I just posted a comment on Dangerously Irrelevant: Know a great commenter? listing just a few of the folk who have really made their mark on the Sandaig blogs. There are of course a great many more. All make a great deal of difference to the children here we own them many thanks.
If you have commented on any of the Sandaig blogs, Thanks
Tag: blogging
eLive and teachMeet07
I am quite excited, next Wednesday I am going to elive: Edinburgh’s Festival of Learning for the 21st Century.
I seem to spend half my blogging life reading posts about great ideas coming from educational conferences and feeling a little green.
Days out of school for inservice do not feature as much as they did a few years ago. I’ve been lucky enough to be part of Masterclass and am now a Glow mentor which has meant that I have managed to go quite a few interesting gatherings. I really feel that my teaching benefits by being given the chance to meet with colleagues and get exposed to new ideas face-to-face.
Last year I was talking at ELive and they have asked me back again this year. Whilst I am a little nervous to be talking to teachers rather than pupils I am really looking forward to going to other seminars and having a chat with anyone that sits still long enough.
I’ve usually found that the informal chat surrounding inservice events and conferences to be as much value as the events themselves. Last year’s elive was followed by an informal bloggers meetup (Photos) this developed into teachMeet06 at the Scotish Learning festival and now TeachMeet07
Starting at the Jolly Judge, between 4.30-7.00 for drinks and wifi. and moving on to Centotre, George Street, Edinburgh, 7pm-late.
Past experence and a look at the wiki means this looks like being a great night.
Dave Cain on Booruch
I just caught up with the last Booruch which I forgot to load onto the ipod before going on the Netherlands trip and suddenly remembered it just before I left to walk to the shops.
David interviews Dave Cain who is behind the great Pencaitland Primary Blog. A lovely interview Dave C, a probationer, has embraced blogging with ease and confidence. Great ideas for using a blog with younger primary pupils. I am pleased that David continues to find scotEduBlogs.org.uk useful.
The gentle optimism of Booruch makes it my most regularly listed to podcast along the the frequently silly and useful Geek!Ed!.
Popping over to Booruch to grab the links I noticed David’s twitter:
Walked around the village with my class; sharing the task of aligning our map with satellites (GPS) as we produce our Mediascape.
It would have been nice to be in David’s class today.
Vote for us!
A while back we got a free LG shine from The LG Shine bloggers relations programme. This was really useful on our recent trip to the Netherlands where we posted photos regularly to the Sandaig’s Netherlands Moblog, we are also starting a wee classroom experement: Sandaig MoBlog which needs some work.
Anyway I’ve entered the Born to Shine Competition to try an win another phone. All we need to is to get more comments on the Born to Shine Competition – blog entry than other entries and we will be on our way to a class set of phones.
You can see the full size full size photo and if you have a minute please pop over to the entry and give us a hand.
37 Children, 6 Days and 180 comments
We got back from our Netherlands 2007 trip this morning after a rather tiring drive through the night.
I think we made a pretty good fist of blogging the trip and I am beginning to think about what went right and what didn’t work so well with the way we handled the blogging, I might have better thoughts once I’ve had a good night’s sleep.
The main focus of the blog was communication with the parent and it certainly hit that nail on the head. The reaction from the parents and from the children when I read the comments on the buss proved that.
But I am starting to think of other possibilities:
The trip was not really designed for the children to do written work, our timetable is packed and I was relying on volunteers to try posts during the bus journey. This meant not every child was posting and the posts were pretty much the first thing that the bloggers thought of.
It might be possible to build in some whole group reflection time where diaries and blogs would be kept uptodate, but we would not want it to feel like school.
Maybe we could have a blog/pod team organised on a room basis and give them a wee bit of time each day (maybe they could stay up a little later then they would not miss out other things).
An internet connection in the hotel would have been good, I posted shivering in the dusk from the town square with a t-mobile pay as you go wifi one evening, a cosy cafe was better the next night and I am afraid I had to shelter in Macdonalds on a third.
The Netherlands Moblog was a good idea, but unfortunately my kludge to get it working left no facility for comments, this could be a really good tool.
I made the firsts UK post and the last one via a bluetooth mobile, this worked very well and didn’t cost too much. I posted one quick post, one small photo and about 6 words, from the Netherlands and it cost about £4! I’d like to investigate getting a dutch sim for another time.
I lost my MP3 recorder on the first day, but even then it was apparent that the children really need time to think and rehearse even informal podcasts. Again time would need to be made for this if it was to include all the children.
We had another tech disaster when a card in a camera with a load of great pictures and video got corrupt. Very disappointing.
Overall I am quite pleased with how the web 2 aspect of the trip turned out (other aspects were good too) but it is really another scratch in the surface suggesting lots of ways to do it better.
Now all I’ve got to do is read a weeks worth of email I think I’ll leave my fed reader for tomorrow.
Off to Holland Tomorrow
Spent the day packing and getting ready to go. My inbox is empty, I uploaded the new episode of Radio Sandaig the Netherlands 2007 blog had a final tweaking and I worked out a fairly horrible kludge to allow the class to publish photos and maybe audio from our phone: Sandaig’s Netherlands Moblog.
Cameras, macbooks, mp3 recorders and other kit has been gathered. I just hope we can find some wifi.
Usually the blogs are posted by the children so this will be a bit different, the children will take photos, video, record some mp3s and type up some notes on the bus, but I think I’ll be the one doing the actual posting unless we can find a very convenient connection (except for the phone stuff). I’d quite like to try to record the trip on google maps but think I’ll leave such cleverness to the children when we get back.
It is a bit weird thinking I may not read a blog or email for a week, it will probably be good for me, but I am not looking forward to my inbox next weekend.
TeachMeet07
Over at TeachMeet07 – ScotEduBlogs Wiki you can sign up for the next meet.
The meet will be on the 23rd of May to coincide with eLive.
I am really looking forward to catching up with some of the ScotsEdublogs world.
Scran Scribble
© Gerry McCann. Licensor www.scran.ac.uk.
I’ve just got my self a blog at Scran Scribble weblog service.
I finally got hold of my GTC number and joined Scran as a teacher so that I can access all those amazing images at home as well as in school. Scran recently (I think) changed their copyright to allow blogging of their thumbnail images ( an example use on Nicole’s blog ) making this resource even better. I just need the time to dig in and exploit it for my class.
The images on Scran now have a Share link which opens a window and lets you post to a blog, at the moment it only handles scribble and eduspaces blogs automatically but other systems are to follow. The pic on the right is one from Scran following a search for happiness.
The great advantage of Scran as an image provider is that it should be accessible in any Scottish school and I can’t imagine it being blocked by any school in the world. The only dissadvantage at the moment is that is is a wee bit tricky for primary pupils to blog images and get the copyright etc right. When we did the children downloaded the images and uploaded them to the Sandaig blog. Scran are working on this, personally I’d like a flickr-like snippet:
The blogs at Scran are elgg powered and it looks like there is a nice community in the making I’ve joined the Blogging for Education and Using Technology in Education groups.
I’ve looked at Scran on and off for a few years now, used it occasionally but this time I am really going to make a big effort to use this wonderful resource that is on my doorstep.
Bluetooth blogging
Note our LG Shine sitting on the macbook.
Our network is not really functioning in school at the moment as it is migrated from Mitel to Dell.
Despite this we managed to get some blogging done today. Using bluetooth and a mobile to connect to the internet was surprisingly easy after reading GSM Phone as Mac OS X Modem.
I am now wondering if i can get this to work on our Netherlands 2007 trip. I wonder if I could buy a dutch sim to use on the trip.
As an aside it is a pretty good job to work with folk who smile like this.
Creative ICT Innovations Conference Manchester
Free conference for educators interested in innovative developments in ICT.
I saw this one a while back on Creative ICT News and even check the train times and prices. Great looking lineup. I wish I could manage the trip but finances and timetables will not allow. Maybe some of the presentations will be online Hint to John
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