Tag: blogging

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Otters Blog

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.

Blogged from tm

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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:

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.

Blogged from tm

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embed

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.

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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.

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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.