Tag: classroom

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I saw a tweet mentioning me and the Flickr Search and Stamp for the iPod touch project on Friday. Clicking the link took me to Searching for CC images – SHea iPod Touch Project a post on Ian Guest’s posterous about:

a year long project between two schools, one in the London area and the other in Yorkshire. Students in two classes will be loaned an iPod Touch, for use both in school and at home.

The post contains a youtube video of how to use the Flickr Search and Stamp on an iPod touch and the blog has a lot of other interesting iPod Touch educational information.

I had mentioned this tool in a blog post and added it to the Interesting Ways to use an iPod Touch in the Classroom collaborative google presentation but have not blogged about it here..

The idea was to get around some copyright issues for children searching for images to create with on an ipod touch. Ideally children would save a photo, figure to the attribution and edit the photo to add this. That can be quite difficult and time consuming on an iPod touch so I though up this workaround. It searches flickr, only returning images that can be used and edited under a cc license, it then will produce an image with the attribution stamped onto it in the same way as my flickr CC search toy.

Flickr cc attribution

It is based on the iPod Touch Poems webapp I knocked together and has quite a few rough edges. I am sure I could improve the performance, interface & a lot more but it seems to work.

Here is Ian’s video, which should give you an idea of how the app works:

I’ve added a link from the page/Web app to the video to act as in app help so many thanks Ian for this. You can also get an idea of it the app work in this Simulator.

I’d appreciate any feedback on using the app, especially in class and ideas for improving it.

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This post is the second in an attempted series about getting started blogging loosely linked to the launch of glow blogs.

Have you see this:

This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress.

Portrait Of The Unknown Saxophonist by an untrained eye
Attribution-NonCommercial License

anywhere recently?

The above quote gets me 751,000 hits on google if I search for it. Why? Because it is the out of the box About Page on a wordpress blog.

Most education blogs I know are wordpress ones, and a fair number of them have never edited their About page. I don’t think this need to be seen as self promotion, just politeness to your reader. When I see a link to a blog post and end up on a blog I’ve not visited before the chances are that I’ll be interested in who is writing it and something about them. I click on the About link.

Schools blogs too, I want to know the sector, who the authors are, age & stage and where in the world the schools is.

We are expecting a new batch of educational bloggers in Scotland this session as blogging become simple to set up via glow I am hoping that these new bloggers will add themselves to ScotEduBlogs and I’ll be able to read them and to find out a little about the writers.

As an aside, I’ve twitter set to send me a mail when I get a new follower, often these are folk who have not tweeted much, if I can tell from their tweets and they do not have a description or a link on their twitter page I often don’t follow back.

My own About John page may not be very interesting or even spelt correctly, but it is there.

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Strip designer

This week I have added five new apps to my iPad and thought I’d post them here. 

The whole post was made on the iPad all text ‘written’ with Dragon Dictation.

The first is BBC News and this is just a translation of the BBC’s new site for the iPad that it works very nicely. It’s pretty slick there is a series of all news feeds on the left and you could see the articles on the right. You can customise the feeds so I’ve already remove sport and added the Scottish news  it seems very iPad friendly and like quite a few  designed read and access media in an attractive way.

Another media viewer I’ve  installed is FlipBoard which has been getting a lot of attention on the Internet and on twitter. This app pulls information from different sources, Facebook or twitter and from collections and about different things, say technology or entertainment.the app presents these streams in an attractive way.   You can to flip through the pages with some pretty effects.   What I think is really impressive that is with the tweets from your twitter stream it doesn’t just to show the tweets, if a tweet has an article linked it will present some of the article, with a photograph that will present the photograph.  FlipBoard has been a little controversial as it is pulling in content by scraping rather than they’re getting it from RSS feeds. To me this doesn’t seem too much of a problem most of the longer articles are shortened so you need to display the source along with any adverts and branding to read the whole thing. This viewing is done in the app rather than in safari. 

The next  app is regexecutioner which is an app  to help learn about regular expressions.   I do occasionally attempting to learn and to  use snippets of regular expressions. Hopefully this may  get me up to speed.  It is a pretty straightforward app were you can see  examples and you can take a regular expression and  a text block instantly see it’s result.

StripDesigner  is more of a creative app.  You can see from the screen shots that are  illustrating  this post that I have used it to present and annotate some screenshots of these application.  It’s a really nice ComicLife clone.  I tried on the iPhone first there the screen space is a wee bit limited but on the iPad and it just works very nicely indeed.  You can choose different layouts of up to five pictures.  You can add texts and the other things, adjusting fonts, text size and drop shadows in an easy and intuitive way.  I think it would be a great application to use in a classroom and I imagine I’ll be using it quite a lot.

The final application I’ve installed this week is Dragon Dictation which is an amazing application.  I have recorded all of this post and it turned into text using Dragon Dictation  it is very straightforward to use: you press a record button, you talk, you hit the Screen to stop.  Dragon  then analyses this (I imagine it sens the audio to a server) and brings back the text. You can quickly clean up and edit the text.   I tried it first on my iPhone you can tweet straight from Speech.  I then they tried on the iPad  and had one crash so made sure  to a copy of each section of this post as i  recorded six different sections. I had to do a little cleaning up, but given my accent and the fact that there is no training period make this application seem like magic.

    

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With Glow blogs looking like they may stimulate the use of blogs in more Scottish classrooms I though I might put together a few posts about some ideas around starting to use blogs in the classroom.

A few years ago I blogged about Starting Blogging in the Classroom with some advice that I still think holds good. I’ve published some general notes at OpenSourceCPD Blogging, Introduction to blogging & Blogging with Pupils which may be of some use.

The above still stands but I want to pick up some details and tips, starting with short term blogs in this post.

Setting a date by Damon Duncan
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

I couple of weeks ago I was following a lovely class blog: International Week. The blog uses posterous’s ease of publishing media very well, the children are recording short pieces of audio with easi-speak mics and uploading them to the blog. The mics are in my opinion a great tools for the classroom.

In the week the blog has also had pictures, animoto, youtube, a survey, google maps and writing. It is a great example of using posterous in the classroom.

Kevin McLaughlin has produced an inspiring post about the week: A week of blogging and creative learning

One of the things I like about this blog is the length of time it ran: 1 school week, 5 days.
I spent a fair bit of time moving old posts across when I left Sandaig to here. I am a digital hoarder. I love the ability to look back through a year or 3 of a blog and I really like the connections that build up and grow on a long term blog. When I was teaching at Sandaig Primary my main blogging focus was Sandaig Otters which ran for 5 years at that url and is still being updated at a new home: Sandaig Otters.

But I also organised quite a few other blogs some for individuals, some for particular projects and these included a few short term blogs.

Short term blogging is, I think, a great way to add any short term project, trip or collaboration in class.

One of the first blogs I organised for short term use was The Listeners – Primary Six Writing Week which only has 11 posts. I probably spent more time customising the design than the class did blogging. I still feel it was a success, the children in the class were very much focused by publishing their work online and very much encouraged by the comments they received.

Since then I’ve organised quite a few short term blogs, including trip blogs and blogs for short school projects. Of course if you have a established weblog you could just use categories or tags to organise a set of posts round a theme or project, but this can be a great way to dip your toe into blogging and finding out how it could help your teaching.

Scottish teachers now have easy access to blogging tools with the release of glow blogs. At he time of writing the blogging facility is fairly basic but several improvements will be made before the start of the next session. Setting up a glow blog is very straightforward and LTS have produced some introductory material: Glow Blogs – An Overview « Glow Help Articles, glow blogs can be set to be private with only glow users, or a subset of those users having access or open to the public. I would recommend that you open the blogs up to the public. If I didn’t have access to glow I think I’d be very tempted by posterous as a simple way to set up a blog and get pupils started.

Although setting up and using a blog is technically very simple you need to think a wee bit about the attitude of the pupils, they need to know that they are not using bebo, facebook or messaging their friends, that they have a responsibility to themselves, their class and school.

Short Term Advantages

  • The pupils will not have time to forget the safety information or become fedup with you reminding them.
  • The initial excitement of publishing online will hopefully not fade over a short term project.
  • By setting limits in time and scope for the blog makes it more doable and less likely to lose focus or drift off which can happen with long term class blogs.
  • If the blog is collaborative with another school setting a fixed period will give all parties a target that is easier to met and give attention to than an open ended project.
  • If you are hoping that an audience will have an effect on your pupils organising that is simpler, and your audience will be more likely to stay the course.
  • It is probably easier to give pupils more control over the organisation of a short term blog with simple aims.

Short Term Tips

  • Makes sure the blog is set up and you are comfortable with using the interface
  • If you are going to use photos make sure the pupils know your rules for posting, (probably no named faces).
  • Pupils can use the cameras, edit and resize pictures independently. I am alway surprised at how many school taking photos is a job for adults.
  • Similarly with other media, make sure that you are not going to be needed to get it sort out and posted. If your pupils are not regularly handling cameras, importing and editing media files make sure you have at least a couple of experts before the project starts.
  • You can prep an audience, contact another school, explain to parents how to post, do a wee bit of online publicity (twitter).

Short Term Examples

International Week the blog mentioned at the start of this post is a great example. The rest are ones that I have organised, not that I think they are particularly good examples but I know more about them.

Snakes and Ladders, this blog was set up for a project designed to help integrate children joining our school when the one across the road closed down. Half a dozen primary sevens were given the responsibility of keeping the project blog up-to-date and did a great job. Another team were tasked with creating a video which was posted at the end of the project. The pupils were not in my class and basically organised themselves during the project.

The Dream Dragon – A log of the dream dragon project quite a different blog, mostly updated by myself and used as a teaching tool for a fairly long project with sporadic activity, I wanted the class to have an overview of the project.

World Cup 2006 I noticed quite a lot of classroom blogging about the current World Cup, this one stimulated a few reluctant boys, unfortunately the Scottish term cut it short.

We blogged trips to Holland in 2005, 2007 and 2008 these blogs were much appreciated by parents as were the Holland 2010 posts which kept my ‘tradition’ going after I left school. Trip blogs are a great way to demonstrate some of the powers of the internet to your class and to get parents interested in blogging.

I blogged a weeks trip to Glencoe 2006 to do outdoor activities. When a class I had previously taught to blog went with their next teacher to Blairvadach they were perfectly capable of organising the blog themselves.

Elephants was another week long poetry blog which gathered some of very interesting comments I’ll return to some ideas about comments in a later post. Like the The Listeners blog having a separate blog meant we could customise it for a particular project.

Bottle Poem

McClure – Sandaig is a collection of 3 blogs for a collaborative project with a class in Georgia in the USA.

In one of the blogs I made some fairly crude customisations that allowed comments to appear with the same weight as posts. I did this, as usual, at the last minute but I think it was a nice idea it reminds me that blogs are not fit for every purpose and were not designed with the classroom in mind, hopefully in the longer term we will get blog like software that will allow even more customisation than is available now.

This particular hack was performed quickly at the last minute and I would not have been able to do it if the blog had been a long term one. Short term blogs are ideal for all sorts of experimentation.

I am sure I’ve only scratched the surface of the use of a short term blog I hope these examples show that it can be a useful tool in the classroom and would allow folk unfamiliar with blogging to make an achievable and worthwhile start or experiment.

I hope produce a few more posts about classroom blogging which might be helpful to people starting out with glow blogs next session and will tag them glowblogs. I would be interested in collecting any other short term use of blogs in the classroom.

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Glow Blog Screenshot

Yesterday saw the launch of blogs in Glow. A much requested feature from the beginning it is great to see Glow getting into a web 2 world at last. To set up your blog you need to have creating a blog allowed by your ASM, after that you just add a Blog webpart to a glow page and click create. You can create a private blog, one that can only be viewed by glow users and an open blog, I know which one I’d go for;-)

Alan Hamilton has published a table explaining how glow users roles map to the blog’s role: Glow Blogs | #learnerham. I think I’d go for giving any pupils as much permission as I could. At Sandaig Primary the children always blogged with admin rights and they never put a foot wrong.

Yesterday I set up a quick test blog just to see how thing work, I managed to get in first and spent a while trying things out. It is, on first impression, a pretty standard WordPress set up and I managed to change my theme, add stuff to the sidebar and make a couple of posts. I had a bit of trouble posting an image as there seems to be a wee bug in the system, I’d guess this will be easy to fix.

The blog both integrates into glow, with a version (without media) of the Quick Press area in the glow webpart:

Blow Webpart

this could be handy if you wanted a text only blog, but I am more interested in the fact that with a public blog you can log into the blog admin directly using your glow login through the magic of Shibboleth.

Feature Requests I’ll be making

To celebrate day two of glow blogging I though I’d make a couple of feature requests.

  • Storage space; at the moment this is set to 10mb:
    Storage Space
    Two header graphics and a couple of other small pics and I am at 3% of this already. My graphics are fairly well squashed (unlike some who should know better;-) ), 10mb gives very little space for audio or video files. I’ve not tested the upload file size limit. I know Glow has been very good at increasing storage space for standard glow sites when it is needed and hope they will take the same approach here.
  • Settings, not too surprising but you can’t do a lot with these, the one thing I would love to see turned on is the ability to activate the MetaWebLogAPI, this would enable lots of good stuff, the use of specialised blogging clients and, more interesting to me, blogging from mobile devices (ipod touches for instance).

I’ll not be lobbying for lots of extra themes, though other folk might, the one I’m using, K2, has a fair amount of customisation available and I don’t think the limited number of theme is that important.

Getting started blogging

Especially if done in full public view there are some potential difficulties. I personally feel that the advantages hugely outweigh these, but I also feel it pays to tread carefully. I always used to repeatedly stress to my pupils there responsibilities in publishing to the world. I likened it to a school trip, explaining that blogging was like going out into the world as a school representative. In the same way as I expected excellent behaviour on a trip I expected excellent behaviour on the blog.

Teachers too have their responsibilities, we need to try to get he best out of blogging, introducing it in a structured way. Three years ago I blogged: Starting Blogging in the Classroom and think that is still a reasonable approach.

Ever since I started pupils blogging I have felt that it is a wonderful classroom activity and I hope that the glow blogs will lead to an explosion of classroom blogging across Scotland.

I am also hoping that these blogs will be listed on ScotEduBlogs making that an even more powerful resource.

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It has taken me a while to get round to the second post based on a morning at Glencairn primary working on the ipod touch project. In fact the pupils have beat me to it: Comic Twist.

After syncing the ipods I did a wee bit of work with the class on their new apps.

The first app was Comic Twist which allows you to create comics with up to 3 panes a little like Comic Touch, the Comic Life for the ipod/phone. I went for comic touch as it is cheaper that Comic Touch and does 3 panes in a comic.

The second app is i think going to be a great one, it has been sitting in front of my nose for quite while, firstClass. FirstClass is the email and communication systems used in North Lanarkshire Education and I have been rather slow to realise its potential for all sort of things. It is a great way to have discussions, share files etc. I’ve used the mobile client on my iPhone a lot mostly for email, it is amazingly quick even in an area with a very poor mobile connection.

I just had not thought of using it with pupils. The weekend before the iPod touch conference it suddenly dawned on me that we could use it to pass files around the classroom, messaging etc. At the conference the children from the Friezland iPod Project were using firstClass in this way. So when I got to return to Glencairn I synced the iPods with new software and showed the pupils their new firstClass account. We are only using one account for all the ipods to share but the children could easily upload images (created with comic touch) and join in a discussion. The images and discussions can of course be accessed on a desktop or via the web. This makes it very easy to get text images and files onto and off the iPods. We could add movies to a file store in firstClass on the desktop and access it on the touches. We even quickly tested exporting a keynote presentation that some pupils were working on and uploading it, it worked a treat.

Click on the thumbnails to see bigger versions of desktop and iPod views.


I think FirstClass is going to be very useful for working with iPod touches in the classroom.

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Recently I’ve been thinking about ipod touches quite a bit. As well as giving some support to the Glencairn ipod project and being the middle man for a wee Consolarium trial of TapTale which will start soon, I am just back from Oldham and Blackpool CLC’s iPodTouch Conference.

The conference was a great success and there is a lot of interesting chatter on the ning site and on Twitter #ipod2010

Last weekend I started playing with an idea for a wee web app. The idea is to provide an interface for searching flickr and creating images combining flickr photos and text. Using only photos that can be adapted and incorporating attribution.

shark_touch_poem

As a sort of proof of concept I made a web app that makes lunes. A Lune is a fixed-form variant haiku created for the English language. It has three words on the first line, five on the second and three on the third. I’ve used lune writing as a classroom activity on several occasions, they are simple and fun to write. (Lune (poetry) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

The web app works like this:

Touch Poem Screens

  1. Pupils load the webpage int oSafari on their ipods and type in a search.
  2. The app retrieves and displays a list of creative commons photos that you are allowed to make derivations of.
  3. Pupils select a photo by clicking on it. This opens the photo with a 3 line form over it.
  4. Pupils type in poem and click Go.
  5. The image and text is sent to the server where it is stamped with the text and attribution and sent back to browser.
  6. Pupil presses on image, save dialog opens and image can be saved to photos.

I am using the phpFlickr to search and GD to stamp the photos

I tried the app out with the Glencairn primary six class on tuesday, we then bumped the photos to my phone, transferred them to a mac and added voice in iMovie: Animal Lunes, all in 90 minutes.

I though the app ran fairly smoothly except for quotes ’ which came back escaped with a slash ’, some text ran off the pictures and the problem with not being able to fix spelling mistakes. I should be able to fix the escapes and hopefully alter the font size to suit the picture width.

Of course the whole thing was put together in an afternoon, the code is rough and the interface rougher. The plan might be to make it a bit more ajaxy and add a few different poem types, proper haiku, kennngs, Cinquains etc. I am wondering if it would be worthwhile developing? Is it too much of a one off to be really useful? I’d love to know what you think?

You can see the webpage in a quick and dirty Lunes Simulator or directly Flickr Lunes.

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Bumping

I’ve just organised (in a loose sense) an iPod touch pilot at Glencairn Primary School. At the North Lanarkshire ICT & Technical Services Centre we have an an ICT Box Scheme – Hi-Tech Kit on Short Term Loan and had originally got 22 iPod touches as part of the scheme. Although schools regularly borrow the other kit on the page no one had asked for the touches, so we decide to do a slightly more formal pilot and asked for classes to volunteer. We wanted a primary class with ? 20 pupils so that the children could feel some sort of ownership for the devices. We had a few volunteers and drew Glencairn out of the hat. The pilot will run from now until Summer.

Last week I spent a couple of days trying to choose some apps, and ended up with 50 odd and a pile of podcasts. Here are the apps: 3D Brain, Angle, Art Envi, Basic Math, Brain Toot Lite, Brain Tuner, Brain Tutor, Bump, CM_, ColorTalk Free,Comic Touch Lite, CountriesLE, Dictionary, Documents, EU, EuropeanCapitals, EuroTalk, FlagsWorld, Flickr, FlingFree, FlipBook Lite, Fliq Notes, French LITE, Google Earth, HistoryMaps, Hubble, iBearFlagsEU, Icon Memos, iSpy, iTalk Lite, iThesaurus, Kaloki Free, Martian, MATHO, Maths, miTables Lite, Muscle Head and Neck, NASA, Newbie Lt, Pix Remix Lt, PopMath Lite, Quick Graph, SculptMaster D FREE, SimpleDraw, Skeleton Head and Neck, Sketch Pad, Sketchmania, Slideshow, Stars, TCT Lite, TimesTables Free, touchPhysics Lite, UpThere, Whiteboard & Wikipanion. I just copied the file names from the finder and remove the file extension and version numbers so the names may not be exactly the same as the app names.

The podcasts:

The ipods all sync onto one mac and the idea is that we will not add any more apps and the children will not be able to update the ipods, they will be able to transfer images to classroom computers. I was surprised that this allows you to buy apps and add them to all of the ipods.

On Friday I visited the school and handed over the touches to the pupils. I was surprised at how many of them had touches at home, over half a dozen out of 19. We went through some stuff to introduce the children to the the basics. I used a document camera to project one touch to the class smartboard and that seemed to work fine. After we let the pupils explore the ipods and play with a couple of games we introduced some apps. We typed a sentence into the notes app and figured out how to copy and paste. Next we checked out the Calculator and Dictionaries. Then we created Martians with the Make a Martian app and use Bump to share them between phones.

The classroom has an airport base station (one of the older grey ones) and I was please at how quickly the children could exchange images using bump over wifi. I hope this can become the basis for some collaborative work, groups collecting images or screenshots annotating them with Comic Touch Lite and bumping them. eventually they may be able to use some sort of slideshow app to put the images together.

The possibilities for using the touches seem endless and we explained to the children that they were more likely to see how to use the touches to help their learning as we were.

The hour and a bit I had in the class went by far to quickly and i feel a wee bit of jealousy for Ms Moonie.

We have started a blog Glencairn iPod for the class to report their adventures and assess the devices and I’ll have to go back in a couple of weeks to explain how that will work (that is my excuse anyway).

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&channelIn

Having just read Joe Dale’s Integrating ICT into the MFL classroom:: Discovering the power of RSS at TM Mobile the text version of his audio at TeachMeet Mobile I though it might be worth adding links to the notes for my audio:

Joe does a great job filling in the background to TeachMeet mobile so I’ll not give much background except to say that I was surprised at how well the event went, ipadio‘s audio coming over loud and clear after I switched from Safari to firefox.When David had told me about it I wondered if it would really work, would enough folk signup in the short timeframe and would folk listen if the technology worked. For twitter there seem to be a far number following live. We had a wee problem with some of the prerecorded audio and one was posted to EDtalk.cc: EDUtalk365 #1 – A G Pate (University of Glasgow) and it had 70 views within an hour (nearly 300 now)

At the start of the noughties I was teaching at Sandaig Primary in Glasgow.
By then. even as a late starter I had been using computers for 5 years. We had 4 or 5 apple macs in school and a few old BBCs. I never did get a BBC to work.

By the year 2000 I was creating ict tools, mostly with the wonderful HyperCard, games for kids, worksheet makers for teachers and planning tool for myself. At that time my focus was for making simple and engaging activities for children this included a fair bit of drill and practise.

Even then I had always enjoyed getting my classes to produce newspaper and the like, trying in a simple way to make some of their work ‘real’ and purposeful.

Over the next couple of years I started a school website to show off my pupils work. I was trying to fill up 2mb of AOL space with stories, pictures and some flash animation. About 6 pupils in my class had an internet connection, dialup of course. I hoped that publishing on the web would be motivation for the children and started to build simple tools to help them publish word and pictures.

By 2004 we had out own domain and started to produce a weblog, I was not really aware of the blogging that was going on in education but though it followed on motivationally from other things we were doing. by this time the school had a network with 2pcs in the class, our old macs, now including a couple of iMacs were not allowed on the network.

At the Scottish learning festival in 2004 I saw radiowaves and was very impressed with this online collection of class and school radio stations, unfortunately I could not afford this so started thinking about publishing audio on our website. This was 1st recorded on the windows voice recorder which seemed to be limited to 1 minute recordings. i had a lot of fun figuring out how to get my truly horrible flash ‘radio station’ to work. It was obvious from the start, even with terrible quality and background noise that the pupils could produce compelling and powerful audio and enjoyed doing it

.

According to wikipedia The term “podcasting” was first mentioned by Ben Hammersley in The Guardian newspaper in a February 2004 article. But I did not heard of it.

As we continued to make more recordings, of music, french and writing, in early 2005 I was hearing about podcasting but though it a flash in the pan! By Easter I realised that it was the way to go and added a handmade RSS feed to our Radio Sandaig webpage. The main focus for the podcast shifted to a child lead magazine style ‘chat show’. This continued till 2008 with occasional curricular or project based episodes.

I found podcasting to be a wonderful tool. Extremely motivating , children would happily work on scripts in their own time it particularly good for encouraging collaborative working.

For a while the children were unaware that they were involved in talking, listening, reading and writing as they assumed they were doing ict. As the shows went by it was obvious that individuals were improving their confidence and talking skills especially and that the groups of children were working hard helping each other improve their presentation.

Over the 2nd half of the decade podcasting has become mainstream and is a lot easier to do. Over the time we moved through audacity to GarageBand and tools to create & publish podcasts are easy to find. I think of classroom podcasting as a low cost activity as you only really need one computer, and perhaps a microphone. most of the activity for the children is in the planning and preparation.

Tools like posterous or podcast producer make the technical side of podcasting invisible and will allow learners to concentrate on the content and presentation. and I’ll be interested in seeing how this develop.

As the decade finishes we are seeing a lot more mobile podcasting possibilities; ipadio, audoBoo and posterous. These will hopefully be exploited for mobile podcasting away from the classroom, a different sort of podcast, less planning and presentation more capturing experience and evidence. I occasionally. with much footering, tried mobile podcasting but now we have the tools at hand and in a lot of pockets. I remember fantasising back in the middle of the decade about some sort of podcast which could be made on the same device as it was listened to. Podcast and comments would become some sort of tree structure with listeners being able to listen and join in to different nodes in the conversation. I hope to see something of that sort appear in the next decade.

Finally a podcast that made a big impact on me in the early days was an audio-manifesto produced on idlewords, there is a text copy at:www.idlewords.com/audio-manifesto.txt. Basically the writer was proving that reading was better than listening, faster less linear and that is much easier to provide links in hypertext than audio. I am still convinced by this, but there are two thing that make podcasts stand out, one you can listen while doing something else, try reading a blog while doing the dishes or driving, the second is the extra communication provided by the human voice, time and again comments on the children’s podcast showed that this was much appreciated by their audience.

I don’t think that is going to go away and podcasting of some sort will still be a great classroom activity in 10 years time, I just hope it is used in more of them.

All of the presentations from TeachMeet Mobile will be posted on EduTalk over the next few days as part of the EDUtalk365 project.