I was interviewed by David Noble last month. David is currently researching his doctoral thesis by interviewing educators to determine how they use the social web to support learning, teaching and professional development. You can read more about his work and the participants on the Edonis Ning site.
I was quite nervous because our telephone conversation was broadcast live online using iPadio and I knew some people were listening. If you missed it, David has published the audio here or you can download it below.
On Saturday, I had the privilege to share a share a platform with Nick Hood at the Scottish Science Education Conference at the Dunblane Hydro. Our session went by the name “Using New Media in Science Education – Not Just for Twits”. The aim was to share some of the online practice taking place both inside and outside the country’s science classrooms.
We spoke about blogging and walked the participants through the process of setting up a free blog. Nick explained RSS and demonstrated why every teacher should use a RSS reader. We also covered podcasting and use of a wiki. For anyone interested in the links we used on the day, find a summary on my wiki.
During the session, we mentioned the lack of blogging Chemistry teachers. Word has reached us that Dr. Taylor has met our challenge head-on and started his own blog. Great job, Dr. T.!
A great new project kicked off at EDUtalk this week. John Johnston and David Noble have set the ambitious target of posting a piece of audio every day throughout 2010 as part of their EDUtalk365 project. I think that their idea of educators sharing ideas on the changes sweeping through education is brilliant and the nature of the contributions makes it possible for busy people to dip in and out of the published audio as and when they have the time. I have posted previously on the ease with which audio resources can be accessed while driving, walking the dog, washing the dishes, etc. and I think that David and John are on to a winner here.
To help them on their way towards 365 days of audio, I recorded a short piece on how I have been using Wordle in the classroom as an aid to literacy across learning. You can listen to my contribution here. Better still, subscribe to their Posterous blog or add it to your iTunes podcasts so you’ll never miss an episode during 2010!
Sessions on the first day were booked up well in advance, with 1000 teachers and auxiliaries spending Tuesday at the festival. I had planned to go along on the second day as the programme had more ICT and secondary sessions of interest to me. However, that changed when I became a late addition to Wednesday’s schedule with a double slot to speak about the work I have been doing with blogging and iTunes in my classroom.
The numbers for my sessions were low on paper but two or three times as many people turned up each time. I spoke briefly about running a blog before explaining how SMART Notebook software can be used to produce a videos that can be downloaded as podcasts with iTunes. Then we looked at the ways in which everyday handheld devices such as mobile phones and iPods can be used for mobile learning. I was genuinely surprised by the level of interest shown and the number of questions I was asked during and after each session.
I was delighted when I managed to squeeze into Ollie Bray & Derek Robertson‘s games-based learning session at 12.30 in between my own slots. I’d met Derek before, he was one of the tutors from my PGCE course, but I had never met Ollie despite having exchanged tweets and interviewed him on Skype for a podcast.
The single disappointment for me was the way that the event finished so quickly in the afternoon. My last slot was over by 2.30 and by then many of the exhibitors were packing up. If the rumours are true and the event is run again next year, then I think I would try to spend more than just one day there to ensure I could take something from the event for my professional development.
As always, I was economic with slides but I have embedded them anyway. There’s also an audio recording of the morning session attached to this post.
I know that it’s only a matter of minutes since I posted about the Glow groups I started to create after returning from the Building Glow Communities event but I need to show you all something. As I started to work on my groups, I realised that I had an obvious source of resources in my classroom blog. I tried to use an XML web part to bring the RSS feed into Glow but it just didn’t look right, see screenshot below.
The text is all bunched up together and the layout does not let you easily identify the beginning and end of individual entries. This is a shame because I thought I could pull in homework activities and their solutions in the same way that they are published to iTunes.
Luckily, there’s a very helpful Glow genius called Fraser who came to my rescue. He has a black belt in XSL and was able to write some code that will allow anyone with a WordPress blog to import their RSS feed into Glow. This is a major breakthrough for my personal plan for using Glow with pupils and I am sure that there will be many blogging teachers around Scotland who will be eager to take advantage of this solution.
As a before & after activity, take a look at the structure that has been given to my blog feed in the following screenshots.
Notice how the embedded video player now sits neatly amongst the text. There are also clearly recognisable download links, making the feed much more useful.
I use my classroom blog to feed four different podcasts; Advanced Higher, Higher, Intermediate 2 and Standard Grade Physics. Wordpress category feeds keep the posts in the correct podcast and Fraser has set up the code so I can feed any combination of WordPress categories into Glow, essentially replicating the podcasting process I have been using.
This is a seriously useful piece of code to have for your Glow group.
…is perhaps a grand title for an informal after-school get together but I think it conveys the importance we placed on coming together as a group. Last month, a group of teachers from Highland schools were invited to Dingwall Academy to meet fellow teachers who either run blogs themselves, or have classroom or even whole-school blogs.
The group, initially all primary teachers, were contacted by email to see if there was sufficient interest in the idea of a meeting. Louise Jones suggested that Stephanie Disbury and I, both secondary teachers, should try to attend as there was currently no framework for us to participate in a similar group with a secondary focus.
We met in one of the computer suites in the recently-opened Academy. The idea was for us to spend some time looking at each other’s blogs and seeing what other practitioners were using their blogs for, both inside and outside the classroom environment. I was really surprised by the frequency of media use. Photographs and embedded video seemed to feature prominently in many of the sites we visited.
Louise brought us all up to date with the e-safety CPD roll-out across Highland and an interesting debate on the use of 3rd party sites followed, particularly around the issue of whether or not pupils should be using a personal account.
A theme that cropped up several times was that of internet filtering and the problem associated with hosting materials to be used in school on sites such as youtube, vimeo and flickr. I must thank Margaret Vass for coming to our rescue with suggestions for sites that would not be filtered in primary schools, Photobucket seems to have gone down well – it works in school and has shorter upload times.
Jim Henderson, our virtual learning coordinator, also joined us. He delighted several of us with his announcement of a new server, complete with WordPress MultiUser, to give a safe blogging platform for schools across the Highlands. This could not have come at a better time. I am planning a series of blogging sessions with staff at my own school during study leave and now have an appropriate hosting solution that will not require vigilance for inappropriate advertising in the sidebar.
Hopefully this will be the first in a series of meetings. It was great to see how others not only use their blogs but also to hear how they think their use of blogs will change over time.
With the decision to stop using Edublogs, I am left with the question of what to use instead. This isn’t just a decision for hosting of my own blog, that’s done and dusted now. The problem is that I am not sure where to point others who are looking for a blogging solution. In particular, I’ve been charged with providing blogging training after Easter for staff at my own school and will need to have something for these practical sessions
I had heard of WordPress multi-user before when I had exchanged tweets with David Gilmour, who administers the East Lothian Edubuzz.org blogging system. Then we had a brilliant session last Sunday on EdTechRoundup, when we had several people join us to talk about WPMU. In the main meeting and background chat room, we covered the rationale for using WPMU over the established vanilla-flavoured WordPress solution, moving on to cover the set up and maintenance of WPMU.
Feeling enthused by the discussion, I’ve downloaded WPMU myself and had a go at installing it. There are ongoing teething issues. For example, my web hosting company will not allow me to use wildcard subdomains (you’ll know what that is if you read the installation documentation) and issues with too many redirections (stuck in a forwarding loop between the login screen and the admin dashboard screen) amongst others.
All of this makes me agree with comments made during the week on twitter, where Stuart Meldrum and others voiced the opinion that the biggest problem with maintaining WPMU was having the time to do it. In the mean time, I’ve had a blog comment from Jim Henderson suggesting that there may be a server coming to Highland at some point, giving is all access to a centrally-maintained WPMU installation. My fingers are tightly crossed now because I can’t wait for that to happen!
