Tag: flickr

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End of School Year

Straight from school on friday to the pub, for a bit to eat, a few Guinness and to talk a fair bit of nonsense.
Steam was let off the world put to rights and a few farewells said.
The way staffing in schools goes at the moment you spend a lot of time saying goodbye.

The next day I got down playing with phpFlickr here, increasing my admiration for both flickr‘s api and phpFlickr. It is a great pity that flickr is not available in many schools (it is worth repeating this frequently I think).
I finally bit the bullet and bought a pro account on flickr, nice seeing the old photos reappear safe and sound and the badge on my other blog is refilled.

Progress

Due to rain, I’ve spent a bit of time today tidying my desk at home and planning the geeky bit of my holidays.

A few weeks ago Carol Fuller (Sandaig’s fairy blogmother) invited me onto facebook, which I hope to explore and blog about. Through it I’ve discovered mojungle a mobloging sort of application which seems nice. I’ve also found that flickr is getting on better with my phone so I hope to try some moblogging experiments perhaps combined with the aforementioned phpFlickr. I’ve embedded my flickr tagged moblog and mojungle on my moblog.

I didn’t use the third glow pilot as much as I did the second, but I need to blog a bit about glow I think.

I am also going to spend a bit of time with SuperCard and update some of my projects.

Other than that I hope to get down to the beach, climb a few wee hills and resurrect my tai chi practise all once the rain stops.

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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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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.