I’m dissapointed in myself for the lack of blog updates of recent.. I’ve not been idle, just lots of things are at the “waiting for permission/meetings/equipment/time” stage. Mainly I want to talk about the scotedublogs aggregation project but here’s some other updates:

- Observations on givings kids Audacity and a headset and asking them to record something: they can do it, no problem! The only issue I came across was the whole “you need an idea first” part - though one pair did an original (if strange!) satire about rich New York interior designers (yes, indeed!)

- I have been investigating gaming software. Gamemaker is great and am thinking seriously of using this, and even using it to demonstrate programming to S3. ThinkingWorlds is pretty amazing too but find it hard to get started with. Blitz3D is good but maybe for later on as it’s pretty complicated for beginners. Looking forward to trying some of this with the kids whenever I manage to talk to Derek about it.

- Might be replacing the rock-steady standard make a web page in Microsoft Frontpage unit with a rather exciting make your own blog unit! Idea is to use 21publish to do this. The software looks great though not totally sure about relying so heavily on a third party site.. especially as I won’t be taking the classes :/

- I did an interview with David Noble about Open Source. It was good fun though I think it’s pretty hard to make out what I’m babbling on about! The main point I was trying to make was that web2.0 is the inheritor of the fruits of Open Source. Without Apache, mySQL, PHP, Ruby, etc, there’d be no explosion of web2.0 sites. Without open standards being encouraged there’d be no XML-based data sharing as we have it today. And without Open Source, Creative Commons couldn’t have flourished as it has. In short - hurrah for geeks!

BUT! Mainly I wanted to say well done to Robert Jones and John Johnston who have so far created a great wee test site for the Scot-Edu-Blogs aggregation project. I got my wee Ruby book today out of Borders and I’m trying to work out what’s going on. Looks pretty cool though, so far!

Since this is probably my last post of the year, I’d just like to say thank you to everyone who reads this and whose blogs I read. This is my second year as a teacher and so far it’s been excellent in terms of what I’ve learned. Half of this is because of the excellent school I am working in and half is because of the great teachers out there blogging. It really makes a difference, doesn’t it?

Happy new year, and keep on blogging!