Tag: blogging

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Joe Shaw just pointed be to a very nice looking idea St. Mary?s Bannockburn Blog. It is a homework blog with the work posted in comments which are both approved until the due date, some nice varied examples of fun homework tasks including finding the meaning of Scottish words Scottish Meanings – P7H and looking at art work: Homework – Andy Warhol.

Food for thought, I am very tempted to try this. I think joe said that they get over the digital divide by allowing time in school to do the tasks if pupils want to (before school, lunchtime, I am not sure).

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  • http://www.bubbl.us/, flash mind mapping, I’ve spent about 1 minute on it and am convinced it would be useful in school, if we can access it. I wonder if you can create multiple accounts with one email address. if so I might give this a wee try for story planning next week.
  • dotherightthing.com here is a a Scottish story that will affect my shopping and one discussing if the site is the right thing to do.
  • I am going to point my bloggers at Sploder and Amazing Circles BETA for a bit of fun soon, I am not sure how long Sploder will be allowed in school but it looks like it would entertain at home. Hopefully using these fun tools will reinforce blogging skills that will be useful with curriculum based tasks.

  • The costs of trying to maintain a highly ordered system often outweigh the benefits, they say. A messy desk, like Einstein’s, can be “a highly effective prioritising and accessing system”, since it will develop an emergent structure modelled on how your specific mind works, not some externally imposed schema.

    from Oliver Burkeman: A right mess | Weekend | Guardian Unlimitedhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,1998329,00.html

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edublog 'office'It has been a busy week, and I’ve not posted since last weekend.
We are still 3 members of Staff down at school which means that I am back in class full-time rather than teaching ICT in the mornings and with P6sj in the afternoons. This is quite disappointing but it doesn’t look as if it will change in the near future. That means that the blogging I was supervising from 9:00 -9:30 in the media room has not been happening and the number of posts on Sandaig Otters has diminished.
Having said that there has been a few interesting things going on:

  1. As a follow up to the first lesson in P6sj’s science topic Sound and Light I took the class to the media room and they played the BBC sound games. I then asked them to take a screenshot, save it as a jpeg or gif, blog about the game, link to it and comment about their learning.
    That was quite a lot to fit into three quarters of an hour but a few of them managed to do it (here is Amy’s Post.)
    Of course the tech is at the moment getting in the way of the teach a little, but after a few more lessons I hope the children will be able to concentrate on the learning, rather than on remembering how to link, or save a screenshot.
  2. I finally got round to converting the film my class made to flv format and posting it to Sandaig TV: Fischy Music. most of Primary 6sj had a hand in filming, editing or recording voice overs. I can’t wait until the 4 mini macs arrive and we can do this a bit more efficiently. I also uploaded a Sandaig Christmas video made by 4 primary seven pupils. This took an age to edit as they were working in there lunch time, which is too short to really get much editing done after eating. I am quite looking forward to sitting the staffroom next week, but Radio Sandaig will probably keep me busy.
    I am pretty happy with using the flv format to present the movies rather than quick. I do wonder if having swfs in the enclosures in the RSS feed (these don’t show up in itunes) will be a problem in the future.
  3. I had a wee bit or online R&R with the Flickr: The edublogoffices Pool I had a early lead for messiest office, but I’ve been thoroughly beaten by David
  4. A little light htmling rounded off my week.

I’ve also been thinking about a couple of things:

  1. After the flickr fun mentioned above, I was interested in David’s suggestion in this post: EdCompBlog: EduFlickr: A good year for the poses…

    I began to wonder if this would be a good exercise for schools – a photo for every day of the school year. Would that be an interesting record of the school’s life? Perhaps different classes/groups in the school could each take a picture to compare the experiences of different pupils. Or even better, two or more schools could share their photos and set each other challenges.

    Barbara has taken up the challenge: A Flickr Activity/Challenge- Are you in?.
    I commented on both post, about not being able to use flickr in school and looking for an alternative, but on reflection the goodness that would be gained by using a flickr pool, rss, comments, discussion and notes ate too big an opportunity to miss, I think I’ll be cheering from the sidelines.

  2. I have started posting task suggestion to my P6sj blog: Mr Johnston – Sandaig Primary 6 SJ for Primary 6sj bloggers to do out of school or when they have finished class work. Unfortunately I am in P6m now in the mornings and I set up the individual blogs for P6sj that I am teaching in the afternoons. I am not sure if i have the time and energy to set up another 20 blogs for p6m.
    I am also worried about the idea of online ‘homework’ if not all the class have out of school net access, is it unfair to give those that do extra opportunities? I suppose I could set up some lunchtime access once or twice a week.

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SEB Logo

Over at the ScotEduBlogs news: index site

and

have be working flat out. You can keep read Pete: ScotEduBlogs and Robert’s post and comments to keep up or cut over to scotedublogs_devel | Google Groups to watch or join the development.

I am trying to work on the design as I can’t contribute code. Feel free to join in with anything, but especially:

The ScotEduBlogs Logo competition

We need a logo, preferably 790 pixels by 180 or so. It should reflect Scotland, blogging and sharing/ Open source software.

I am not sure about the judging process, probably a poll on the wiki.

First prize: fame, and the right to stick a open source license on you logo;-)

You can also join in with suggestions as to how this project should look, perform, features you would like to see, Robert and Pete are not only open to suggestions they seem to add them faster than I can think ’em up.

If you are a ScotsEduBlogger you should also go over to the site and check to see if you are listed. If not add yourself, if you are check your tags and edit them to your preference.

Please blog about the project so that as many SEBloggers can join in the process.

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The blog software I use here,

is GPLed and extendable. I’ve used a few extensions to show flash content and even hacked one to play mp3s.

I just installed another one that will be handy for me rather than the children, slink.

slink lets you define some links that can then be inserted quickly by typing, for example: [[slink:p]] and getting

.

you get to define as many slinks as you like in a simple file, mine looks like this at the moment:

p|Pivot|http://www.pivotlog.net

a|Apple|http://www.apple.com

s|Sandaig|http://www.sandaigprimary.co.uk

o|Sandaig Otters|http://www.sandaigprimary.co.uk/pivot

ewan|Ewan|http://edu.blogs.com

david|David|http://edcompblog.blogspot.com/

robert|Robert|http://www.jonesieboy.co.uk/blog/

pete|Pete|http://geekyteach.computingteacher.co.uk/

google|Google|google.co.uk

sb|ScotsEudBlogs News|http://www.scotedublogs.org.uk/

sw|ScotEduBlogs Wiki|http://www.scotedublogs.wikispaces.com/

boo|Booruch|http://booruch.libsyn.com/

stv|Sandaig TV|http://www.sandaigprimary.co.uk/pivot/sandaig_tv.php

f|Flickr|http://www.flickr.com

which reflects common links I’ve made recently, but it is simple to change by editing a text file.

This is the sort of thing that keeps me amused while doing the more important job of running the children’s blogs.

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If you read my blog much you might have noticed the odd moan about flickr, not being able to be used it here.

Recently I found Pics4Learning. This is

intended to provide copyright friendly images for use by students and teachers in an educational setting.

There does not seem to be a specific license attached to the photos, they only ask for attribution. Yesterday my class searched for photos to go with poems they wrote, downloaded them, resized them and posted them to their blogs. I also explained that they need to give some sort of attribution, unfortunately I had not found the instructions, so we just linked to Pics4Learning, next time the attributions will be to the photos.

I was quite please that quite a few of the children a managed this as there are quite a few steps involved. I was especially pleased to see Courtney who didn’t have time to finish her post went hope searched for a picture, added it to her blog (remembering to resize it) and attributed it.

I realise that the site is nowhere near as wide and deep as flickr, but it will be a great asset to our blogs this session. I also think there is some advantage in the children downloading and editing photos rather than just linking to flickr. It should also insure that readers of the children’s blogs who also have images sites blocked will see the pictures.

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I just want to point to Robert‘s post about Scotedublogs – A New Hub for Scottish Educational Blogs which is pretty wonderful news.

Teachers doing it for themselves;-)

What is great about this project, like the Scotedublogs wiki is the fact that anyone can join in and influence the project. Robert and Peter are doing the heavy lifting (code/programming) at the moment, but anyone can help with that or just an opinion on what needs to be done or the best way to do it. I am no coder, but I can put in my 2 pence worth about features, design etc as can anyone else.

Check out Robert‘s post, the Scots Edu Blogs Aggregation Project page on the Scotedublogs wiki, the discussion group and the project itself: www.scotedublogs.org.uk.

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A cross between putting my money were my mouth is and enjoying the last couple days of freedom.

Click on the left right hand side of images to advance, the left to go back. The slides sort of explain the hows, whys and wherefores. You can try the editor I hope it will be usable by the children. If not I’ve enjoyed playing with flash.

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An interesting pessimistc/optomistic post by Will

Yes, there are more and more examples of teachers and students using these tools in their practice, but the numbers of examples of students on the K-12 level whose learning is being transformed by these technologies is amazingly small, at least to me. I mean really, where are the examples of students blogging?and I mean blogging, not just using blogs?and building global networks of learners? There are some, yes, but not enough to make the case that these tools can work in the current school environment.

Which hits a few nails on the head. I certainly feel that blogging has done my classes some good but I don’t think their learning is going through a major transformation. I am not too worried though. I am not at all sure if any optimism is possible on the other global events Will refers to, but it should be for educational blogging.

First I think the methods to help children blog in the first place, fitting this into the curriculum and the school day, are developing and need to be explored before we build global networks. This will take time (more time). As a class teacher who is starting the fourth year of blogging with children I am still scratching the surface, just starting to move from giving the children an audience to letting them develop a community. I’ve seening this happen more this session than ever before.

Secondly as we slowly integrate blogging and a world wide network of children learning together it will hopefully dovetail nicely with A Curriculum for Excellence, Assessment is for Learning and other educational efforts outside the blogosphere which I think are pushing in the same direction. (Maybe extreme-learning too, but I don’t know much about that).

Thirdly a lot of the edu blogs that have started up over the last year have been professional development blogs not learner blogs. I do not see the sort of changes that I think Will wants until more children are given the tools, hopefully as teachers use the tools themselves they will start giving them to their classes and then as Will says we

will have our kids leading us further toward where we need to go?

I don’t think this will happen in 2007 everywhere, but we already know The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.

I’ve a few ideas of where I want to go in 2007 and hopefully will be planning them here before long.

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I see Ewan had taken up this meme, I guess it is self indulgent but fairly harmless, I am having a good time anyway reviewing my years .
Next year, if I am here, I will not need to do this: ’cause I’ll have tagging of posts working properly. A lot of the post I write are more of notes to myself and at the moment often lost in the archives, hopefully next year they will be all lined up by tag.

  1. July: I played with Google Maps Again, improved my tracking of Teachmeet06 and disapproved of Learning styles
  2. August: I though about SSDN which became Glow. I started using TextMate, went back to school and was jealous of Ewan and AB.
  3. September: I messed about with google earth, appleScript and other ways of posting. Reported on our Media room, pointed to PodcastDirectory.org.uk, plenty of posts on SETT and teachmeet06 and some practical classroom stuff
  4. October: I went to Be Very Afraid, started getting children blogging in the media room and tried to figure out which software to use for providing individual blogs (I went with pivot Primary Six SJ)
  5. November: I reported on a short term blog and made a Flash Video player.
  6. December: I made and tested a simple flash mp3 player, used it to do some 10 minute podcasts with the children here and here, 10 minutes as in 10 minutes to plan, record and post a sub 1 minute podcast. I messed around with OPML which sort of lead to ScotEduBlogs news and I rounded to year off with a review of my blogging year part 1 and this post.