grew very quickly, pushing poem off the front page (which I increased to 30 poems/posts). With hindsight it might have been better to only have the last poem on the blog front-page with a list of all the poems on the side or scattered around. Or maybe no poems just boxes with titles which would open entries in a lighbox/thickbox style when clicked?

With the increase in the number of primary school blogs I’ve noticed a big drop in the comments on on main blog, perhaps due to that blog becoming routine and neglected to some extent. I’ve also not found the time to get the children reading and commenting on other blogs something else I hope to remedy next session.

So I hope to be doing more of these sort of arranged commenting blogs in the future, where there is a fairly intense burst of activity on the blog over a short period. I think this calls for a different sort of organisation and layout, I am just not sure what yet.

Pivot which we use for blogging here is a lot easier for an amateur to mess about with layout and organisation than some of the more popular blogs, its simple template tags allow you to create templates for posts, pages etc with a wee bit of html and css knowledge.
I’ve not seen any other school blogs that have altered the shape of a blog to suit purpose in this way and I’d be interested in any ideas for making these sort of blogs more accessible, interesting and attractive, if you have ideas and examples please let me know.

Posted on
by

sandaig home

It has been a couple of weeks since my last post and may be a while before the next. This will be a even more unfocused post than usual. I part the last of activity has been down to being to busy and in some cases frustrated with technology. Network problems have slowed down some of the projects I’ve been working on in school and I’ve spend a fair bit of my NCC time fault reporting.

I have been using a couple of wikis with some success. On our own site I’ve been working with a class one afternoon a week on challenged based learning, the latest Instrument Challenge section of the wiki is nearly finished. This is using pmwiki. I am afraid that the method used to post images and sounds is a little too complex for a class I only see once a week. PmWiki requires the children to name the file rather than just upload it, this has lead to one or two cases of files being over written. Other files have been uploaded with out giving them extensions making them unusable. The attach, go back to page, and add image by typing. is more complex that uploading an image to a blog. My own class have been using a wikispaces wiki and one or two have started adding to their pages from home. We have had quite a few problems in school when wikispaces seems to freeze, I’ve not seen this at home but I text to use the text module rather than the wysiwyg. The freeze also might be caused by network slowdown which is also making both wikis sometime frustrating to use.
I am quite pleased with the possibilities of wikis although my heart is still with blogs. Hopefully next session I’ll have a chance to use wikis again, next time I’ll spend a bit more time getting the children familiar with the use before using then in anger.

I’ve not managed to use Exhibit, which I tested in the holidays, the network does not allow something that is going on there. I think I’ve managed to work around it with a wee kludge but it is not ideal. I do hope to let the children test it in a couple of weeks.

bloglogo

The last week or so I’ve been preparing for our trip to the Netherlands. I’ve set up another blog: Sandaig Netherlands 2008 and A moblog of sorts incase we cannot find a internet connection. Hopefully the children will post audio, video, photos and text to report on the trip and talk to their families. We leave on Sunday morning and return the following friday afternoon.

garden logo
I also hope that my own class, most of whom I am leaving at school will keep up some online activity. maybe update the wiki and blog, but I really want them to keep up the How does our Garden Go photo a day project. They have been doing ell so far, posting a photo of our school garden everyday for a couple of weeks. The idea is to document the changes, both seasonal and ecological and practise and think about taking photos.

There have also been new songs on the Sandaig Jukebox, another episode of Radio Sandaig and some Eco Ninjas posters added to the site in the last couple of weeks, no wonder I’ve not had time to blog.

Posted on
by

Seb Header_448

The ScotEduBlogs site is dear to my heart. An opensource effort by teachers in Scotland to aggregate and redistribute the posting by Scottish educational blogger of all shapes, ages and sizes ScotEduBlogs has become an more than every day read for me.

At the Scottish learning Festival side dish TeachMeet07 4th Edition I made a plea for support for ScotEduBlogs. At that time it was being hosted by Jonesieboy, Robert Jones, who was also the main programmer of the site. I was approached during the dinner following Teach Meet by Joe Wilson of the The Scottish Qualifications Authority, who proposed that the SQA and Learning and Teaching Scotland should support ScotEduBlogs. Ewan who is National Adviser: Learning and Technology Futures at LTS was quick to agree.

To cut a long story short; ScotEduBlogs has now moved to its very own server which should lead to (and Robert will correct me if I am wrong) more stability, better updating etc, etc. The SQA and LTS logos now sit prettily on the ScotEduBlogs sidebar.

It might take a few days for ScotEduBlogs to settle into its new home, so if you notice anything strange let us know.

If you are a Scots Educational blogger you can do your bit to support ScotEduBlogs too:

  • Make sure your blog is listed.
  • Make sure the tags on your listing describe your blog.
  • Link from your blog to ScotEduBlogs (there are some images and help on the wiki).
  • You might want to help out by designing a new graphic or in other ways, see the wiki again.

As well as just reading the front page ScotsEduBlogs can be used in lots of other ways:

  • The front page has an rss feed.
  • On the Blogs page you can filter blogs by tags and get a rss feed for your tag or set of tags.
  • You can even follow the ScotEduBlogs tweets on twitter.

See the wiki for more ideas.

As there are more and more ScotEduBloggers ScotEduBlogs will become more and more useful as a learning tool, enabling you to get ideas that you might not pick up through your favourite feeds.

Posted on
by

On Thursday this week I’ll be off to Georgia for a long weekend visit.

Carol Fuller of Sammy McClure, Sr. Middle School is being honored by Woodruff Arts Center in the Woodruff Salutes Georgia Arts in Education Leaders (pdf) scheme for her work with us on the Dream Dragon where her students from Cobb High School wrote a play based on some Sandaig Poems. (among other things).

On Saturday I am going to go to the award ceremony and on the Friday and Monday I am going to visit Sammy McClure, Sr. Middle School. I am hoping to do some collaborative work between my class and the students there. I started a blog, McClure – Sandaig to support this, hopefully it will be an interesting read. We will try to post updates on the pupil activities and I hope to post during the trip so that my class can follow what I am doing. In case of connectivity problems I’ve made a sort of moblog too.

I had quite a lot of fun setting up the blog (and a related one, more of which if it works) and moblog in the early hours of Saturday. The moblog just pulls down photos from flickr, which is the easiest moblog app I’ve found. Of course flickr is blocked in school so the webpage downloads the photos to the Sandaig site if they are not there and shows them from there. I hope to adapt that idea for out forthcoming Dutch trip with primary 7 this May too.

I am also hoping to be able to update the map and use Flashmeeting to have a wee chat with my class at some point during the trip, time difference and holidays allowing. I thought briefly about using seesmic to talk to my class, but am not even sure if we can access it in school and it might open a can of worms. I think there might be a wee podcast too.

Of course this is not so much a plan as a wish list, but I’ll be trying my best to both enjoy meeting Carol for the first time, visiting a school in the USA and getting as much value for my own class as I can.