archive link | Perma linkIFBIN
I've occasionally dipped my toe into flash (eg Rommy Robot and some here) but not much more than the occasional image gallery, display and the odd experement in the last year or two. I am still really using actionscript 1 and it seems to be at 3.0 now!But I read the odd flash blog and toaday saw IFBIN via Moock: IFBIN 2.0, hundreds of free, open examples, which has 100s of free examples, I've not really dug into them yet, but the way the files are delivered seems interesting, you launch the application and it opens your browsers which load a localhost port http://localhost:5505/flash/:
.The IFBIN Service provides code installation, subscription management, and allows one click access to top quality code from the industries best developers. The service designed to provide code security in file verification and code signing. The IFBIN Service will only install files that are signed and verified as authentic.
I am not sure how many Scots-Edu bloggers are interested in flash, except ab but if you are, the price is right, safety seems ensured.
archive link | Perma linkImpermanence and Comments
I was working/ playing with primary seven today ( a wee bit of Macrone cover) blogging some poems on the Sandaig Poets blog.
The new posts knocked one of my all time favourite entries bio poem by Kimberley off the front page.
Kimberley's poem started a great conversation between Kimberley and Carol Fuller (Our The Dream Dragon collaborator and fairy blogmother).
It generated two new poems, one a collaboration between Carol, Kimberley and Kimberley's Gran! 15 comments in total a great read.
Kimberley's comments were made from home and her writing was really impressive, at parents night I thanked her Mum for supporting her spelling only to find out that she did not see the comments until after Kimberley had posted them.
I am posting here to keep the poem in mind, but also to solicit comments on the new post over at Sandaig Poets, first blogs for some of our new pupils, leave them a comment and perhaps you could start some magic.
If you do and you'd like me to comment on your classes blog leave me a comment here or add yourself to CommentsForKidz on the scotedublogs.
archive link | Perma linkFirst Week Back
Well that is the first week over and it went very well all things considered.We got a new podcast out yesterday on Radio Sandaig, just a short one, written and recorded in less than an hour. I am hoping to really move the podcast forward this session, but I have yet of figure out where the time will come from. If it was just my class, I would not have a problem, but I want to involve at least the two primary sixes and two primary sevens (we have two classes at most stages this session as opposed to one last session). I also want to minimise the disruption to my colleagues as much as I can.
I have also started my new class blogging, managing at least a post a day. I had forgotten how slowly the children type at the start of the year. The class blogging will I hope keep going at the same sort of rate until we get the ict suite up an running. I am not finding much difference having one computer in the class rather than the two I had last year so hopefully the sacrifice of the other machine to the suite will be worth it.
This session I am sharing one of the two primary sixes with a colleague, and will be carrying out some sort of ict duties in the morning (maybe some non class contact cover too). Next week I hope to get the other primary six and one of the primary seven classes blogging. Only half the classes in the school have computers working in them so far as the new network points are not connected yet. I am still thinking about how to handle an increased number of blog posts.
Away from school I am visiting my poor mum in hospital which is keeping me away from the web:
, probably a good thing in many ways. (Mum is slowly recovering from a knee replacement and some complications, now improving steadily).The most interesting things I have seen are Ewan and Andrew's new jobs as LTS 'New Technologies for Learning Research Practitioners'. (A wonderful job title, I am going a slight green colour) and of course Glow, which looks very intriguing and I wish I had a wee bit more time to blog about it. Maybe launching at the start of term has both advantages and disadvantages?
archive link | Perma linkBlogging From TextMate 2
I seem to have got this working now, this post was posted from TextMate and the image was uploaded from TextMate. I quite like the idea of blogging from the desktop from a text editor, with a bare interface. I've only been using TextMate for a wee while, it is probably a bit over-powerful for my rather primitive html, php etc. It is probably more suited to someone who lives inside a text editor. (I like the idea of doing that, and sometimes attempt it in the summer holidays, but I've a living to make).
The image upload is pretty neat, you drag and drop an image onto the window, it is uploaded and the html snippet inserted. (there are templates for markdown and textile too) Tags: TextMate blogging metaweblog
archive link | Perma linkTesting TextMate
This post was made using TextMate and the metaweblog API. After a few failures I am pointing to http://www.sandaigprimary.co.uk/pivot/pivot/metaweblog.php#john_johnston to see if that works, using my Blog id at the end of the url. Main entry textarchive link | Perma linkWhere did all the time go?
Two days into term and the days are seem shorter, blog reading is pretty limited.At the weekend, I tried to get Wordpress Multi User and Lyceum to work on the Sandaig Site. I don't really want the hugely scalability of WP MU but I would like to set a class or three up with individual blogs this session. I want to do it on our site, to keep control and safety in my hands. I want children to be able to choose some of the features of their blogs, even if it just colour and header image, and I want to be able to set up the blogs quickly. Needless to say it has not worked so far. I am casting around for other ideas, setting up one blog with a category of each child would I think lose the ability for each child to have a theme in wordpress and if we used pivot changing themes would be a little too hard for 10 year olds.
Not that we are ready for full scale blogging, we have one pc in the class at the mo, and the classes with the new cabling are not switched on yet (mine should not be, but the mitel guy told me how to make a temporary link from one router to the other).
In an attempt to distract myself from all of this and my forward plans I've been playing with different ways to post to the blog, hence all the weird short posts of late. I am thinking of quick ways to put up information in a standard form, say flagged blog posts in my feed reader, or children collecting data of some sort (weather say). I've had various partial successes, but I probably need a little help with the technical details.
archive link | Perma linkTesting Ecto
That was an image, I am testing metaweblog with ecto[posted with ecto]
archive link | Perma linkBack to work
Started a new session today, and got my primary six class down to blogging straight away on A bigger Sandaig and Class Rules I am hoping to set up a scribe system first in my class and them in others this session.The ICT Suite is moving on:
The guys from Mitel came in at the weekend and configured all the PCs that came over from Barlanark. They also told me how to wire up the connection to my room on a temporary basis, hence the blogging. I am beginning to get my head round a few ideas for extending the Sandaig media empire, turning more work over to the children.
archive link | Perma linkappleScript metaweblog
A quick test of the new metaweblog.php with applescript.Technorati Tags: , metaweblog
archive link | Perma linkPerformancing test
A quick test of the new metaweblog.php. pivot forum for more information Technorati Tags: Performancing, metaweblogpowered by performancing firefox
archive link | Perma linkFlock
I am trying Flock again, since a new version of the metaweblog fileI got on thepivot forum
technorati tags:flock, pivot, metaweblog
archive link | Perma linkrandom thoughs
glow doesn't seem to be a good technorati tag.Andrew's post about glow has a nice image at the top, generated by msig.info having spent some time figuring out how to do this in fireworks, I wish I'd seen this earlier. A pity the page has a wee bit of text that is not suitable for the classroom, if we got round to individual blogs it would have been a useful tool for generating header images.
TeachMeet organisation is moving on a pace, wine and dinner seem to be organised, but we need a wifi sponsor.
archive link | Perma linkGlow
I've just checked out Glow which is the new name for SSND. There is a Glow: the movie (19 minutes) to introduce teachers tohmm.GLORIA
Who are you?
A glowing hand reaches in and beats her to it. Gloria looks up to see the GATEKEEPER - a handsome man in a white suit who appears to glow. She jumps back in shock.
I think we could have a laugh watching it in an inservice.
Strangely enough the Mac Version QuickTime movie: Glow: the movie (high speed) didn't work on my my mac, just opened QT player which showed an endless connecting message. The Windows Media video: Glow: the movie opened fine using Quicktime in safari (I've got flip4Mac installed) .
If this is what we are going to get it looks pretty ambitious with a good toolset. All sorts of collaborating and content.
I was please to see a wee RSS icon floating by on the screen, I wonder if glow will allow the publishing and pulling of rss to the www or just within glow.
Also the words after school club video podcasting on another screen.
The mention of 'glowgraphics' (I think) sounded interesting as does the Intellectual property page at LTS.
The ssdn would seem to solve (in school at least) the bandwidth problem, but I wonder how powerful a class pc needs to be to see mutli user video chat?
I also worry about the idea of pupils connecting from home, the digital divide is still a problem in some areas of Scotland.
In the example the wee girl was online in her bedroom out of the parental line of sight, maybe she should have had a bed made up in the living room and her dad could have kept an eye on her while he did the ironing
I am also curious to see how open to the rest of the world
Andrew is blogging glow too.
archive link | Perma linkEduflickr
Via EduBlog Insights: Eduflickr.com a proposal to get round the fact that flickr is blocked in many schools. Sounds great. I was chatting to Ewan the other day and proposed that someone might just pull down filter and repurpose all the creative commons photos on flickr, this is a bit more practical.archive link | Perma linkBlogger Beta
There is a new version of blogger out in Beta: http://beta.blogger.com/.I grabbed an account and there seems to be quite a few useful features
archive link | Perma linkpivot update 2
Got a couple of minor issues so far.One is that quotes in the comments seem to be escaped, I think i could fix that with this patch from the pivot forum but it seems easier to wait until pivot 1.30.2 is out.
The second problem was pointed out by Andrew Brown, pivot now has stronger spam protection, and redirects possible spammers to http://spammerbegone.com which is possible not the best place for children who forget to answer the silly question to be directed.
I've fixed that by setting the redirect to http://127.0.0.1/ which should be less offensive.
I had a quick trawl through the spam log to see if I could find Andrew's message, I didn't but I could see 12 spam messages trapped in the last half hour.
I know that I've had a lot more at times, but I wonder what this says about site stats, do they include all the spam messages. If you think your blog is getting 100s of hits a day they might be the wrong flavour of hits?
archive link | Perma linkpivot update
I just updated to Pivot 1.30.1. Seem to go ok, if anything weird happens I hope it turns up before next Monday, when the children come back.I've added trackbacks to this sub-weblog and hopeful all the new anti spam stuff will do its job.
archive link | Perma linkBack To School
I popped into school last week to move some computers that were clogging up the staff room to an open area.Today I went back and it looks like their new home will be ready for the week after next when the children will be back:
This is a first for our school, up until now we have had 2 internet computers in each class. This session we will have one computer in each class and the rest in our new lab.
I am not sure if they will all be connected for the start of term, but I am hoping to be finding out the difference between working in a lab as opposed to the classroom will mean getting a lot more done.
The school is like a building site at the moment as it is getting prepared for an increase in numbers as the school across the road has closed.
The work looks as it is well on schedule, and I am almost looking forward to going back to work
archive link | Perma linkIs that the time
I glanced up and it is the 9th of August. Nearly time to go back to school.Apart from a bit of gardening, walking and the odd glass of red everything else is unfinished. I've feel like I've been working away on lots of fronts with plenty of blue sky fun, but no end result.
Poor old Rommy Robot lies untouched.
I've failed to install mySQL on my old G3 many many times. This was particularly weird as I had done it before.
I played with the google api Google Maps API and have nearly got something useful, I need someone to explain how to convert whatever the squares on a OS map are to latitude and longitude.
I messed about with RSS, tags and the Flicker API tags learning a bit more about del.icio.us, Technorati and coComment.
I did a bit more with the Flickr API and have a potentially useful couple of tools Flickr Creative commons search and Flickr Creative commons search if Flickr is freed from websense.
My idea with the RSS feeds and the APIs was to create some sort of research starter for children blogging, a quick way for them to get links, images and conections on a particular topic but there is a long way to go on that one. I did learn a fair bit about copying JavaScript and API examples.
I messed around with WordPress and started setting up some blogs for the Bannerman New Learning Community Primaries, more about this later. Downloaded and installed a fair number of themes and just started scratching around the surface of WordPress, lots to learn.
I read a lot of blogs, wrote some comments, grabbed links.
I didn't use flash to make a new toy for the children at school, either a bubbleshare clone or a flickr style notes thing, both of which I thought about when I found out flash now can handle file uploads.
Anyway, I am going to pop into school tomorrow and see how the new computer room is getting on. Time to leave the chair behind.