archive link | Perma linkBe Very Afraid
Tomorrow, Sunday, morning I am off to Be Very Afraid at BAFTA. I am taking 2 of last years primary seven, now at secondary, to create a podcast.BVA is a celebration of students' digital creativity, in the david lean room!
Should be an interesting event (last years).
The pupils have though up a very creative idea for their podcast (hint revenge), hopefully they will have time to blog about it tomorrow at Sandaig Otters and the podcast will be published sometime on Monday from BVA, if everything go ok.
if you have any interested children they might like to read the Sandaig Otters blog on Monday to see what is going on.
archive link | Perma linkbutterfly
In mum's garden, testing posting from iPhoto to a blog via appleScript, and metaWeblogApi. Title of post comes from photo's title and the body of the post comes from the comment.
archive link | Perma linkonlinevideo wiki
onlinevideo Set up by Theo Kuechel and Kevin Burden to explore explore the educational possibilites for using online video editng tools shown at TeachMeet06 (blog entry)I an not sure if we are ready to jump from desktop to web for video editing but I'll be interested to see if we can use any of these sites in school.
archive link | Perma linkSett roundup 1
I hope to post a bit more as I digest the last couple of days.First the linkage:
Blog postings about SETT - The Scottish Learning Festival, collected by technorrati:
http://www.technorati.com/search/sett06
Flickr: Photos tagged with sett06
Blog posts about TeachMeet (bloggers, and others get together at the festival):
http://www.technorati.com/search/teachmeet06
Flickr: Photos tagged with teachmeet06
Flickr Creative commons search sett06
Official SETT Weblog
I am posting the links to the technorati search page rather than the tag pages, technorati seems to have missed quite a few posts tagged with teachmeet06, this means that my teachmeet aggregator and more professional tools like Hitchhikr don't pick up all the posts, Hickhiker get more with the [Conduct String Search -- may return some irrelevant Blog Entries]. I wonder if it worth a trip to Technorati API: Search. Probably not, but might would be a nice distraction from implementing all the good teaching ideas I saw at sett.
I seem to be the only person so far tagging my comments, but not too much commenting has gone on as far as I can make out.
I've been thinking a bit about live blogging events, it seems a great idea, but I am not sure I am the person to do it, I don't type fast enough and I really need times to think about things. I was at Peter Peacock address, trying to blogs the important points and chatting to Ewan on Skype. After a while I realised I'd just typed a collection of buzzwords, Ewan had written a coherent post, fast fingers. I didn't post my list.
Most of my SETT posts will be useful to me as a reminder and link list, I am not sure if they will be useful to anyone else.
The other problem about live blogging is that it should lead to a blossoming of comments and I'd guess most folk are too tired after two days under the weird light and too much technology, even the folk blogging didn't seem to post many comments on the day, too much to blog too little time. Anyway, I'll probably blog my next sett/conference and hope the Scot's Edu blogsphere reached a tipping point.
Instead of my usual forray into techy stuff at SETT, this year I thought I?d try and take in something that wouldn?t usually have jumped off the page at me.I went to quite a few thing that are along my line, including Building primary communities, Infants Can Communicate! and To Blog or Not to Blog. I really enjoyed them all, and picked up a pile of great ideas. the last two listed were reports on blogging projects that really impressed me. My foray into classroom blogging has been bluesky, these project really pointed up good practice and linked it to learning and the curriculum in a very coherent way.
A middle aged blogging dog was taught a lot of new tricks which will hopefully end up improving the learning in my classroom.
Finally(for now, it has taken me best part of two hours to get this far, due to browser meanderings) I met a ton of old and new friends, many of whom on Thursday I asked to chat to (ie steal ideas from) on the Friday, they successfully avoided me and I still have a pile of things I'd like to know, and requests to make. I actually think I needed a longer sett, maybe with a few breaks
archive link | Perma link
archive link | Perma linkTo Blog or Not to Blog
Susan Buchanan, Fiona Cunningham, p7 pupils - Woodhill Primary SchoolFiona Andrews LTS
First seminar I've managed to get a ticket for and I got the last one.
David just walked in, looks like this will be blogged twice, Susan: hands up who has dabbled, about 1 third!!
Basic, what is a blog? Nice loose definition.
Don't contrive, need to be learning lead. PCPod
- Real Audience
- Motivational
- Ownership
- Interaction
- Feedback
- Exciting
- Reinforcement (of French by podcast)
- Home School Links
Fiona C: fluent in French, Woodhill classroom assistant, created lessons and recorded French files.
Train children: iTunes, iPods, MP3players. Children used iPods at wet intervals.
Children testing and playing with each other.
Children thought they ere cheating by practicing at home!
Children are on, demo weather exercise, sound files link with worksheet. Own personal teacher, children bring own ipod.
Pause and rewind, test and review.
Children check their strengths and weakness, retest themselves.
Children blogged what they though about the project, preferred way of learning.
Woodhill Primary School. commenting is a skill, 2 stars and a wish.
Other projects: Woodhill Primary School Eco Warriors
Woodhill Primary School Parents
What to blog, CPD, lots of stuff for teachers, use as calendar, homework, classwork, extensions, links for children, outing reports, book club, inter-school links.
- start small
- worthwhile tie in to learning and teaching
- be comfortable with tech
- use good software
Great overview of blogging and lots of ideas.
archive link | Perma linkInfants Can Communicate!
I am excited about this one, Morag and Marylyn's blog the Interactive Talking Teddies is one of the best examples of good practice I have seen.
Subtitle: A Tale of Two Bears and Two Classes, the room is full and they have sent for extra seats. David has been dispatched to get a cable. Spencer and Campbell are in place.
Project took place between to Argyll Primaries.
Started two years ago, adapting ideas for younger children,
Bears posted to respective schools.
Children discussed what to do with the bears, some wanted them to go on the bus.
Nice audio-slides of the children talking. Recorded delivery, track bear's progress.
Children assumed bear would hibernate during journey.
Children talk for bears, videoed with iSight. Bear taken on board as real person, video and photos taken by primary two children.
Bears went home, over 2000 digital photos came into school.
Kidspiration to write and tell children in partner school.
Children's work added to scrapbook which returned to original school.
Campbell went to Isaly to do an island tour, vib on Logan Air flight.
Interactive whiteboards, Morag started posting on a blog about there ict activities.
After a hibernation, Spencer and Campbell wanted a blog!
Spensers and Campbell's activities provided a inspiration for children's writing, from getting a uniform knitted to going on a boat trip.
Primary 3's wrote article for calmac magazine, great real audience.
Children made 'contraption' technology for transporting the bears, the children wrote at length.
Children took Bears home; on condition they did something interesting and they wrote about it in the bear's diary.
Comic Life
Flappy le Crow, a french crow from Tobermory visited and only spoke french.
Home School links, holiday activity, bears passed from child to child, lots of parent involvement.
Motivation, Approbation, independence, Confidence, Communication, Collaboration
Best thing I've seen at Settarchive link | Perma linkTeachMeet06 vs Glow
Off the cuff, after midnight.I had an great day at the Scottish learning festival. I met a lot of folk from scotedublogs, especial thanks to Neil Winton who had to buy me an extra pint when I realised my wallet was empty.
I had a go at blogging a couple of presentations live (see below) but my typing and thinking are not really quick enough, hopefully the notes will help me remember what went on and generate some reflection.
As usual what is great about Sett is not so much the presentations but the meeting up with old friends and online friends you have never seen in the flesh.
My most embarrassing moment was not recognising Stuart Oliphant of Learning and Teaching Scotland, whom I have talked to several times as he connected us to a video conference with Holland, my only excuse was he has shaved and every one different on the telly.
So at 4.00pm I made my way to teachmeet06, a great buzz in the room, really positive feel, I briefly blogged Theo Kuechel and edublogger's mum, missing all the real good stuff they talked about, due to the previously mentioned slow fingers and brain. At that point my iBook and the room were to hot to blog any more, I had blogged David's gig this morning and he was his usual amusing and pertinent self; had me smiling and thinking, so I sat back and listened.
I had to leave for the first Glow mentors meeting, so I didn't see Ollie Bray and was, to tell the truth pretty gutted not to get my 7 minutes of fame.
Then to glow, again briefly blogged. This was the launch for the glow mentors, it was nice to see the children giving a drama presentation of the expected effect of glow for teachers and pupils, but I did not really get any facts or information.
On to the glow mentor's dinner, again great to see old and new friends, but the atmosphere was very different from teachmeet06, less of an underground excitement, more questioning: what will glow deliver? when? does glow understand say rss and its potential to connect?
I guess Glow feels like work to teachmeet06's play.
Kudos to Ewan and the rest of the scotedublogs guys for the heavy lifting, to Promethian and LTS for the wifi (I've still got a few more minutes if anyone wants to grab some tomorrow) and to Stormhoek for the teachmeet wine.
archive link | Perma linkGlow mentor Launch
Alan Yeoman: Welcome, there is dry ice!What are mentors going to do, depends on local authority. Encourage and support.
We have to use the tools! and share.
Children's drama explain glow!
Mari Dougan:Glow up and running by mid 2007.
Glow team will keep mentors uptodate, email first then glow details.
Mentors to try glow tools as they come online
Nov-Dec 2006 phase 1, some facilities may be available on LA network.
Jan-april more access, yet to be announced.
Mentor glow groups, interest groups. Testing activities.
Residential Program at Stirling.
going for dinner....
archive link | Perma linkTheo Kuechel
Theo KuechelGreat children's video of adjectives, sentence and then acting out. Simple and cool.
videoegg jumpcut eyespot Children develop digital lit, skills transferable. Wiki might be setup
digital signpost
Demoing jumpcut, slice, delete, duplicate. Workonline, take home, effects, slick interface.
archive link | Perma linkBlethers
Loading ?blethers?, I'd like to know more about process writing.Progress Report blog for tutored children, motivational, homework.
Other comments, real audience, willing homework.
teacher has time to think, reply, conversation. And it worked, 3 ones.
Blogs need teachers, they are just a tool.
Live blogging slowed down by my typing.
archive link | Perma linkDavid Weinberger: Everything is Miscellaneous
David Weinberger Ofcourse I should have read the CluetrainKnower - Knowledge - Known
World is more complex than knowledge.
Knowledge is big, Knowledge is orderly - Tree structure.
Properties of knowledge are the same a properties of the real worlds. So we have to categorize by yes/no into trees. Ideas are separated by physicality of books. Libraries are trees, so cooking fish, will not be in the fish section.
2rd order: Metadata, card catalogue can sort in different ways, but you need to reduce the info to fit on a card.
3rd order a leaf can be on lots of branches, amazon lists books in many categories. Nice illustration of messy linking, the messier/richer the better. metadata and data will not be separated (copytight laws are lunacy
) in the 3rd order.Dynamically organized tree, hey del.ico.us tagging.
Data storage is so large, keep and tag.
Mass media dumb down. People are tired of this, simplification. Blogs can expand and check the detail, take simple idea and add complexity (nothing new conversation does this).
Wikiopedia can lack credibility. Lots of checks, edits, history, discussion. lots of examples, disclaimers add to credibility, why not in main stream media .
Wikipedia will come up with collaborative knowledge, not in someone's head, but in the conversation.
Wikipedia will ban if you repeatedly roll back to your edit without explanation. My battery is going, David want his children to work collaboratively, to read socially.
Going to go to teachmeet06.
archive link | Perma linkOptical Air Mouse
GO 2.4 Optical Air Mouse and Compact Keyboard SuitePaul and I just got excited about these on the scotsys stand, at £99 they look great for using on smartboard.
archive link | Perma linkThe Reading Bus
The Reading Bus
http://www.readingbus.co.uk
A couple of minutes late, children presenting.Hannover PS Aberdeen; High social depravation mixed backgrounds and abilities.
School has lots of parent links.
Raising attainment in Reading, fun and fostering lifelong reading.
The bus started from school, but includes other partners.
CFE - Enterprise, affected parents as well as children.
Learning bus, Aberdeen Bus company for education staff, buses are fun and unthreatening for parents, halfway house.
Involved more than one school, schools were to raise money for bus and conversion. Flat funding, lots of other charities contributed.
Bus launched 31 Aug 2006.
Partnerships with libraries, heath, school nurses, community health.
Emphasis on non-threatening place for teachers, learners and parents to contribute together. Children very involved in all aspects and implementation.
Bobby: 10 primaries involved, children from all schools worked together. Enterprise approach. Eg. Design of bus competition, great ideas. Bobby obviously benefitted great confident presentation.
Samantha: great list of events she had been involved in.
The slides in the background are going too fast to blog.
Morag Russell Aberdeen University
Learning conversations designed to find out what children think (and let the children know).
Wicked witch idea: What might happen if you cannot read?
Great use of conversation.
Wher do you want to read, not in classroom
Parents recall of school, lack of choice, again asking parents why reading was important?
Eg: misreading of pregnancy test.
Parents think they are not good readers, didn't read novels.
Community Radio project, children lead, interviewed based on wicked witch.
Slide, children learned: adults think they are smart but they don't know what children thing
Question to children, why can people read but puppies can't? Great answers from children.(need time to think)
There is far to much in this, to blog as it goes on. keywords, conversation, enterprise, (revisit children's conversations with them, lets them know that their contributions are valued).
Children link reading to real life rather than education.
Live broadcast radio show. notes: £120,000 to buy and convert bus
archive link | Perma linkDavid and Ewan's Gig
An early start, I sneaked in. How primary teachers create a community of learners.BeBo: blogs not used, children don't want to write?
Connections and discussions.
Ewan's BeBo deconstruction, blog least important, comments, bands, photos, friends, Attention
Ewan:
- Blogs and Comments
- Heh, Sandaig otters, thank goodness we blogged yesterday. On to the teddies and out of school communication.
- Musselburgh trip to France, 4698 visits, advertised on posters in local shops.
- Clustermaps, opportunity to shoutout to the audience.
- The Dream Dragon, example
- How to bore your friends and family or A useful tool
- Photos with notes Viking Invasion Project on Flickr
- Highlight, link and learn, open photos to others to add knowledge.
- Telling Tales: teddies, bubbleshare: audience.
- Link Out, East Lothian blogs for all children with custom sidebar .
- Online link shareing.
- scotedublogs
Discussion, problems and blocks from HTs and authorities.
archive link | Perma linkOf to the Festival
Pretty soon I will be off to the Scottish Learning Festival and teachMeet06.Unlike some of the other scotedublogs folk, I've still not really worked out what I am going to see.
First thing I am going to find out Where is AB? and se if he has any wifi left, if so I'll post some thoughts, and links over the next couple of days, more as a memory aid than anything else, typos ahoy!
Last year I am sure I was one of a very few people blogging Sett05, just by 'borrowing' machines that were scattered around the floor, this year it looks like being very different.
archive link | Perma linkAnother approach to phones in the classroom
phones in the classroom on you tube
archive link | Perma linkPebbles
Last night I was reading an interesting post And, don't forget to breathe! on GD's Random Jottings a blog by a teacher in Argyll (one of Andrew Brown's 118 I'd guess). It was an interesting post from the chackface, I was especially interested inBut I'm beginning to wonder how many others have stalled ICT projects, their progress barred not by large rocks but by small, irritating pebbles of problems.There are plenty of rocks in the way of progress, but the small technical details are often a show stopper, things that work at home or on an inservice or training day just don't work in the class where the pressure is on, frustration will lead to the stall. And there are so many pebbles.
At lunch time I was planning this post, it was going to be about the use of wee cheap devices, namely the iRiver and cameras and just getting things done quickly and generating excitement in the class.
This morning I was doing a bit of talking in one of our primary six classes, the one that is 'not 'mine' (or half mine, I am sharing one of the p6s this session), we were looking with a projector at some posts and comments the children had made, following links in comments, and talking what makes a good comment. 15 minutes before the bell we decided to blog about the French lesson from the previous day, the children's second one. The children wanted to blog about it, but couldn't think of much to say so I pulled out my iRiver and recorded a short song about the alphabet, we uploaded that onto the blog and the children were delighted (I am not sure how delighted their teacher was with their accent). I was pretty pleased with myself, and thinking about the afternoon.
The day before my class had been working on electric circuits and a group made a tiny movie with a digital camera, they has written a good report and were going to blog it, with me giving a hand to get the quicktime movie in the post.
I've installed the stuff from embedthevideo.com to make it simple to generate code to popup movies.
We uploaded, blogged and tested. The video was blank and QT said it needed a component. Eek, I then spent any free seconds for the rest of the afternoon trying to get a move exported from QT pro that was a small size and played on our school PCs, needless to say I didn't get it to work until after the end of the school day. The problem was I had encoded the movie in H.264 format, doing it again in H.263 format worked fine (and the movie was smaller). I uploaded the replacement file and the post is now working well.
Anyway, this post was, in my imagination, going to be about the ease of using small devices to make quick, simple and exciting posts with children.
It turned out not to be so simple. I'll know the next time.
The idea of making really short, small video and audio clips and blogging them easily was really attractive, getting away from the larger scale podcasts and dv projects to something more spontaneous, this technology should be transparent but it is full of grit and pebbles.
archive link | Perma linkGlowing to SETT
Another awful glow pun, sorry. I got the news yesterday that I had been accepted as a glow mentor, and therefore would be going to SETT. I had not asked my HT before as I've gone the last few years and thought that it might be pushing it. She said something like 'I expected that you would be going and wondered why you had not asked.'
Of course I was going to pop along for TeachMeet06. I am not sure what to do about the teachmeet vs glow dinner clash?I also don't really know what is on the program and have not chosen which presentations to go to, I know I want to see the Interactive Chatting Teddies as I would like to get my photo taken with Spencer and Campbell, and I presume Ewan will be doing a turn, so I will probably heckle
.
Any suggestions as to other good presentations gratefully received.
What I am really looking forward to is meeting with everyone who has supported the Sandaig Blogs, by commenting and linking, over the last couple of years.
The other thing I've got to do is work out exactly what i am going to talk about for 7 minutes at TeachMeet, seems harder than talking for an hour, I am going to be talking about RSS and APIs but have not really worked out a conclusion yet.
archive link | Perma linkwikipedia not exactly how I planned it.
Used under: GNU Free Documentation License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
from wikimedia.org
Then I gave groups of children printouts of the Wikipedia pages about Scottish cities and highlighter pens, they went through the entries highlighting bits of text which will become note and then their own texts. Steam-powered Web2.0. good fun was had by all and the children ended up with some useful starters for their research. There should be a child's eye view on the Sandaig Otters blog tomorrow.
archive link | Perma linkIntroduction to Blogging - Links
I will be talking to folk from the schools in our Learning community tonight these links are for me to talk about.Sandaig Blogs:
- Sandaig Otters
- Sandaig Poets October 2005
- The Dream Dragon
- Kimberley's Bio-Poem
- The Netherlands 2005
ScotEduBlogs Wiki Links to the Scots Edu Blog world.
A couple of tutorials on using wordpress (interface might be a bit different)
- Intro to Wordpress
- Posting to Wordpress
- Blogging in Wordpress - pdf A great guide to using Wordpress at edu.blogs.org, so there may be a few differences.
archive link | Perma linkA good weeks blogging
My class are beginning to get the hang of blogging, this week we appointed two class scribes each day to blog each day, they are given the digital camera, and snap away then blog whatever they choose over on Sandaig Otters. This week the children, who are pretty much new to blogging, need a bit of support with the technology as well as the writing but I think this is going to be a regular feature of the class this session.
I am also going to try to expand it to other classes. I kidnapped a few children from Primary seven to do a wee bit of blogging yesterday. If this expansion happens I'll need to get busy figuring out how to present the posts as they will be dropping off the bottom as fast as they appear.
Again this week I have has sterling support from a pile of off site teachers and friends who have been commenting on the work. Apologies to those who have not had a follow up comment from the bloggers, we have still only one pc in the class as the suite is not ready yet. I'll be delighted to return the favour and also link to other primary blogs if you let me know.
archive link | Perma linkMore Suite Progress
The furniture was built today, it was surprisingly big and looks of great quality.I am getting pretty keen to get started, but am trying to keep calm. Watch this space...
archive link | Perma linkPivot
I think this blog is unique in the ScotsEduBlog world in that it runs off Pivot.The reason is that 1. I was familiar with pivot when we started blogging at Sandaig as I had blogged for a few years at Bad Poet my non-edu mainly SuperCard blog.
and 2.Pivot is one of the few blogs that did not need a database on the server, and we did not have a database with our hosting package at the time.
Pivot has in my opinion, proved to be great, very flexible with a pretty good toolset.
It has enabled us to run 18 weblogs for a variety of purposes. The theme settings are not as slick as say wordpress, but it is easier to customise using basic html and css, the blogs here may not be the prettiest but they are distinct from each other and some are cunningly disguised as parts of the main site (example: HT News or Sandaig News).
The main thing that has held me back from wholeheartedly recommending pivot to other teachers is its lack of pre-moderation of comments, so I was delighted to read about the new 1.40 beta on pivotlog.net, which has Comment Moderation and Greatly improved Metaweblog API support.
I think I've already been testing the metaWeblog stuff here as I uploaded some cutting-edge files from the pivot forum recently, but with moderation I can now recommend Pivot to any teacher with a smattering of html and css that would like to run a blog from a web host rather than use a blogging service. wOOt as the young folk say.
archive link | Perma linkThe real reason why no one reads your blog
The real reason why no one reads your blog. Via J Walk BlogWell it amused me.
archive link | Perma linkreal work
I was talking to a colleague in another primary school recently. They mentioned that a cpd opportunity in blogging had been offered round in their staff-room, the reaction from the staff was along the lines of that is all very well but we have real work like spelling to get through.
I am a wee bit worried about this, and unfortunately I doubt the message is going to get through very quickly via cpd. A/the problem is that folk seem to think blogging is out with the normal day to day curriculum when it could be an enhancement to it.
A less than best practice example: this week I did a couple of sessions of McRone cover in our two primary seven classes. As it was only the second week of term, I just did my own thing rather than follow the class routine. I decided to do a wee poetry lesson using a basic template to get the class started blogging. The lesson turned out to be about a lot more than blogging. We started by reviewing nouns, verbs and adjectives and introduced antonyms, we discussed powerful vs weak words, the importance of audience and getting our spelling right.
The children wrote poems and blogged some of them on Sandaig Poets, things got a bit frantic and some spelling mistakes were made, eek! Poems were blogged, and over the next couple of days, thanks to Ewan's linkage, and comments from Bob, Andy, Neil and Steve, the children's interest was maintained.
I popped back into one of the classes later in the week (my own macrone) for a follow up. We discussed spelling mistakes, slang, text messaging, audience and the ideas given by the comments, some of which served to increase the class vocabulary. We went on to cover internet safety, audience again and a few other things.
The time spent by pupils on the computers was about 10 minutes each. Most of the work involved, discussion and writing, the odd picture was drawn, nothing out of the ordinary.Blogging provided some extras (audience,context and purpose) for real work.
After reading Gordon's post Too much hassle I think the problem is that some teacher do not realise that it is not really much hassle to dip a toe in the web 2.0, but we need to give enough time, training and practice to let them know that. Same as any other aspect of teaching and learning really.
The English Beat - End of the Party - Special Beat Service (yes I am grabbing this from iTunes, sorry)
archive link | Perma linkclassroomblogging wiki
Tom Barrett let me know about a new wiki he has set up: classroomblogging to answer the questionSo what can I actually use a classroom blog for?There are already some great answers.
Tom has set up a blog for his year 6 class which I look forward to reading.
archive link | Perma linkGoogle Earth Screenshot: Troon Beach
You cannot quite recognise the people on Troon beach. I think I might need to set up a test blog if I do not want to choke this one up with experements.
archive link | Perma linkAnother fine mess
Over the last few week I've been blogging happily from TextMate and feeling quite pleased with myself. I even wrote a crude command from the blogging bundle to convert a set of selected words to technorati tags. Unfortunately I didn't check it out properly and the links produced were broken. So this morning I fixed it and used textMate to retrive the posts fix the links and repost them, not noticing until I had finished that that set the date to todays. I've reordered them now, but it looks like I went mad blogging today.This is my code, it is important to note I know nothing at all about shell scripting so just used google to figue out what to use:
echo "<p class="ttags">"
tt="<a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/thetag/" rel="tag" target="_blank">thetag</a>"
str=$TM_SELECTED_TEXT
for word in $str; do echo ${tt//thetag/$word}; done
echo "</p>"
Hopefully the next paragraph will show it works:
archive link | Perma linkK12 Online 2006 Conference
This looks like it is going to be great:K12 Online 2006 Conference?
the first annual K12 Online 2006 convention for teachers, administrators and educators around the world interested in the use of Web 2.0 tools in classrooms and professional practice. This year?s conference is scheduled to be held over two weeks, Oct. 23-27 and Oct. 30- Nov. 3 with the theme Unleashing the Potential.Organised by Darren Kuropatwa, Sheryl Nusbaum-Beach, Will Richardson. Just misses our October week holiday, which is probably a good thing from my family's point of view.
archive link | Perma linkPodcastDirectory.org.uk
archive link | Perma linkSuite Progress
Our ICT suite started to come together today, we got a phone call yesterday to tell us to expect deliveries.
The classroom assistants did a great clean up
Hugh helped stacking the furniture
Quite a lot of boxes
And by the end of the day the plaster had been done
We are expecting the decorators on Monday and the guys to put the furniture together on Wednesday
For me the icing on the cake arrived just after the plasterers:
I am really looking forward to getting down to work with the suite and the mini suite of 4 mac minis. A few children were working with my iBook today to produce a comic life of two, which have been published on Sandaig Otters, I am hoping to that this sort of activity a lot further as the session progresses.
archive link | Perma linkTesting Google Earth Geo-Blog Snapshot
I am just testing an AppleScript from Adam Burt which takes a screenshot of google earth and posts it to a blog via ecto. does lots of tagging and produces metadata too. Designed for blojsom I've tweaked the html a bit for pivot.Details and download of the script from Google Earth Geo-Blog Snapshot - ecto Script plug-in.
I know little about google Earth, but I know there are a few folk out there who might like this.
meta-longitude=-4.322157262071
meta-latitude=55.878416254973
meta-altitude=0
meta-range=156.059623386301
meta-tilt=0.0
meta-heading=5.009656812371E-14
meta-coordinates=-4.322157262071,55.878416254973,0
archive link | Perma linkThe Kindness of Bloggers
Image uploaded with AppleScript
It took me a while to get TextMate working and AppleScript worked for everything but posting images.
I got a ton of help on the pivot forum from hansfn, who was very patient with me, and spent a good while reading docs and googling, but I could not get AppleScript to upload images.
Last night I posted a comment on Tom Smith's Blog this morning a script arrived in my inbox that worked perfectly.
It is always a great pleasure when this happens, people who you do not know giving up time to help out a stranger.
archive link | Perma linkDrupal
Tim Lauer is Moving to Drupal. The setup sounds great:For example each of our 4th and 5th grade teachers will have a blog which she will use to post assignments and announcements to students. Each 4th and 5th grade student will have a Drupal based blog that will live behind our firewall.and
While we plan to introduce this to the students as a way to manage their work, we also will begin to introduce the idea that their class blog is a place for them to do other things besides just respond to assignments. We will also enable the images module so that they can use their Drupal blog as a place to organize images associated with their work. Using RSS we will create a master feed of all images and create a Flickr type collection of images that they can share and discuss with their classmates.Sound just great. I am wondering if Drupal is suitable for hosted sites, how hard it is to setup etc, etc.