archive link | Perma linktagging teachmeet06
For the aforementioned TeachMeet06 I noticed that Ewan is using teachmeet06 as a tag on flickr photos tagged with teachmeet06. Gordon is tagging his blog posts teachmeet06 so here is a wee aggregation: tagged with teachmeet06 which will pick up del.icio.us tags too. If you are blogging about TeachMeet please join in the fun.archive link | Perma linkTeachMeet06
TeachMeet06
Learn something new, be amazed, amused and enthused. This is an informal gathering of those curious about technologies.
Anyone can share cool ideas they have or great ideas they've triallled in their classrooms. Join us in person or via Skype.
We want things that have succeeded and which have failed. Whatever it takes to further the knowledge of the education community.
archive link | Perma linkScots Edu Blog Daily
I've tried lots of ways to read and keep up with blogs, I mostly use Vienna a desktop aggregator at the moment because it is free and has appleScript support, which allows some simple recycling of information (example).I've tried netvibes, suprglu, home portals and a host of others.
But the one I really like is lilina: this example gives me the postings from 30 odd Scots Edu Blogs sorted by date, I know a few of the other solutions are supposed to do this, but they do not seem to get it quite right, bunching posts from one blog together rather than splitting them mixing them with the others and time sorting them.
The example is a bit slow, but it is running of a machine in my house which is a fairly amateurish setup. It is also missing all the edublogs.org blogs as edublogs.org was having a bit of trouble with bloglines yesterday, ironically this problem was caused by bloglines. I'll add them later if this looks like being useful.
Hopefully Scots Edu Blog Daily lilina might mature into a useful Scot-Edu-blog tool.
archive link | Perma linkvideo blogging
Ewan's Post pointing to Stephen Heppell's idea for school TV got me thinking about video blogging. I've also had some problems with quicktime files on the site (due to my lazy linking straight to the media). so I've been looking for some vblog code and found embedthevideo.com which seems to do the trick, click on the image to play the movie in a new window or direct link. I've updated the Glencoe Movies page to use this code and guess I should do the Dream Dragon if I have time.I'd appreciate comments if this doesn't work for anyone. The movie is on archive.org so is slower than the Glencoe Movies.
click here to download
archive link | Perma linkZoho Show
Via Tim Lauer zohoshow is a new addition to the Zoho Office Suite. An nnline tool to create, edit, publish, and show presentations.I had a quick try redoing the first few slides from an old presentation: Weblogging and Podcasting at Sandaig a S5 Slide Show to Weblogging and Podcasting at Sandaig (ZoHo Show). The process seems quite simple, not as powerful as S5, but another handy addition to the Web 2.0 toolset.
I don't present much, but on the last couple of occasions, I've just used Safari with a load of tabs open, a couple of local pages for the intro and outro slides. If you are talking and showing examples of blogs, pods etc, this seems agood enough way to do it.
powered by performancing firefox
archive link | Perma linkDraft MOODLE Course on Blogging
Draft MOODLE Course on Blogging from Andy in Aberdeen. I was delighted that Sandaig got some link love, but apart from that this looks like a great intro to blogging for Scottish(or elsewhere) teachers. This is a step by step guide to educational blogging using mainly Scottish examples. The steps are set out in a clear and well ordered way that would allow any teacher to get the idea of educational blogging and get started blogging. In andy's hands Moodle looks like a great tool for online cpd.powered by performancing firefox
archive link | Perma linkCluster heads part 2
That last post was just to show the Heads of the primary schools in our learning community how easy it is to blog. The poor souls listened to me for about 90 minutes and the upshot is we are going to try setting up blogs for the other 5 primaries in the Bannerman New Learning Community for next session.I am quite excited about this, I hope to set the sites up over the summer and then do some cpd with my colleagues next session.
I've got a few ideas about using the blogs that I've not inflicted on them yet, I'll wait until the blog bug has taken hold.
archive link | Perma linkhitchhikr
David Warlick's tool for collecting photos, postings etc about conferences.
Like my eLive 2006 RSS experiment on steroids.
powered by performancing firefox
archive link | Perma linkLast burst
As the final term of the session slides into sports days and clearing up we are doing a couple of interesting things at Sandaig.The recent romans podcast is Educate's podcasting directory's featured podcast.
As mentioned below I started a World Cup 2006 blog. If you have a minute, please give the blog a comment.
It has been hard for the children to get time to post much, as we are busy with filming The Dream Dragon. Based on the Keepers poem for National Poetry Day October 2005 written by Sandaig children and turned into a play by Carol Fuller, an American high school theatre teacher in Austell, Georgia in the southern United States of America and pupils at South Cobb high school.
The production is pretty lo-fi, no costumes or scenery, only a few props. Focusing on the performances and how to stage it. The children are shooting the video taking turns at being cameraperson, director and gofor.
They have come up with some pretty imaginative suggestions for how to frame and stage scenes. I've uploaded quicktime movies of Scenes 2 to 7 to the internet archive, these are linked from the The Dream Dragon blog.
This whole project has lasted most of this session (and it might not be over yet),
sparked by The Keepers Poetry Project which was based on a poem by Phil Whitehead and run by Peter Ford our poems were original published on the Sandaig Poets blog and podcast on Radio Sandaig.
This was blogged by Ewan McIntosh and spread via Anne Davis, who was Spellbound by a Podcast.
It was then picked up by Carol Fuller from Ewan's blog , her students wrote a play based on the verses. Carol has also become a frequent commentator on Sandaig Poets producing some wonderful conversations. I have a lot more to say about this whole process, but for now i need to thank the poets, blog magicians and fairy blog-mother Carol for everything.
archive link | Perma linkWorld Cup 2006
With only a short time left, I've started a new blog for the class:We have a new blog:
Sandaig World Cup 2006
Comments appreciated. Already the children have been quite creative in the sort of posts they are writing. Completely unprompted.
Later by unprompted I mean I've not really talked too much to the children about the form of their posts, I am too busy with this. The children have come up with a couple of really imaginative ideas for postings, short at the moment, but IMO sweet. Children who have not been all that interested in the blog are coming to the fore.
archive link | Perma linkGoogle spreadsheets
I got a trial account, but am having some problems loading a 92k csv file I uploaded, seems to hang at about 7 percent.
Better luck with a smaller file 5 columns 29 rows.
In school I've mostly used spreadsheets with my classes to produce graphs, there doesn't seem to be a charting facility in google spreadsheets yet.
There is I am sure a case for making simplified versions of these web 2.0 online tools for children covering spreadsheets and databases. Full-blown applications are overkill for most primary needs.
archive link | Perma linkScotEduBlog Meetup 2
After the fun of the first ScotEduBlogMeetup there is another one in the planning stages the New Meetup is planned for 20th September 2006 to coincide with SETT. The program is evolving on the scotedublogs it looks a bit more ambitious than the first one.archive link | Perma linkCoLT
Born Geek: CoLT a firefox extension that lets you copy the html tag in firefox. I am welded to Safari because of the similar function that comes with Safari Stand this makes it much easier to copy links and use them in a blog or in a html editor. I am posting this with Performancing .com another nice firefox plugin that lets you post to a blog from firefox.
archive link | Perma linkGoogle video player
Now out for mac. Looks interesting but the System Requirements of Video card with at least 16 MB of RAM and 1 Ghz or faster processor leave me far behind on my G4 400 with an 800mhz upgrade. I need a summer job to buy a new box.archive link | Perma linklight relief
After that last one this is a bit more like it, if you've used Flash you'll be laughing out loud.archive link | Perma linkcommenting
I've been writing this post in my head for a week or so and it is nowhere near finished, but I need to get it out of the way to clear my brain, if you read this blog I don't do too much reflection so this is an unusual post (apologies in advance for rambling).I've been blogging with the children in Sandaig for over two years now. I started off with little knowledge of the edublogosphere, just wanted to bring a tool I'd found useful elsewhere into school. I've always been keen on children publishing and a blog seemed a good idea at he time.
As time went on I read other educators blogs and though about what blogging was doing in class. All the eduWeb2.0 ideas about audience, purpose etc made sense.
At first our blogs didn't get too many comments, or they came in flurries, they were powerful aids to the whole process, real people (and a real poet) commenting on the children's work valuing it and encouraging them. I didn't think too much more about them, sometimes the children replied and got into short conversations, sometimes not.
A lot of this was limited by time, timetable and having 2 internet machines in the classroom. Occasionally we would get a real flurry of activity.
Recently Andy posted Help Wanted and started a scot-wave of comments, my class wrote some comments and got comments back from the Aberdeen guys and Andy himself. At the same time our fairy blogmother Carol started some lovely conversations over at Sandaig Poets.
(most of this has been masterminded or loosely connected by Scots blog wizard Ewan)
This has been wonderful, but it brings up a couple of thoughts.
The comments by children here and by my children have been of a pretty good quality, the children are taking blogs a lot more seriously than say think.com, but as conversations develop it become harder to organise access and time. I don't know if this would be easier with individual blogs that would be aggregated on a mother blog in a lab situation, but I'd like to try.
My class have made me proud with their commenting so far (another nice example).
Keeping up conversations amoung 10 year olds will require a bit of support, I am having difficulty reading all the comments (need to check if PIVOT has a feed for comments, wordpress does), keeping up with my classes comments on other blogs hmm!
The more conversations children have the more interesting teaching points will come up. The problems with being public but not seeing facial expressions and body language have be pointed up in newsgroups, mail list and blogs. Today Ewan the most experienced scot-edu-blogger provided an example here and here, if adults have trouble understanding each other children will too. (This might not be a bad thing, think teaching point
).I keep saying we are only scratching the blog surface here, and am getting
archive link | Perma linkcocomments
I think I've added the right stuff to the comment template to make cocomments work here:http://www.cocomment.com/integrate#pivot
I changed:
var blogURL = "Fill in your own website";
to
var blogURL = "http://www.sandaigprimary.co.uk[[home]]";
which should hopefully point to the correct subweblog (say here, or the otters)
More info for Pivot users on the forum here: coComment
Could someone let me know if it works?
archive link | Perma linkRevolution, I'd prefer evolution
Steve gives some alternative views of the first UK Edublogger Conference.his final post calls for Revolution
It's the only way to change the education system as it isI'd prefer something gentler, I don't think of blogging as a revolution, it is a natural extension of normal classroom practice. We try to give children purpose for tasks, we display their work. The world wide wall display is a new way of doing that, providing purpose and a bigger audience.
From the bottom up. Getting a massive installed base of blogging schools. Aggregate, aggregate organise. Work around the slow system.
... john's snip...
Revolution is fast and furious. And comes suddenly, before anyone is truly aware. Blogs are the answer.
archive link | Perma linkTheme
I've redecorated a bit. borrowed some javascript to expand and collapse some of the bits on the side. Only tested in safari and firefox mac as I left the pc in school this weekend, if you see this before monday from a pc and it looks wrong let me know (I obviously don't mean wrong from the design sense, just if something is blasted off the screen).archive link | Perma linkCommentsForKidz
After the wonderful response to Andy's shout for help I've set up a page on the scotedublogs wiki: CommentsForKidzThe idea is, if you want some comments on your class/school blog you stick a link on the page and comment on other blogs listed there. I mumbled about this before, but I think it is an idea who's time has now come to Scotland.