I’ve joined the International Edubloggers Directory although I am probably a good deal scruffier that the folk on the graphic.
Tag: blogging
Starting to get things moving
A while ago I was moaning about not managing to get the kids blogging, this sessions class are a very different bunch than last years and I’ve been struggling to get them posting to the blog regularly enough to get familiar with the tools.
The answer turns our to be, same as last session, to get the children to organise the rota, two children organise the random selection of a couple of others to choose what to blog about, take photos, and blog the next day (I download the photos before school).
Radio Sandaig has also been less than regular in its output. I’ve been trying to organise it by getting children from 4 classes to write and record segments, as teachers and children are busier than ever, it is getting harder and harder to find the time. Last session I was out of class teaching ict across the school and could make some time, this session I am back in class and have been using my NCC time. It was not enough, especially as the children had to write in their own time at home. This month I think I’ve solved the problem, on Thursdays I am having a Radio Sandaig Working Lunch this involves opening our media room up and letting the children write. We probably now have too much material. Interestingly this session I have more children wanting to write about outside school activities, mostly TV and movie reviews, than class work, I guess this is because they feel more ownership of their segments.
Next session I think I’ll take the podcast back inside my own class and develop it as a talking, listening and reflection tool as part of our language and pse program.
So despite a few frustrations (mostly with tools I’d love to use being unavailable for technical reasons or filtered out) I am feeling pretty positive about using ‘social media’ and online tools. I’ve also got a nice new project to unveil soon and a couple of interesting ideas (well interesting to me anyway) to blog about, more frequent posting ahead.
News Reading, New Tweeting
I think I only managed one blog post over the christmas holidays. I did tumble 8 times, post half a dozen links to del.ic.io.us and do a fair bit of tweeting.
I didn’t read my RSS reader at all. I was a bit busy putting together a non-educational site, incorporating flickr, youtube and blog streams, I wish I could use video and flickr on our school site in the same way.
Last night I opened my reader and basically just marked all as read, I didn’t feel too bad as twitter had been giving me as much reading as I could deal with, lots of links for various edu (and other) bloggers and of course I subscribe to tweets from Scotedublogs which kept me up-to-date with my fellow Scots. I don’t know that I’d like to rely on twitter all of the time but it gave an interesting tilt to things and another tilt back tonight when I opened Vienna.
There seems to have been and explosion of twitter tools and addons using the and one nice one is Twitter Stats this is a perl script which you can run from the terminal in OS X and a numbers template to paste the results into after the perl script copies them to the clipboard, here are my twitter stats:
Coincidentally today my class were doing a little charting of there own surveying the communication tech they have at home as far as I recall this show a huge increase since last year.
Wee Movies
I’ve been thinking bit more about getting children to make and publish wee movies. I was working with a couple of children on one recently and thinking about making a simple system for blogging them. I’ve used the Anarchy Media Player on our wordpress blogs (Test Movie) and on Edublogs blogs, Edublogs does not implement the rather nice feature of Anarchy where a image file with the same name as the movie plus the extension is used as a splash. I don’t think I could use Anarchy without breaking some older stuff here, so need another solution.
This got me thinking as did embedthevideo.com – Video Pop-Up Link Maker which I’ve used on the Sandaig Blogs before.
I wanted something like both, a splash screen without a popup. Quicktime movies can be embedded in html with a link to another movie that will load in the same place when the first movie is clicked. I’ve knocked up a quick and crude webpage that takes a movie and an image and produces the html fragment to use quicktime to load the image and play the movie when the image is clicked.
The movie above is a screencast of the webpage in use producing the html that show the movie.
The setup also allows Sandaig pupils to upload images and movies and optionally produces an embed link to the tool to allow others to then embed the movie (I do not suppose that anyone will want to do that but it was interesting to play with.)
So the weemovies page would allow anyone to produce the html fragment if they know the url of a movie. The script is not very portable or flexible, but I hope it will be useful. We have got a wee movie in production which should see the light of day next week.
Scran Image blogging
© 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.
iMovie and wee movies
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.
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.
Tumblr 3.0
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:
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.
I still don’t really get facebook
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:
I just wonder how to accept it
Twitteratation
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.
Stuck with ICT
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.
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.