Tag: glowscotland

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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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I’ve blogged a bit before about adapting glow to show video and audio. I’ve found another way to do it using the TopUp Javascript library and jQuery

Here is a screencast to show how it works:

This goes in an xml webpart in glow:




Here is what is going on:

Line 1 includes the jQuery Library hosted by google.

We then have a simple script using the library.

Line 3 setting jQuery to noConflict, this means that we use jQuery for our main function name rather than the $ shortcut. I am not sure if I need to do this but it fixed some early experiments.

Line 5, this is where we use jQuery, we use it to add a css class of top_up to any link that links to an m4v file.

Line 9 add the TopUp javascript library from gettopup.com. This is enough to make m4v videos play in a popup window but in the last bit of the script we just ajust some settings.

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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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Mp3s_in_glow

A while ago I blogged about adding some functionality to glow: Glow Kludges, in a fairly crude way. This technique for embedding players for audio and video content into glow semi- automatically has proved useful to several teachers and classes and in a few groups I’ve created.

I’ve managed to refine some of this a bit recently for both audio (mp3) files and some video formats, this is one of the improved techniques.

Again the idea is to replace a link to an mp3 files in a glow document library with an embedded Flash player. This avoids users having different behaviours when clicking on a link to an mp3 depending on their operating system, browser and settings

We use 2 JavaScript libraries jQuery and the jQuery SWFObject Plugin and a small fragment of code, links to the libraries (jQuery is hosted by google and can be loaded from there, I’ve uploaded jQuery SWFObject to some glow webhosting space) and the Dewplayer Flash mp3 player.

The links to the libraries and code are put in a glow xml webpart:

//first link to the 2 libraries
<script type = "text/javascript"src = "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js" > </script>
<script type = "text/javascript"src = "http://publicwebsites1.glowscotland.org.uk/jjjs/jquery.swfobject.min.js" > </script>
 <span style="color:#0080FF">// now replace links to mp3s with flash player</span>
<script type = "text/javascript "charset = "utf - 8 " >
$(document).ready(
function() {
// href$=.mp3 is the selector finds all links to mp3 files
    $('a[href$=.mp3]').each(function() {
        audio_file = $(this).attr('href');
        $(this).flash(
        {
// dewplayer.swf is the flash document hosted in a glow webhosting site
            swf: 'http://publicwebsites1.glowscotland.org.uk/jjjs/dewplayer.swf',
// these arguments will be passed into the flash document
            flashvars: {
                mp3: audio_file,
            },
            height: 20,
            width: 200,
        }
        );
//we need to stop the link to the file working
        this.onclick = function() {
            return false;
        };
    }
    );
});
</script>

Basically with the above snippet of code in an xml webpart any links to mp3 files on a page will be converted into a flash player. The xml webpart can be hidden by setting its titlebar to none. When pupils upload mp3 files into a document library on a page the flash players will be embedded.

jQuery is an extremely powerful javascript library that is easy to use by folk like me with very limited JavaScript knowledge and very useful for adding functionality to glow.

By the By anyone interested in altering glows appearance should check out the Consolarium group, Charlie Love has sorted out how to apply a custom theme to the pages there and posted an explanation and resources on his blog.

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T“>

On Thursday I took part in a Glowing Thursdays event, presenting about podcasting, I’ve put my slides together with an audio recording of the event. I’ve done a little editing mostly to cut out a phone call interruption (I left in the first ring to explain the subsequent loss of my train of thought) and to add the answers from the Q&A at the end as I failed to capture the audio of the questions. Anyway here is the video, click to play.

I’ve also uploaded just the audio

or download from my iDisk. There is a larger version of the movie here: MobileMe Gallery – Podcasting Glowing Thursdays

Here is a list of the links mentioned:

Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike photo by Seven Morris

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I guess this will be blogged and tweeted a fair bit, 3 years ago I hopeful posted:

Unfortunately I have found navigating the discussions very clunky. lots of scrolling and clicking, neither of the two views let you read and respond with out a lot of clicking.
It is hard to follow discussions that you have started and taken part in, as there is not ‘my discussions’ or even a search. There is no recent discussions list either so to see if a discussion has be updated you need to dig down into the various threads. The date on the threads is not the date that the last addition to the tread or sub thread was made.
I really hope that this can be improved on by the time the portal goes live.

Today I woke to a barrage of tweets about glow forums. Glow forums are are forum setup on glow using the popular phpBB Open Source forum solution. Like many other internet users I am already familiar with phpBB which is a vast improvement over Glow discussions.

Of course this will have training implications for glow users who have spent time getting their heads round Glow discussions but I for one will be a lot happier showing folk how to use the new forums than I ever have been waffling round the previous tools shortcomings.

With blogs and wikis due to be added this session I will not have much room to moan about glow anymore.

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A short while ago I wrote about using JavaScript in glow: Glow Kludges and noted that Fraser Davidson had briefly showed me his use of XSL in glow. I had hoped to catch up with Fraser to find out more about this, but have not managed to yet. He had mentioned that it should be possible to combine Javascript with the pages produced from xml (say a rss feed) and styled with XSL.

This weekend I was looking at this again, due to the horrible weather, and started googling XSL, while I’ve not got a real(any) understand of XSL I have managed to do my usual copy, paste & mangle and got some interesting results. I was able to take various rss feeds, format them with XSL and then insert media players with JavaScript. I don’t really know enough to understand this, but have made a wee screencast to some of the things I’ve been playing with.

One tip I do have for editing xml and xsl in glow is not to use the glow interface, just set links to your XML (and optionally XSL) in the XML webpart. These file then can be edited and updated without going into the glow ‘modify shared page stuff’ trying to edit the xml or xsl in Safari or firefox in a tiny text box is a pain.

I’d be interested in working with other glow folk to see where this could go, I wonder if a national group could be set up for discussion and testing.

It does make me wonder why these potentially powerful techniques have not been explained or documented by LTS or RM they would have answered many of the folk who were disappointed by lack of RSS support in glow.

The screencast is pretty rough, more of a thinking aloud one while looking at the screen than a planned out video, but I’d be keen to know what you think about this.

Original video replaced by vimeo copy (11.07.2011)

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Sfl 09folk

I am starting to filter through various thoughts about the two days at the learning festival and of course TeachMeet09, yesterday I posted my unused, TeachMeet09 presentation (not a presentation, just talking and webpages) and I’ll have to post about our successful SLFtalk project in more detail later.

I found listening to all of the audio posted over the two days (27 in all i think) that got me thinking about how I had spent my time at SLF, firstly I had obviously missed a lot both on the trade show and seminars.

In fact I missed a few seminars that I had booked due to the printout supplied by the festival lacking days, the events I had booked were listed and times given but no days.

The following is probably a bit mixed up as to times and even days, in the SECC one hour looks like another.

Wednesday

My iPhone powered Posterous go off to a good start even before I got into the SEECC as I met Miss SLF herself, Tess just outside, Tess dressed the part and we grabbed a coffee and started bumping into folk until the doors opened. This met and chat formed a major part of my festival and quickly filled up my head with lots of ideas. On previous occasions I’ve live blogged a few seminars, I gave that up as my typing and thinking are not fast enough, this time I did not even take notes, but I think it might be a plan not only to take notes in seminars but at coffee time too.

Glowing Lounge

When the doors opened I went to the glow lounge, where I was introduced to Fraser Davidson an RM glow support guy. Although he was busy Fraser had time to swap ideas about using glow with me and we have been tweeting back and forth since. I am pretty excited about some of the functionality that Fraser has been adding to glow and will keep my eye on the Glow Scotland blog for news.

Fiona Hyslop Keynote

Next I went to the Fiona Hyslop – Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning keynote, this didn’t trigger any alarms, except perhaps when she mentioned several times that teachers would need to stretch themselves, not sure how many teachers have any more to stretch! The political aspects of the keynote mostly went over my head, luckily Bob Hill filled me later in when I asked, I hope he will blog about this soon.

Davidnoblepres 09

David Noble Using Glow Meet to connect learning professionals

After that I headed for David Noble’s seminar Using Glow Meet to connect learning professionals – lessons from the Access Network where David talked about his work in networking groups of professional online. He used his Access Network as an example and explained how he is starting to use Glow and GlowMeet to work with Chartered Teachers. David has an amazing amount of experience in this and filled in a lot of detail of how to make this work in reality rather than theory.

In the audience I met Joe Dale for the first time (in the flesh) the first of quite a few English educationalists who had made the journey north.

After David’s seminar he Joe and I headed down to the floor and buttonholed folk as we went asking them to post to SLFtalk I am not too sure how this went down, but we did pick up a few promises that came good.

Stevedoug

At some point we bumped into Doug Belshaw and Steve Beard and went for fish and chips. The usual banter and info swap took place.

Steve later showed me some of the way he is using sharepoint to provide a learning platform for pupils. The interface was, imo, better than Glow which is also based on sharepoint, I pointed Steve at LTS’s Andrew Brown and crossed my fingers.

The rest of the afternoon was a bit of a blur, I met with my north Lan colleagues, watch Ann present on 2DIY and the Smartboard on Smart’s stand. I’ve seen the smartboard in a new light since moving to North Lan, mostly due to watching Ann present, my previous use was mostly as a big mouse and scratch pad for brainstorming by pupils, Ann seems to know the notebook software inside out.

CPD Lounge

Bigtweets cpd Lounge

At some point(s) I visited the cpd lounge, when I enjoyed the Scotland on Screen presentation and persuaded David Griffiths to record a segment about the project for SLFtalk: Scotland on screen. The CPD Lounge seem to be acting as a meeting place for lot of people, I finally got to exchange more than a tweet with Mike Coulter, Mike is a fire hose of great ideas and has given a great deal of support and informal advice about SLFtalk. We had an interesting chat about aggregating and filtering information. I also fixed the cpdLounge video camera and was delighted to see that they were using big tweets.

I met up with David Muir and went with him across the Clyde to:

TeachMeet SLF09

Bob Camel John

TeachMeet too place over the river at the BBC building. As usual an amazing set of people were there, including a big English contingent. Although I was disappointed not to get drawn for a presentation this was offset by the people who were. All were really interesting and it is hard to pick the favourites. I guess the ones that made the most impression on me were the ones that were about the effect on pupils:

Technology took a step back in Tess Watson‘s presentation on STEP as well she had a cloth’s line of pictures instead of a slide deck. Neil Winton was on passionate form and you can follow his slides on Slideshare, Neil was gently cameled as this year was a first visit to Scotland by the TeachMeet Camel.

A feature of this TeachMeet were the Learning conversations at the break, I’d guess most folk just had a chat but I joined in with Can Glow drive pedagogical change? lead by Bob Hill, along with John Connell. It is easy to get on a high horse talking about this stuff and I think I probably did, rather overstating some of the problems with Glow.

After that is was into a taxi and off to TeachEat for a lot more informative chat. I ended up in the pub next door with Ollie Bray who had lead a brilliant effort at organising teachMeet and Tom Barrett. Tom gave me my favourite image of the day, describing his classroom with Endless Ocean projected from a Wii beside a long wall display as ‘taking the game out of the console’. This natural mix of technology with pain and glue is essential in the primary classroom.

There is already a lot of content online tagged tmslf09 and there will be more.

Thursday

Some of Wednesdays reports my be a little out of chronological order and these ones certainly are.

Glowing Lounge

Ger Glowmeet

I visited the Glowing Lounge twice on Thursday to see 2 of my North Lanarkshire colleagues present, both have only been using glow since January but have made great progress.

  • Geraldine Shearer talked about setting up her own school site, joining and participating in a National group, The very important bear, and setting up another National Group ‘The Unsinkable Ship’. Geraldine’s class joined in a glow group and the moment their smiles indicated that Geraldine appeared on screen spoke volumes.
  • Marjory Murphy talked about introducing glow to her class and using glow for Active Literacy; story writing and posting Formative Assessment comments.

Although I’ve seen some of this before it hammered home to me how glow is making a difference for teachers and classes that have not used online collaborative tools before. Glow may be an imperfect tool, but given the large amount of support given to teachers using it compare to other online tools and the overall vision, it will hopefully change many games.

Smart Table

Smarttable ian

At some point in the day Tom and I ended up at the smart stand watching Iain Hallahan Presenting on the SMART Table, you can read more on Iain’s blog, but I was captivated by the attention and concentration his pupils gave the table.

It would be great if the festival could be run on a day where more classroom teachers could come along. Over the years I was luck enough to get along but for most class teachers this is not possible.

Dragon’s Den

Was another area where pupils got to perform and worth watching because of that. Showed what pupils can do, confidently presenting to a large group of adults in a competitive setting. The sort of thing that goes on regularly in a lot of schools across Scotland.

Derek & Ollie

I didn’t stay until the end of the Dragon’s Den as I wanted to catch the spotlight by Ollie and Derek. At that point Derek was still in the Dragon’s den. Being a regular reader of both of their blogs I didn’t expect too many surprises but it is nice to have beliefs reinforced. In the event both gave a pile of interesting information and some food for thought.

Ollie talked about opening youTube up in schools and suggested that we should risk assess in the same way as we would any other potential problematic activity. I have always explained of online activity to my classes as being similar to a school trip, explaining that pupils represent the school and I expect positive reactions from the public. Ollie extended this nicely, explaining that using youTube would not mean free searches for whatever caught the pupils fancy but the use of youTube for meaningful learning.

Among other things Derek gave a rundown on CANVAS Scotland’s first schools based virtual world for learning. I’ve been involved at the LA side of this project and have been impressed by the scale of the project. That is it is small scale and focused. Although Derek probably winces when he sees me in his inbox asking for updates I think this has real possibilities for the classroom and As Derek has explained could be duplicated for other projects. Canvas uses opensim to create a Secondlife like world, in this case dedicated to art. each LA in Scotland has its own virtual gallery wher pupils art will hang alongside video of the pupils talking about their art. Pupils will be able to meet and talk about their art work in this virtual world. Watch the video to get more of an idea of how this will work. CANVAS will be accessed through Glow.

One thing Derek said that I have trouble with. In talking about various 3d virtual worlds he said:

are they going to gravitate or grow into text based one dimensional interfaces, …. I don’t think that they will…

I am not so sure, I hope children (and adults) will be able to move between 3d and text, appreciate hand written poetry as well as 3d movies, be happy using text and video chat. I hope CANVAS could be a model for a similar project using pupil voice instead of pictures and video. I like the idea of Tom’s pupils moving between Wii and wall display the two connected together.

I recorded parts of Derek and Ollie’s presentations for SLFtalk and you can listen there: Derek Robertson on CANVAS and Ollie on youTube.

Last minute on the floor

After the spotlight I went back to the floor to visit a couple of stalls I had meant to go to i-board make open-ended tools, games and activities for interactive whiteboard, like many other stands, but came at the recommendation of Marlyn who is working on matching the activities to CfE, at the moment they are offering 6 months, full access to all materials for free. I’ve not had time to explore much but trust Marlyn’s judgement.

I also dashed round to 2Simple Software to speak to Alan about the launch of 2Simple Online. I really like the 2simple products, and especially wish 2DIY was available for macs. At the moment 2Simple are giving all Scottish Schools one years free access to 2PublishExtra which will be accessed through Glow. This is another example of how glow is becoming more interesting as a portal rather than a tool.

SLFtalk

During all of this activity I was keeping half an eye on SLFtalk asking folk to contribute and moderating their contributions.

It is important, to me at least, that this moderation was just to avoid spam rather than to filter content.

I am delighted with the range of contributors and contributions to SLFtalk and will be blogging more about this later. Enough to say it has restored my faith in podcasting, openness and the human voice! I also hope to produce a compilation podcast of all the contributions ‘Now That is what I call SLFtalk‘ very soon.

Highlights

The above is a bit rambling, so here are my highlights:

  • Meeting folk, too many to mention, some for the first time in the flesh. As usual all were interesting, some as expected and some surprising.
  • Glow, how it is being used, and the tools that are becoming available through it. (I didn’t think I’d be saying that.)
  • Pupils, Geraldine’s pupils smiles, Iain’s concentration, the Dragon’s den presentations. I wish I had asked Neil’s a sensible question or two.
  • SLFtalk, lots to think about there. more later.

I also regret lost opportunities, for conversation, seminars and even some stalls, hopefully next year will be even better.

And

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This was going to be my TeachMeet talk at the Scottish Learning festival this year, if my name had been pulled out of the virtual fruit machine.

kludge: (a badly assembled collection of parts hastily assembled to serve some particular purpose (often used to refer to computing systems or software that has been badly put together)) wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

The kludge refers in this case to my, fairly clunky, attempts to change some things about glow’s interface.

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with glow since I first saw it; I love the concept (What is Glow?) and hate some of the GUI and user experience. Since watching and being a little involved in glow training I hate some of the difficulties folk have doing simple things but I love seeing the inspiring work teachers and pupils have done in very a short space of time. (I saw great presentations from Marjory Murphy and Geraldine Shearer, both from North Lanarkshire, in the glowing lounge .)

Last week I was working with a primary 6 class using GarageBand to create some simple music, the idea was then to upload the pupil files to a glow group into a document library and discuss the music in a discussion forum below.

The group is a local Authority one, and the hope is that eventually pupils may comment and assess work from other classrooms and schools.

Glowdocs

Unfortunately when the children started trying to listen to each others music, the files downloaded and opened in itunes, rather that just played in the browser. This lead to a little confusion and made it hard to move from listening, back to the browser and into a discussion.

I had been using an xml webpart at the top of the page, to make the glow page a little prettier:

Garagebandglowtop

So I started copying the links to the mp3 files and using dewplayer to provide a flash player. It quickly became apparent that this was going to make the page very big and the players would be separated from the discussion by the document library. It would create a lot of work for me and would not be easily for most teachers to duplicate. I really wanted to automate the process and I’ve found one way to do that.

I’ve seen and used the Anarchy Media Player on many blogs. This is a JavaScript solution for turning links to media into media players:

Anarchy Media Player 2.5 for WordPress, WordPressMu and Standalone Javascript will play any simple href link to mp3, flv, Quicktime mov, mp4, m4v, m4a, m4b, 3gp as well as Windows wmv, avi and asf files, in the appropriate player on your web page.

I though I might give it a try. I need to upload a folder full of various files to a website outside glow, as I could not get Glow to accept a JavaScript file in a document library. Once I’d done that I needed to do some simple configuration and then added this fragment to the xml webpart:

The automagically turned the document library above into this:

Glowdocswithplayer

Each link to an mp3 file is changed into a flash player which plays that file.

Brief testing seems to show that this will work for .mov .flv video files too. There seems to be some browsers issues which I am testing. I’ve also tried a few experiments with the shadowbox-js media viewer and the jQuery JavaScript Library with some success, again a lot of browser testing to do. My Javascript knowledge is minimal to say the least but I had a couple of brief conversations in the glowing lounge at the Scottish Learning festival this week and was introduced to Fraser Davidson who works for RM supporting glow. He showed me some lovely stuff he has been doing with XSL to embed and beautify various feeds into glow. He also told me, if I picked it up correctly, that we could export and make available an xml webpart that already has the Javascript links and code to produce the sort of transformation of a document library I’ve been playing with. That would mean that folk would just need to add a webpart to their page to get the same sort of effect, no coding needed. I am hoping to get together with Fraser to find out more and swap ideas.

Later today I hope to attend the Glow Development Needs You! event at LTS and find out more about some alterations and enhancements of glow. It looks like there may be quiet a lot to look forward to in glow soon.

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My blogging seems to have hit a all time low. I think this is mainly because I used to blog about my classroom practice (with some iPhone, web tech and the odd AppleScript thrown in). I was never one for educational theory I am afraid. I now don’t have a classroom to practise in and blog about.

My more technical posts have never been popular (judging by comments) and fall between absolute beginner and competent so don’t have that wide an audience;-)

Anyway I am going to start a wee Glow post and see what happens.

Glow 2blogpost

I’ve blogged about glow before but never had the chance to use it in the classroom. Over the last few weeks I’ve watched North Lanarkshire teachers and pupils start to use glow in practise and have been involved in helping with some of the training.

So far I’ve seen glow have a remarkable effect on some teaching and learning in the first schools to get on board. Teachers have been setting work on glow, children posting work and commenting on other pupils work, locally and further afield. Classes have joined and contributed to National groups and in one case I know off a teacher created a national group within about a week of joining glow. There seems to be a real appetite for getting children involved in all sorts of online collaborating.

One of the favourite activities seem to be the use of Marratech video conferencing through Glow Meet. This is a little ironic as North Lanarkshire has run its own Marratech server for several years. Although this has been used for many projects I think there has been a significant increase in video conferencing in the first couple of months of glow.

I am beginning to think that the most important aspect glow is the way that online collaboration and communication receive promotion and support. There is top down encouragement that is being met by great enthusiasm, almost as if folk have been waiting for the tools unaware that they were already available.

Watching folk take their first steps in glow also highlights some problems with glow and perhaps some pointers for Glow 2.

GUI

Glow Password Change

I’ve watch a fair number of people click the cancel button to start all over again by accident. There are a number of similar examples.
The editing of pages in glow is quite a laborious process compared to many web 2 applications there are many examples of slicker interfaces. Compare adding an rss feed to glow and to, say netvibes. Editing information in glow usually seems to involved lots or page reloads and then some scrolling.

Organisation

Groups are hierarchical and difficult to find, interesting groups may be buried inside others. The ability to search group descriptions and the tagging of groups would help this. Some sort of way of filtering and organising groups is needed.
Recently I found a group discussion in glow asking for suggestions for glow 2. I posted a couple of comments but there is very little discussion on the board, perhaps because folk cannot find it?

Data Exchange

One of the strengths of Web 2 applications is the way many of them allow syndication and distribution of data, I can have flickr update in my blog, recent posts from blogs listed in a wiki and so on. At the moment RSS in glow relies on 3rd party scripts or widgets. The is no way, as far as I know, of getting information out of glow in an automatic way. It is hard t ofollow the work of groups you are interested in and no simple ways to share what a group are doing.
Some of this is due to the overriding concern for security but glow does allow for public facing html webpages so the idea of some of glow being open to the public is not beyond the pale.

Wish List

It would be good if Glow 2 was in some way modular, allowing users and groups to add popular and useful open source components, making them private or open to the world. So a group could have a wordpress blog, a phpBB discussion forum, a choice of cms, wikis VLEs etc. etc. Adding the ability for glow to update and add modules would also make Glow a work in progress, in perpetual Beta, rather than a fixed toolset.
I don’t think this is to far fetched, at the moment glow will allow secure access to lots of external content. If this could be expand to give users a choice of the tools it could be wonderful it would help with some of my GUI and data exchange wishes too.

2 Stars & a Wish

We, in Scotland, have an amazing opportunity in Glow which could be even better.

Basic 5 Point Gold Star Beveled The vision of a national collaboration and communication space for education..

Basic 5 Point Gold Star BeveledThe promotion and support of this collaboration and communication..

BubblesWhen the dust settles we have the best tools for the job, and tools that we can swap at will as better ones come along..

I’d be interested to know what other users have on their glow 2 wishlist? Or if you know where the best place to discuss this would be?

Top image http://www.wordle.net/ with this post’s text.