Tag: blogging

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Just noticed VidDownloader – Back Again! – Download Youtube, Google, Myspace, Break.com…videos in DIVx Avi Format which might be useful at home if you want to download youtube etc and take to school. I found that one via popurls | popular urls to the latest web buzz a useful home type page.

And an interesting looking wiki Wiki – AboutUs, this seem to auto generate a new page and content when you search for a domain name: eg SandaIgPrimary.co.uk – AboutUs. There was no page for SandaIgPrimary.co.uk when I searched for it, but the wiki pulled in information about location (based on web host), generated a screenshot and a Description. The description was interesting, as it was pulled from the about.html page, I guess the wiki software checks for an about.html (and others?) from the domain and tries to find a meaningful piece of text. I think it looks for a meta tag description first, but I’ve never got round to adding one. You can then go on and edit the information in the normal wiki fashion.

John @ Sandaig PrimaryI got to the AboutUs wiki in an interesting fashion. One of the things I do in my spare time is webmaster for The Tai Chi Union For Great Britain. I was mailing back and forth about some stuff with another member who runs a webhosting service Recursion (As I’ve mentioned recursion is one of my favourite words. Gordons blog is suitable named; The Loopzilla. From his hosting site I saw he was interested in wikis and he sent me the AboutUs wiki link. He also mentioned he was friends with Linda H who joined in with a lovely conversation with our primary 4s and links to Sandaig on her Classroom Displays blog.

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lg_shine

This week I have been working with our two primary seven classes in the media room. Trying as usual to do a little too much in the time, I’ve been doing a bit of basic spreadsheet work and some work on mobile phones.
The first day we talked about communications tech the children had in their homes, it was interesting to me that last years primary 6 figure of just over 60% with internet access in their homes had risen to 85% for the primary sevens (47 children). More surprising was figures of 12 out of 47 who had WII and the just released PS3 in their homes.

(aside, I had one of my p6s post to his weblog from a psp last week)

46 out of 47 children had mobile phones of their own and we had some good discussion of the various ways phones could be used. The children were pretty knowledgeable (knew more than me) about various mobile technologies, but I managed to impress them by posting a couple of quick photos to the web site. Quick fingered kids did the text input.

We finished off today by posting a mind map about mobiles to the blog along with an audio file recorded on my mobile and bluetoothed to my mac to be converted to an mp3 (this had to be usb sticked to a networked machine to get onto the network). Done in the last 10 minutes of a lesson in a fairly off the cuff way, I think this has possibilities.

A couple of snags had to be worked around, converting to mp3 from the recorded amr file with iTunes was at the wrong sample rate for playing in flash so we needed to use audacity to get it right (the file played fine as a straightforward link, but mp3s need to be at sample rate multiple of 11,025Hz (e.g: 11KHz, 22KHz, 44KHz).

A couple of points of interest, I needed to get the LAME Audio Encoder 3.97 for intel macs from Thalictrum – Products before I could get Audacity to export mp3s from our new macbook. I’ve now downloaded the Universal Binary Installer for the Lame lib from Lame – KJams Wiki this allows export from quicktime.

For my own satisfaction at lunchtime I repeated the blog post from the macbook using the mobile as a bluetooth modem. So the workflow could be:

  • Record on mobile, bluetooth to mac
  • Convert with quicktime to mp3
  • Upload from macbook to blog using mobile as a modem.

Toys for the boys perhaps, but also a good place to get the children discussing the positive use of mobiles in education and a way to get some immediate blogging done from bus trip dead-time.

Blogged from tm

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A while ago I mentioned that I had received a LG Shine phone from the LG Shine blogger relations programme. I’ve started to investigate/play around to see if it can be of use in my teaching.

As someone who doesn’t usually use a mobile phone much I am not in a position to review the phone and compare it to others. I can say it seems pretty straightforward to use for a newbie.

The camera seems to work well except for the lag between clicking the shutter and taking a picture. The picture quality looks ok to me too, here is a random picture of my desk using the macro facility and the unusual flash (the mirror just lights up). I’ve had a few children take photos and they had no problem.

I’ve only tried the video camera briefly and have no complaints. I’ve also used the voice recorder the quality does not sound as good as my iRiver and i guess it would be best for one voice rather than a conversation. The file format is amr, I guess that would be best converted befor sending it to the web.

I listened to the latest Booruch podcast on the way home from work today and it sounded good. Flicking through audio, image and other files is quite easy with the scroll wheel.

It was straightforward to set up bluetooth with a macbook and dell latitude transferring file is simple via this or USB.

Email was again was easy to set up sending and receiving is pretty simple. It is also easy to send an image file via email.

What I am really interested in is using the phone to send stuff to the website/ blogs. I’ve tried a few approaches:

Pivot has a moblog functionality, which I managed to get working last November, but I have completely failed to do so this time arround.

As a workaround it is easy to post photos to Flickr, but that is of limited use as we cannot use flickr in school. I have been experimenting with pulling the images from flickr to the sandaig site: Sandaig MoBlog. One of my class posted a photo easily, you can tell which one is hers because it has got a long description, my texting is not up to it yet. I am not sure if this is a great idea in the long term.

The other thing I’ve been testing (see the last few posts) is BlogMailr a service that provides an email to blog solution. So far I’ve not managed to get this working, the html is a bit mangled. I am not sure why, but I had the same problem posting to wordpress so I don’t think it is a pivot metaWebLog problem.

So as soon as I can I am going to try and let the class loose with the phone, both as a tool to play with and as a way to start discussing the use of mobile phones. I’ve started collecting some links tagged with “mobile” on del.icio.us, if you know of any others let me know (tag them for:troutcolor if you have a moment).

I’d also like to know of any other free mobile to blog solutions out there.

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I’ve not blogged about ScotEduBlogs.org.uk for a while now, but I use the site every day.

The site got a bit of a face lift today, Robert fixed up my latest effort at design and put it to work.

I started adding a bit of information about the site and how to use it to the ScotEduBlogs Wiki a while ago, but there is a lot more to be done before the current features are adequately explained. I hope to do some more on the Using_ScotsEdublogs page over the Easter break. If you are so inclined you are more than welcome to add to the wiki too.

At the moment the features of the site are already more than many in the ScotsEdu world will use, but as the number of blogs grows and the discussion get more diverse they will be invaluable. It is worth taking a look at the Blogs page where you can filter and sort nearly 300 ScotsEdublogs. The site also creates rss feeds for the list of blogs you filter, so you can make a set of blogs to your liking and then follow them with your RSS reader.

Robert Jones and Peter Liddle have even more sophisticated features in the works (some are documented on scotedublog – Google Code wiki, and should move to the main wiki soon. some are discussed in the scotedublogs_devel Google Group).

A request

  • Visit the wiki, search for your blog if it is not there add it.
  • Check the tags your blog is tagged with, fix them up to your liking.
  • Blog about the site. Add a link to your sidebar, you can pickup a snippet to ad a logo from the wiki Community page.
  • If you like make a better link logo, add that to the wiki.
  • Help out with the wiki, make feature requests, quite often Robert has added a request of mine with in the hour.

The reach of this blog is not far but if you read this pass it on and ScotEduBlogs.org.uk and Scots Educational bloggers will benefit.

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I spent the afternoon at BarCampScotland BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment.

Organised by

and others it was the first BarCamp in Scotland. Interesting for lots of reasons. The idea is that everyone there should present a short session.

I was there with

to talk about ScotEduBlogs (my slides).

Robert Jones and John Johnston

Originally uploaded by Edublogger.


and I met for lunch at Susie’s Wholefood Diner and had a wee yack about ScotEduBlogs, it was great to accually meet Robert after a few months of online collaboration.

I pretty much stuck to education presentations:

Ian Stuart talking about Islay High School amazing project to embed ict in all areas, give all the children an UMPC and lots more. A really exciting project. I had a quick play with one of Ian’s UMPCs which was a great tool for children, nice handwriting recognition, they looked really usable and portable.

Digitalkatie talked about giving all the children in her school mobile devices too, another exciting and motivational project.

One of the problems I had was not writing down the location and time of all the speaker at BarCamp. So I was a few minutes late for Tess‘s discussion of Glow her report of how her pupils took to glow was very reassuring as was the screenshot of the primary pupil view of the portal. I feel a lot more positive about glow after hearing from a real classroom. I am still a bit worried about losing our international audience.

I also watched a couple of nice podcasting presentations and a very interesting higher edu blogging one, unfortunately I didn’t get a link from these, due to lack of attention to the speaker boards and the fact I did not take a laptop with me.

Flickr: Photos tagged with barcampscotland

barcampscotland: Technorati

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One of the big plusses of the ScotEduBlogs site is the production of aggregated, time sorted rss feeds. I’ve just added this feed to my sidebar on the left. If you click on the ScotEduBlogs Latest link on the left it will a list of the latest education blog posts from around Scotland.

In Pivot I add this by putting [[rss:http://www.scotedublogs.org.uk/blogs/rss]] in my template.

If you are using wordpress (like a lot of Scots Edu blogs) you can use the RSS Sidebar Widget as I did on the scotedublogs aggregation blog.

(thumbnail)There are all sorts of other ways to use the feed, from subscribing to it in your feedreader to grabbing it in other applications.

I’m playing with the Dashcode Beta and have crudely adapted the RSS desktop widget to display the ScotEduBlogs feed. Click on the image on the right to see the widget in action.

It still needs some testing and the application of some graphics, but if you are using Mac OS x 10.4 you can download it and try it out.

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Cluster thingy
Originally uploaded by Lenny & Meriel.

I’ve been reading Ewan’s post about play and Mrs. O’Neill’s too. Lots of good thinks to think about. Ewan’s post is one of a series about failure which has given me loads of ideas that are not full articulated yet, limiting myself to the play idea has me thinking about play and time.

To allow children to play with the new toys (tools) takes time. Time away from other things so we need to justify it in some way, I don’t have too much a of a problem about that, but I am thinking of the amount of time it takes to blog, podcast or create a video.

For the Sandaig otters blog I usually have pairs of bloggers coming from 4 classes to the media room between 9 and 9:30 in the morning, so we should get 4 posts a day. Quite a few fall by the wayside. Even if the children make it to the room they quite often do not finish their post in the 15 or 20 minutes they have (they need to select a photo, resize it, write a post and blog the lot). Sometimes they get time to come back and finish, sometimes not (the children have also spent time the previous day taking photos for the days post).
This is an in theory way of working, it has not happened since Christmas as I have been back in the classroom fulltime due to staff absences, some children have been posting independently.

On the Primary Six SJ it has been taking up to an hour to carry out some tasks and again some children do not finish. As I am trying to take primary 6SJ to the media room once a week for ict, and we don’t always blog (spent an hour commenting on other blogs last time) it is quite hard to give the children enough regular playtime. I want them to have enough time to make the tools transparent and to get into some real collaborative fun.

Anyway I am interested in how other teachers manage this. If you blog with children how long does it take children to post? How much time do you give them to read other blogs? For people making bubbleshare slide shows and the like, how long does it take for children to put these together?