Tag: teachmeet

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A while ago I proposed A PirateBox for TeachMeet?. Several kind folk donated a fiver and I ordered the Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH wireless router from an amazon reseller.

First problem was that I did not notice that it was shipping from the USA, it arrive the day before TeachMeet SLF11. I didn’t arrive home until late in the evening, but rolled up by sleeves to sort it out. Problem 2 was a USA power supply. This I rectified at Lunchtime the next day and settled down in a corner of the SECC to sort out the box. Apart from the fact I had plugged the mac into the WAN port rather than the LAN port(or the other way round) I didn’t have a wired connection to the network. A major fail, I realised the port problem the next day after TeachMeet and though ti would now be plain sailing.

Yesterday evening I followed the instructions on PirateBox DIY OpenWrt – David Darts Wiki which went, I though pretty well. Unfortunately I didn’t really have a Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH wireless router, I had a Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH2 wireless router! The router was bricked.

I decided to unbrick the router using instructions I found: WZR-HP-G300NH Router: Firmware flash and brick recovery through TFTP After a few tries I noticed extra OS X help in a comment, but still failed. I decided to leave it until today.

This afternoon I had another go, musing again on the comment:

the Mac uses carrier detect to automatically bring network interfaces up and down, and your ethernet interface needs to be up and running at the moment you power the router on, or you’ll miss the little window when the tftp transfer can happen…

I decided to try using linux running on my macbook under virtualbox. The mac had at least given me an “Unsuport MODEL” error after using tftp to flash the firmware, but the virtualbox linux idea got me nowhere.

I’ve now google “Unsuport MODEL” error which has lead to a couple of interesting looking pages:
DD-WRT Forum :: View topic – wzr-hp-g300nh2 bricked and
DD-WRT Forum :: View topic – problems recoberying buffalo wzrhpg300nhv2 which I am leaving until tomorrow.

Based on hope rather than experience I would like t oget the box up and running at teachmeet strathclyde edition.

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Piratebox Teackmeet

I am wondering if folk would donate a few quid for a TeachMeet PirateBox?

29 August: I just got to £60 in promises. I’ve ordered the Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH wireless router. now hoping that I can get it working;-)

I’d noticed Alan Levine blogging about StoryBox and even donated a file in after this post: StoryBox Wants YOU – CogDogBlog.

More recently I saw it on Doug Belshaw’s Synechism Ltd. – User Outcomes Weekly – #11 (A weekly must read), where I commented wonder if a piratebox of some sort would be a useful addition to TeachMeets and the like? Doug had also linked to the PirateBox site where I read more about it and followed some links.

PirateBox is a self-contained mobile communication and file sharing device. Simply turn it on to transform any space into a free and open communications and file sharing network.

and

The PirateBox solves a technical/social problem by providing people in the same physical space with an easy way to anonymously communicate and exchange files. This obviously has larger cultural and political implications thus the PirateBox also serves as an artistic provocation.

Obviously TeachMeets do not need the subversion of tracking and preservation of user privacy that a PirateBox offers. Nor would sharing of copyrighted material be desirable, but It might be fun to have a PirateBox at TeachMeets.

It would allow folk to share files with others at the meet. If it was a traveling project, the box could go from TeachMeet to TeachMeet spreading files as it went. This would provide a sponsor-less goodie bag. Folk would be free to share what they liked, perhaps presenters would share presentations, digital musicians give away background music etc.

Obviously lots of the TeachMeet crowd already share many things online, A TM PirateBox would be a fun side project that might add to the buzz during a TeachMeet and be a concrete way of connecting different events.

A proposal

Having looked at the PirateBox DIY it looks like the cheapest way to make one is to use a Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH wireless router which costs about £70. There are a few other bits and pieces needed but the cost is negligible.

I’d like to put one together, take it to TeachMeet SLF11 and then post it off to another TeachMeet. Unfortunately I don’t have £70 Is there enough folk interested in putting in a fiver to make a box and set it adrift?

If you are interested then DM tweet @johnjohnston, leave a comment here or make contact in another way, if I get a dozen people up for it I’ll send then a link to paypal me a fiver. As a PirateBox utilizes Free, Libre and Open Source software (FLOSS) I don’t think this is one for commercial sponsorship. If you do contribute you will get a warm fuzzy feeling and your name on the PirateBox.

Pledged so far: £60

29 August: I just got to £60 in promises. I’ve ordered the Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH wireless router. now hoping that I can get it working;-)

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Edutalk fist

Last night I went along to Teachmeet Strathclyde at Jordanhill college, I had signed up a couple of days before and stuck my name down to talk about edutalk.cc.

I noticed there were nearly 70 folk signed up and quite a crowd was gathered eating cupcakes when I arrived. This was the first TeachMeet I’d attended when I had not really though much about it or had any involvement with before hand. The participants were mostly students which gave the meet a slightly different energy, slightly more formal and organised than some TeachMeets, the crowd was quietly energetic and motivated.

A couple of the usual suspects were in attendance but I didn’t know the vast majority of attendees.

As usual for teachmeets the presentations were all interesting, with lots of things I either nodded to or was completely surprised by. The compare Paul Campbell kept everything running smoothly.

I was nice to have a round table break in the middle, I went to a Games Based learning table organised by Morven Skinnder, Jen Deyenberg was in the group and has extensive experience in gbl. I suspect learning in Jen’s infant class would be wonderful with or without the high tech additions as I can’t imagine an object or situation she could not animate with learning.

I’ll not go into details of the different presentations or the round table as I am currently chopping up the audio recording I took and posting to Edutalk I had my two minutes talking about Edutalk, should have done 7 as I expect that most folk went huh; without the chance to listen, or see a demo. I am quite pleased with the slide though.

Edutalk is fairly pushing out the episodes at the moment, with the purpos/ed crew adding one a day for their #purposedfutured campaign and the audio from TMLothians11 – TeachMeet Lothians & Borders 2011 which I am (with permission) reposting on Edutalk.

There is still plenty of room for move voices on Edutalk, see the How to EDUtalk to find out how easy it is to join in.

My photos from Teachmeet Strathclyde on my John’s posterous site and there is a Teachmeet strathclyde Edition – Stuff from the strathclyde Teachmeet posterous waiting to be filled up.

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Tmslf 2010

On Wednesday evening I went along to TeachMeet and the TeachEat that follows. I’ve been lucky enough to have watched TeachMeets evolve (at least in Scotland, not made it out of the country yet) and this was one of the best yet.

As usual the event was organised on a wiki by a bunch of volunteers. The lead organiser this year was David Noble of booruch fame. David, in consultation with others made a couple of changes to the program, in addition to the familiar 7 & 2 minute presentations we had a session of Round table workshops and one of World Cafe discussions. at these points we broke out into groups for various discussions.

On the night

The presentations were all great, covering a wide variety of topics mostly with some sort of ict input. All the ones that discussed ict in the classroom however had an extra dimension the ict was just part, perhaps an enabling part, of the project:

  • Ian Stuart discussed using Google Sketchup with International Connections, but the project included children making traditional drawings as a starting point and the stand out point for me was the way Ian’s pupils exceeded his expectations.
  • Colin Maxwell talked about Charity events for teamworking and citizenship at college level, a great ideas that would equally fit into primary or secondary school. I’d didn’t catch if the video of the zombie walk is available but I hope it is.
  • Margaret Vass spoke of her work with Glow Blogs and ePortfolios, Margaret is probably the most experienced primary blog runner in the country. Her ability to see and explain the good stuff that happens in teaching & learning is brilliant. Her post about the presentation: Glow Blogs and ePortfolios? should be read by anyone wondering if primary blogging is worthwhile.
  • Sean Farrell‘s 2 minutes on ‘Logging into Glow: making it accessible to 5 year olds’ made me wish that more folk from LTS had been in the audience. Glow really needs this and needs it yesterday: simple safe logon for wee ones who find typing a glow username such as gw09johnstonjohn4 and a 8 character password (with one char not aphpanumeric) a bit difficult. From the number of teacher logins I’ve reset password for some of the rest of us could do with this too.

The big problem with the round tables was deciding which one to go to. I choose Jennifer Harvey – Setting up a QR treasure hunt which triangulated well with 2 of my favourite 7 minute presentations David Muir –TeachMeet@SLF2010: QR Codes in Education and Jen Deyenberg – GPS and Geocaching – #TSMSLF2010. We are lucky to have Jen in Scotland. I am very interested in GPS in and outside education. Both QR codes and geocaching lend themselves to the mixing up of being outdoors and using technology.

Jennifer’s round table proved to be the highlight of my TeachMeet and SLF she had, in 10 minutes, introduced me to some new iphone apps, got a table full of teachmeeters running round the room collecting audio, video and images and in true TeachMeet fashion had changed her gig to incorporate a pice of software she had found the day before. (some of the results: stickybits » barcode » Jenny not singing For the record my first video in this stickybit is useful).

Catching Up with TMSLF2010

David Flashmeet

If you missed TMSLF2010 or you want to remind yourself about it there are several ways to do so:

  • Fergal, who did a great job of keeping the presentations coming, created a posterous site: tmslf2010’s posterous which attendees were asked to populate by mailing post@tmslf2010.posterous.com, so far there are photos from the night, presentations and recording from presenters.
  • I recorded all the presentation audio on my iRiver and am slicing it and posting to EDUtalk (and cross posting to tmslf2010’s posterous), this might take a bit of time.
  • There was a considerable amount of tweeting: Twitter / Search – #tmslf2010
  • David Muir organised the FlashMeeting and you can watch the recording.

The Future of TeachMeet

The last part of TeachMeet was the World Cafe 9 tables discussing different topics. Again I would have liked to go to several, but went to How can we help TeachMeet evolve? which I was facilitating.

This topic is not oe we could reach many conclusions on. I recorded the audio and posted it to Edutalk: TeachMeet Evolution World Cafe (direct link to audio:
TeachMeet Evolution ). There is a lot of background noise, 8 other World Cafes were going on at the same time.

Some of the points taken given:

  • TeachMeet has always changed/is always changing.
  • teachMeets can be small, someone had one in their living room.
  • TeachMeet needs to be scalable.
  • Local is good.
  • If there is a committee set up to take care of the TeachMeet brand do we have to ask/bid for funds from the committee. This perhaps gives to much power to a group.
  • Sponsors need to get something back. At the moment this is a mention on the wiki and thanks at TM

We had only just started scraping the surface of this when we ran out of time.

The general TeachMeet conversation continued at TeachEat. I was sitting across the table from @eylanezekiel (Head of BrainPOP UK) and we continued to discuss (I don’t think much damage was done) the relationship of TeachMeet to its sponsors. I can’t recall the detail of the discussion well enough to quote them but I was pushed to think about TeachMeet in different ways and try to articulate my perhaps individual position:

  • Personally I think of TeachMeet as a way to recharge my batteries rather than something that needs to grow and expand.
  • I like the unconference principals & ideas.
  • I can also see the value of smaller TeachMeets.
  • I liked the original idea which assumed that everyone who turned up was willing to speak if drawn out of the hat. A nice leveller.
  • I dislike the idea that some folk should keynote without facing the draw.
  • Although I like free beer and nice spaces provided by sponsors I have a knee-jerk reaction agains goodie-bags. I’d be happy with less salubrious venus and paying my way to avoid these.
  • Back to basics might be an idea, just meet up and chat.
  • One size does not fit all we should Let a thousand flowers bloom.
  • Organising TeachMeets is quite a burden and usually falls on mainly one person.
  • @eylanezekiel mentioned that BrainPop had offered to improve on the wiki to make it easier for folk to sign up. While I agree the Wiki is getting a bit of a mess (I deleted dozens of spam pages a while ago), I do not think a particular company should take responsibility for organising TeachMeet. It would be good to have clearer organisation. Perhaps an idea is for the central wiki to list upcoming TeachMeets, but each teachMeet provides a wiki or site to facilitate the organisation. This would allow individual TeachMeets to use a tool provided by say BrainPop or create their own wiki or use another system altogether. TeachMeets would not be limited to one page and would be easier to navigate. The sites could also be a repository for recordings, links to blog posts, resources etc.
  • @eylanezekiel also mentioned the difficulty in try to help with sponsoring TeachMeet when there is not a central body (herding cats was mentioned), again I see this as an advantage. If there is no central body it cannot be taken over by a group or faction.
  • The lack of a central body also should allow for different approaches to take place.
  • Nothing stops anyone running a similar or different event with a similar or different title. They might get a bit of a reaction from the TeachMeet community (whatever that is)

Like TeachMeet as a whole these ideas are well though through but I am betting that is not too important, TeachMeet from the evidence of TMSLF2010 is alive & well. I also bet that I could enjoy and learn from a event that went against all of my preferences.

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On Thursday I went over to the Scottish Seabird Centre in North Berwick for TeachMeet 10 East Lothian. The Sea Bird Centre was a great venue and what I cold see of North Berwick made me think it might be nice to visit in the day time.

The event went very smoothly indeed, Fearghal Kelly and David Gilmour kept things running very smoothly indeed.

Puffin

I arrived a little late so didn’t reall pick up Martyn Pegg on Taking Curriculum for Excellence in the right direction.Outdoor Education, orienteering and the energetic classroom. It looked pretty exciting with members of the audience running all over the shop. The EL East Lothian Outdoor Education Service blog looks interesting. I managed to grab a sandwich an a seat thanks to the helpful centre staff and settled down to watch. There were a lot of new faces to me, I guess a big local turnout with perhaps a good few new to teachmeet, the evaluation was very positive.

I didn’t take any notes during the presentations but enjoyed them all, I loved the mix of tech & tech in Rowena Blair & Krysia Smyth talking about E-scape but failed to get my hands on the fizz-book. Don Ledingham gave a quick and impassioned defence of Curriculum for Excellence and blogged about this: Curriculum for Excellence: Stand up and speak up : Don Ledingham’s Learning Log on Wednesday. Neil Winton presented via Skype and I was surprised how good the video was.

I am going to be revisiting all of the presentations over the next week or so as I post the audio to EDUtalk.cc my own presentation was about EDUtalk and I recorded the other speakers. I would recommend listening to them all.

There is a lot more info on the TeachMeet 10 EastLothian wiki page and:

After the meet I had a quick pint with Robert Jones fresh from his parent’s night, Rowena, Krysia (Who kindly gave me a lift back to Glasgow, thanks Krysia), Fearghal and David. As you would expect an interesting chat and ScotEduBlogs, google docs and delicious links in RSS feeds, the last has led me to remove mine as it seemed to annoy most folk. If you are disappointed you can always Add me to your network.

Now I am looking forward toTeachMeet Perth which also has the CfE badge.

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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.

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On Tuesday I was at TeachMeet Falkirk_09, we had a great night. As usual I was amazed at the amount of work put in by the organisers lead by Margaret Vass and folk from Falkirk.

This time I had the honour of MCing the meet. This was particularly nice as I was not involved in all of the hard work. It did mean that I didn’t really fully concentrate on what the presenters were saying, as I was trying to thing about what I was doing and saying. I did gain a lot of great ideas form the presenters and am currently working my way through the FlashMeeting audio. It is hard to pick out any particular presentations, but for me, Nick‘s Webcam desktop visualiser (pictured above) embodies the DIY aspects to TeachMeet.

Margaret had asked me to talk a wee bit about how TeachMeet started, on listening to the meet I realise that I might not have been to clear or informative, concentrating more on the fun and Guinness rather that the principles. I hope to remedy that in a blog post soon.

In the run up to Falkirk there was some discussion about the ‘rules’ of TeachMeet and they were tweeked a little. As I prepared to talk about the history of TeachMeet I realised that the rules are not really rules. There is a perception that these are fixed, but over the early TeachMeets at least they changed to fit the event. A while back John Connell posted Time For A TeachMeet Alternative? and generated a lot of discussion (Be sure to read TeachMeet Alternatives: follow up on John’s blog too). As TeachMeets are organised by whoever has the energy and good will it doesn’t really matter if you don’t like the format: you can change it. The power of TeachMeets is not, for me, the format but the proof that people can organise and share in a way that is not top down.

As is now customery with TeachMeets the meet rippled out:

I hope that most of the presenters will post details, or links to their presentations. I also am hoping that a few folk might use edutalk to podcast a reflection or review of the event.

I am going to go and post these links to the wiki, please do the same for any others or leave a comment (or tweet me) here and I’ll do it.