Webloging and Podcasting at Sandaig

Weblogs

What is a weblog?

A buzzword!

A word or phrase connected with a specialized field or group that usually sounds important or technical and is used primarily to impress laypersons:
"'Sensitivity' is the buzzword in the beauty industry this fall" (ADWEEK).

A stylish or trendy word or phrase.

Jesse James Garrett, editor of Infosift, began compiling a list of "other sites like his" as he found them in his travels around the web. and Jesse's 'page of only weblogs' lists the 23 known to be in existence at the beginning of 1999.

Sunday 22 May 2005 Google results 270,000,000 for blog

Sunday 30 October 2005 Google results 486,000,000 for blog

What is a weblog 2?

A weblog or blog (derived from web + log) is a web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles (normally, but not always, in reverse chronological order). Although most early blogs were manually updated, tools to facilitate the updating and maintenance of such sites made them accessible to a much larger and less technical population. The use of some sort of browser-based software is now a typical aspect of "blogging."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weblog

From my point of view a blog is an easily up-datable page or set of pages on the web. It can be updated without any knowledge of html through a web based interface. No software is needed other than a web browser. The pages consist in the main of a series of articles, the most recent at the top. Previous articles are archived and can be searched. In addition the articles are available as a RSS feed.

Sandaig Otters

This is the old layout for the blog, 2 colums, the center column was a bit small for images when viewed on the School PCs with 800x 600 monitors.

Sandaig Blogs

List of Sandaig Blogs

What is Podcasting 1 ?

Podcasting Does Not Need an iPod!

What is Podcasting 2?

Podcasting, a portmanteau of Apple's "iPod" and "broadcasting", is a method of publishing files to the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed and receive new files automatically by subscription, usually at no cost. It first became popular in late 2004, used largely for audio files. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast

What is podcasting @ Sandaig?

Radio Sandaig

iTunes

Blog Software

Posting

Posting Images

Classroom: Whiteboard

Classroom: In Pairs

Classroom: any way you like

How to Podcast

Record

Edit in audacity

Edit in audacity 2

Publish

Why Blog?

http://www.sandaigprimary.co.uk
For many of the same reason you would have a static website.
At Sandaig we have had a small web presence since 2000, first as an AOL page and with our own domain www.sandaigprimary.co.uk since 2003.
Before we added a weblog to the school site content was published via ftp upload from my living room.
The pages are created in a variety of ways;
Children produce galleries from a set of photos or scans in iPhoto, older children often scan the work of younger ones,
Children produce work in Word or AppleWorks which are then used as the basic for web pages
I have a few SuperCard projects which children add text and images to which are then semi automatically converted to web pages.

All this is a fair bit of work and distances children from the publishing process. We though weblogs would allow children to become more directly involved in the publishing process without delving into time consuming html skills.

Why?: Audience

The idea is to give the children a wider (one of the widest) audience for some of their work, increase their sense of ownership and responsibility of their work and gain feedback and co-operation from others. Working in small groups on a shared text encourages peer feedback and co-operation.

Hopefully it should inform parents and even allow children to understand aspects of class life. Scanning down the blog show a surprisingly wide variety of activities recently covered.

For many children working on the computer still has motivational value and this is surely increased by the fact that we are publishing for the world.

Why?: Communication

We have had great feedback for readers of our blog. This is very motivating for the children.

Example: A Quick and Dirty celebration of National Poetry Day was organised on Thursday this week. based on The Keepers Poetry Project and the original Keepers poem by Phil Whitehead.

All the children in primary 2 to 7 attempted to write a verse in the last hour of Thursday. Primary Seven pupils types the poems up for the Sandaig Poets blog. apart from the odd file going astray this was a success: 150 verses written.
On Friday we recorded a podcast for Radio Sandaig with some verses from each class.

Other ideas: The future

Drawbacks

RSS

<?xml version="1.0"?>
 <rss version="2.0">
  <channel>
   <title>Radio Sandaig</title>
   <link>http://www.sandaigprimary.co.uk/radio_sandaig/</link>
   <description>An online Radio Station from Sandaig Primary</description>
   <language>en­gb</language>
   <copyright>2005</copyright>
   <webMaster>john@sandaigprimary.co.uk</webMaster>
   <ttl>1</ttl>
      <item>
        <title>Radio Sandaig June 05</title>
        <author>john@sandaigprimary.co.uk</author>
        <pubDate>Mon, 27 June 2005 12:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
        <description>
        Radio Sandaig Chat Show. Our most ambitious project yet. Interviews with children and teachers, News from the school and our Holland trip. ending with a suprise musical item.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.sandaigprimary.co.uk/radio_sandaig/mp3s/sandaig_chat_june_05.mp3"&gt;Download the June 05 podcast&lt;/a&gt;</description>
       <enclosure url="http://www.sandaigprimary.co.uk/radio_sandaig/mp3s/sandaig_chat_june_05.mp3" length="3528296" type="audio/mpeg" />
      </item>

RSS feeds.....

Blog Links

Podcast Links

This presentation uses S5 1.1