Tag: blogging

Posted on
by
Gower Bell telephone

© National Museums Scotland. Licensor www.scran.ac.uk.

I am delighted to have noticed that the wonderful folk at scran have improved their blog this facility.

I noticed this a while back, but at that time it just supported scribble and elgg, I suggested this could be extended to a flickr like blog this, or even giving an html fragment. It now does, and I am testing it out.

Here is an interface screenshot:

I had a wee bit of difficulty with some of the links, but it looks like this could be a great tool of children to write blog posts about the images on scran.

Posted on
by

iMovie 7

I read quite a lot about the new(ish) version of iMovie, a lot of it negative, for example this Wired.com article lists the things that the previous versions did that iMovie 7 (which ships as part of iLive ’08). Apple seem to understand that no everyone is happy, the new version does not overwrite iMovie HD 6, and you can download iMovie HD 6 if you have the iLife ’08 version.

I had not really given this much thought, most of the dv editing my pupils have done is with older versions of iMovie (version 2!) or iMovie HD 6 (see Sandaig Television for examples). So I though we would just stick to the old version. I did install iLife ’08 on one macbook and had a quick look at it. As many have noted the new version is radically different; no timeline, little audio control and no plugin support! We didn’t use any plugins, but had messed about with audio and I saw the timeline as the ‘main idea‘ in iMovie.

This quick look left me with the idea that I would stick to 6 in class. I then though about the way we have started to use video on the Sandaig Otters blog, posting very short clips taken with digital still cameras as an alternative way to post science reports, e.g. Gears, the children took the movies and then I would quickly edit them together with Quicktime pro.

Imovieclips

Last week we were working on our electricity topic on Resistance and when recording the experiment, a few children used comic life and a couple recorded a few seconds of movie with a still camera, instead of me editing the movie I gave Jack a shot of using iMovie. The new version is perfect for this sort of activity, links with iPhoto, grabs the clips, and allows you to very quickly crop and drag and drop them into a movie, titles are a snip and we could add some garageband music easily. Jack put this 16 second clip together in about half an hour: variable resistor. more over I was able to ‘teach‘ him how do do it without having used the new version for more than a few minutes.

Given the time constraints of the curriculum, it is hard to fit in much dv work, I’ve been thinking more and more of using wee movies of this sort as an alternative way of presenting information, the new version of iMovie enables the children to be more involved in this process that using Quicktime pro. hopefully I’ll be able to do a little more of this over this term, but I think the new version of iMovie is a nice addition to our blogging toolbox while being glad the old version is there if we do a more complex video project.

Posted on
by

Tumblr crop

I’ve mentioned Tumblr before, and of course link to my tumblelog in the sidebar here.

On saturday I saw that Tumblr 3.0 was announced with “Over 400 new features, fixes, and improvements“.

A tumblelog is a sort of quick post a link, video, photo, quote sort of tool:

Tumblr Menu

Not the place to post long thoughtful blogs, but a pretty easy way to found objects from the net. The presentation is nice too, huge fonts, auto imbedding of flickr photos and youtube video, this facility has be expanded to Tumblr will now take any video or Flash embed code and scale it down proportionally. The new feature that really impresses me is the way tumblr shows my Archive (like the screenshot at the top of this post). Very sweet in my opinion. tumblr now does audio upload and has tied in with Vimeo to allow video upload. also included with tumblr 3.0 are tags, markdown, channels (which is a move towards multi-author tumblelogs) and a pile of other stuff, best read on the announcement.

I don’t know any other teachers using tumblr yet, but I’d be interested in playing around with this, so let me know if you want to post to the edutumblrs channel and I’ll invite you in. No link as yet as channels are private at the moment. I am also on the lookout for folk interested in the same sort of things as myself to follow in tumblr.

At the monet I post wee links to games and fun that I think my pupils will like to a sub-weblog here, which appears in the side bar of Sandaig Otters and as a web page encorporated int othe main sandaig site: Links for Children and Staff at Sandaig, but this could be a lot prettier as a tumblelog.

Posted on
by

Herald on Sunday : Cyberbullying Originally uploaded by cx1uk

I just noticed Neil‘s photo on flickr.

Article from The Herald on Sunday about cyberbullying. Includes recommendation that teachers should join Facebook.

I’ve had a facebook account for a wee while now and am pretty ambivalent about it. I am not really very keen on the closed nature of the network. Most of the web 2 stuff I’ve found useful (rss, blogs, flickr and I dare say twitter) are open(ish) networks, anyone can see what you have to say.

Someone, maybe Ewan, explained that facebook could be a place to get away from the openness and post more personal things that they would not like all to see, but now teachers are being asked to be ‘friends’ with pupils on social networks which would remove this personal aspect.
Personally I’d not post anything onto facebook or anywhere else that I want to keep secret.

I know facebook groups can be useful, teachmeetperth on Facebook, but in my opinion a wiki is better.

Neil has a great post Are You Going Far Enough? Or Too Far? on this area and I agree that in the case of your own children you need to discuss and reach agreement about access to their social space. Fortunately (for me) my daughter is too old for this to become a problem, I’m her friend on facebook but not on Bebo and for a 17 year old living away from home that is fine.
For pupils this is a different matter, I can’t imagine that many would be happy with teachers befriending them on their space and I don’t think I want to sneak in by faking my age or claiming to be a pupil.

Better in my opinion to:

  • try to teach sensible behaviour and safety with open tools (blogs anyone)
  • model good behaviour and give the children a chance to practise this
  • discuss social software, relating that to real life (cyberbullying = bullying) with the same principals (tell someone)
  • take online behaviour as seriously are offline

and hope/expect that understanding and behaviour transfer to other online areas.

On the topic of facebook I did get an interesting invite the other day:

Facebookinvite

I just wonder how to accept it;-)

Posted on
by

Somewhat unbelievably, I am watching Ewan give a presentation via twitter!

He is at ULearn07 giving a Keynote.

nope commenting on Helen Baxter’s, I checked New Zealand current local time from WorldTimeServer.com (Ewan’s was yesterday)

notes from Ewan:

There’s no such thing as School 2.0
It implies this global classroom stuff, where we are all the same and facing the same challenges – what about cultures?

Careers 2.0: the global microbrand. Anyone with a blog can become an employer and entrepreneur. No cost, no risk, nothing to lose

Global Microbrands are what Career 2.0 is all about: edublogs: Global Microbrands for professionals

Career 2.0 or Exploitation 2.0: we need to educate the process, too or this happens: Ogre to Slay? Outsource It to Chinese – New York Times

Weirdest live blog I’ve ever done, maybe I do not need to leave the couch ever again. I am not sure if i know what Helen Baxter was talking about, but I got interesting stuff through Ewan‘s and Paul‘s twits, Paul seems to be linked up to some NZ twitters. Tweets keep everyting short and sweet, perfect for sound-bite nation or media snackers.

I think you could use twitter and some scripting to present, forget powerpoint, maybe filter tweets through some css to fill up a screen.

Posted on
by

Swict Tagline

I’ve been reading some of the wordpress course over at swict.com :||: the place for help when you’re Stuck With ICT. Swict is a project by Andrew Brown.

Swict Menu

If you want to get started blogging with wordpress this is a great place to start, especially if you are a busy teacher. All of the 18 lessons are available as pdf files and Adobe Captivate videos. The videos are between 40 seconds ans 3 minutes each, bite size for easy consumption!
Andrew has a great voice for listening too and the tutorials could not be clearer or easier to follow. As well as wordpress the growing collection covers Adobe Captivate 2 (Andrew eats his own dogfood), PowerPoint and Macromedia Breeze Presenter 5 Course all in the same style.

Blogged from tm

Posted on
by

I had a bit of bother with this one. I’ve not used keynote much, but it was very easy to create a presentation with. While playing about with it I noticed you could record an audio soundtrack very easily and though I’d do that, export to quicktime or even youtube to let folk see what I’ve been talking about (and to play with the toys). Recording was easy enough, but when I came to export I got errors every time. A quick google fould more folk with the same problem and fixes for keynote 3 & 3, unfortunately I was using keynote 4 and the fixes didn’t work for me. I am guessing the problem has something to do with combining a recorded audio with movies and audio in the presentation. So what should have been a few minutes work turned into a few hours! I exported the presentation to jpgs, then I dug into the presentation package and found the narration audio. Next I imported the into GarageBand and one by one placed the images on the podcast track, adding urls as I went.

Next I exported the podcast to iWeb and published it, the first time I had used iWeb and again it seems easy enough to use without having to read a manual.

anyway here is a version of the presentation as an enhanced podcast.

As a by-product I now have a Podcast. I will not be adding to it very often, but I’ve got some audio from TeachMeet07 which I’ll publish soon. I didn’t manage to record all the presentations, but I’ve got some.

Posted on
by

A frustrating afternoon.
I’ve not managed to get blogging embedded in my class this session yet, although we have dipped our toes in a little.
I have been working with our primary sevens, my class from last year and the other p7 who are starting to use our new wordpress setup.
I am out of class on Friday afternoons this session to work with other classes and so far I’ve been trying to get the blogging habit going with the sevens.
Last week the p7m guys ran out of time before many of them posted there first blog to wordpress. This afternoon I was determined that they would do so and some would get a second post with an image. They got their text ready, resized the images and then began to run into problems:

MYIPROXY ERROR: connection refusedwww.sandaigprimary.co.uk refused to accept connection on port 80
________________________________________
While trying to retrieve the URL: www.sandaigprimary.co.uk/

I think we had some other errors too. At this point I though it might be a problem with the wordpress setup as I had not stress tested it, but the internet seemed to be generally slow.
The second half of the afternoon I was working with Primary Seven S on their pivot blogs, and while some of them managed to post we got lots of the same error messages. so I started to think it was a problem with our site, maybe because 20 children were all logging on at once, but when some of the children went to some edublogs.org blogs to read other school blogs they got slowdowns and the same errors.
The biggest problem seemed to be with blog sites, more straightforward pages just loaded very slowly. I’ve raised a speculative fault, but don’t really know enough about how network errors work to guess what is going on. Any hints or advice welcome.

Earlier in the week i had more frustration as I came into school early to upload a bunch of pictures to voicethread.com and it didn’t work, I got one up but kept getting authentication dialogs popping up. I guess I’ll have to try uploading photos from home and getting the children to add audio in school.

I usually feel technically savvy enough for a primary teacher, but I do not know much about the ins and outs of the network, I guess I need to find out.

Posted on
by

After all the fuss last year testing WP and Lyceum here with pretty poor results, I now have a working wordpress mu setup: Sandaig PupilsI’ve not got any children started, just trying to get the setup ready, so far all I’ve added the Anarchy Media Player and put together a widget to pull the links for the rest of the Sandaig blogs in.
I hope to run this for one of our primary seven classes while the other one uses the pivot blogs set up last year now renamed Primary Seven S

Hopefully I’ll be able to do some comparisons between Pivot and WPMU.

If you have any good wordpress mu tips, please let me know. I am especially interested in being able to set up site wide widgets by default.

Blogged from tm

Posted on
by

Yesterday I was at the Apple Store Glasgow opening. Fun was had by a lot of smiling people. As I mentioned I was interviewed by Mark‘s ex -piecast team The MacCast. I would guess I’ll end up on the cutting-room floor as I mumbled and probably blushed, but the questions made me think a bit. They asked about my favourite apple applications, this got me started, my favourite applications are not apple ones. Of course I use the iLife tools and would not be without them, I’ve just started using pages and keynote and like them. But some of the ones I like most come from elsewhere. Here is a wee bit about 3 of them, why I like them and what they do. A sort of 3 favourite applications after I’ve skipped past iLife, iWork, email, browsing and Web 2.0 etc.

SC Icon

SuperCard is cousin of the old mac essential HyperCard a simple but powerful tool for building applications and scripting on a mac. SuperCard has a simple english type scripting language and can tap into the power of appleScript and unix shell calls. I use it everyday. In the past I have created fairly useful teacher and teaching tools but now I mostly use if for avoiding repetitious task. Eg. most of the gallerys on Sandaig Classes such as this one are run up with a SC project. I blog about Supercard at Bad Poet and have some resources for teachers and others on the site.

Comic Life is not an application that I use everyday, but it is a great tool for children and epitomises a type of good mac application. The way it fits in with the iLife suite, making creating comics a simple task, drag and drop. By tapping into core mac ‘stuff’ the graphics, gradients and shadows are beautiful. I believe there is a windows version in the works, I’ll be interested to see if it is as slick as the mac one.
 

TextMate is an amazing text editor for macs. I probably only use a tiny fraction of textmate’s facilities. Aimed mostly at programmers TextMate is still useful to folk like me who write a bit of html, css and occasional snippet of php, it has a ton of keyboard shortcuts to do all sorts of thing. for example if you are writing on a html document and select a bit of text and hit command-control-shift-L textmate looks up the selection on google and creates a link in your document. textMate is extensible via bundles, there are bundles for all sorts of things, different programming languages etc. I am blogging this with the blogging bundle, I can preview and post this to the blog without leaving textmate. I drag an image onto the Textmate document and it is uploaded to my blog and the html snippet inserted. you can define your own snippets, I type seb and hit tab and a link to ScotEduBlogs is created (like that). Drag a swf onto the document and the code for inserting the flash file is created. It would take months to explain everything textMate can do.

I’ve just realised there is another wee application that I am beginning to depend on almost everyday ImageWell which is wonderful for quickly doing what you want with images, annotating, dropping a shadow, resizing and uploading. I just used it to create and upload all of the images in this post, in no time: command-shift-4 in the finder to get a screenshot (hold the)

So those are my 3-4 left field must have applications I would be interested in yours?

Blogged from tm