ScotEdupedia has arrived. It’s a wiki for Scottish Education. It looks really good, though at the moment I’ve got a problem with the way it’s set up - there’s not quick URLs (e.g. http://www.scotedupedia.co.uk/Maths  doesn’t take you to the entry on maths) which is a real issue for avid ‘pedia users. Also the layout is haywire on Internet Explorer here in Fife. On every computer.

I ain’t trying to bash this lovely website though. I just can’t find the place to comment on the scotedupedia site so I thought I’d put it up here just now.

Good luck to those involved finishing the site off. It will be interesting to see how it is used.

Hello to new viewers to this fine publication, especially those from my class who have sneakily found this! I’d encourage you to have a look at the links to see what weird and wonderful things teachers actually do in their jobs (and spare time). Maybe they could start some revision blogs before the Higher exams start?
In other news, I had a visit from Derek who went through plans for game education stuff with me and the rector at my school. All very very interesting. More soon on this I hope!

Busy with S4 coursework at the moment, then revision, so the plan is to channel all my time into developing online stuff for revision, and shove it all up onto Moodle. A tall order when you see how many concepts are in SG Computing! But will get there. I want to investigate the idea of a computing studies wiki some time soon. I set one up here but haven’t had time to think about how to approach it. Multi-admin Moodle is probably just as effective in terms of collecting different worksheets/quizzes/etc though inflexible in other ways.

Had an inservice tonight and was talking to a lady about blogging - forgot to ask her name but hopefully after being directed to scotedublogs, will find a link to her soon!

I like the way that (I would think) most teachers blogging just now didn’t have to be told to do so in a CPD session - adventures are cool.

- Blogging is working well for the more able pupils, as they seem to be retaining most of what they write about

- Blogging has been unsuccessful for some pupils, as they have directly copied information. Though the information is interesting and accurate, the pupils have succeeded more in the act of finding than in the act of learning. This is in itself an assessable skill - but the knowledge retention was the key to the exercise.

- About 200 posts and every post has been relevant. This is good. However, I am keen to switch to a better blogging system where there is an easier form of moderation.

- I am going to change my approach. Pupils will blog reconstructed information. In this way maybe kids will be forced to synthesise their own summaries of information. Just now they are retrieving with a high accuracy but not absorbing most of what they retrieve.

The third years did well - 86 posts from 15 pupils in half a period. Not bad. Some managed 8 posts. Tomorrow we test how effective this is by taking their own revision and giving them customised questions on it. Then at least I’ll be able to see if the kids are absorbing what they blog, or if it’s just an added distraction.

Inspired by Sandaig’s excellent comic about Burns Night, I thought I’d have a wee look for online comic makers, that might be useful for teachers and pupils alike.

Comic creator by the IRA (the International Reading Association, that is )

Futurama comic maker

Garfield comic creator - this one look great.

Really simple comic creator

Nice simple comic strip generator

Another simple comic strip generator

A wee Super Mario comic maker

Zam’s Quest comic maker about wildlife conservation, no less.

Another comic creator like the Garfield one

Enjoy!

Got the third years to set up their own blog and now we’re doing summaries of different input/output devices on them. It’s good for me as I get an RSS feed of all the entries aggregated for me! So far so good with this - though one candidate has referred to himself as ih8computing . Working on him to change that of his own accord.

The blog is pupil comment only. I’m going to keep it that way, and use our older third year blog for public posts.

Here’s a link to the Third year blog cluster and The old blog

I’m going to program a wee auto-magic RSS reader that displays these entries in a dictionary layout, ready for printing. So if they can have their own entries for everything in a certain topic, they can print it out. Should even be able to do this by using the categories on the blog.

I know a few bloggers out there are very up-to-date on internet safety. Let me know what you think of that particular blog cluster host - does it look safe to you? My only concern is that I am moderating post-publish. There is no option to have a moderation queue for entries. I think this will work fine as I am checking the work as it is posted, but is this too much of a risk?

Tomorrow sees my school’s first meeting about using radio shows/podcasting in school. It’s a meeting of the ICT committee so at this point it’s just to check over if I’ve got my ideas right. Has anyone out there had any problems with the RadioWaves site?

 Our plan is to have a radio show club which will allow kids to make their own shows, produce them, and upload them. They just need to book out equipment. I’ve made wee help sheets for recording and using Audacity - seems pretty straightforward for them.

I also want to get a “mobile recording studio” set up - just a box with a laptop (with Audacity), the mp3 recorder and microphone, and a guide. Would be great if people could book this out like they do with the ICT rooms. Has anyone got good estimates on the time it takes to produce a radio show in this way?

I have been starting to use the equipment in my class and it’s been really good fun so far. All the kids are doing is recording summaries they were to do for homework. Once (if!) I get them all in, we are going to string it together and add some nice background music. It will be a nice revision tool as well, I think.

We’re killing off the third year blog in favour of a blog cluster for S3. I’m getting them to do layout and stuff at the end of each class. I don’t want to link to it just now as next week we hit it big time, and that will be much more exciting! It’s going to use the same site as (hopefully) the S2 classes will use. This will mean all S2 pupils should have a fully functional blog for the rest of their time in school. Whether this will be useful or used is another matter but if they at least make the blogs, it could be interesting.

Also, went to my first Glow thing, though it wasn’t a meeting about Glow, rather an inservice for Glow mentors. It was all about digital video. I’m interested to see what’s available for schools though I was more interested in seeing who else was blogging etc. Never had a chance to ask but would be good to get Fife’s glow mentors to be a bit more public. I’ve made enquiries.

That’s all I’ve got to say for now! I hope to have informative posts about new class blogs, podcasts, and glow stuff in the next few weeks though. ScotEduBlogs, the aggregation project, is coming along well too, though need to get stuck back into coding after a week of watching others do stuff

I’m a bit scared of getting into “plodding through coursework etc” mode at school - so much to do but still need to make an effort to try new things, get new things started up and so on. But it’s easier said than done when trying to process 40+ programming tasks and many other types of practical assessment .

Been having a champion time with the ScotEduBlog project over the last week. In the past three weeks, I’ve managed to learn Ruby on Rails and join in a collabarative open source project. All while going back to school! Good times.

It’s good to be programming something useful, though I am reminded of my limitations as an organised programmer (rather than my typical approach of picking bits away until it works). It’s harder to be scrappy with Ruby on Rails, mind you, though I’ve found ways….

I swithered a bit when deciding whether to be a teacher or a computer programmer. I’m glad I’ve found a way to try to join up jobs and interests to help people improve education.

I’ve got a wee idea up my sleeve too, but that’s for later!

Anyway, well done to John and Robert, who got the project off the ground. Should be a useful thing one day very soon!

I’m a wee bit embarrased how excited I am about this, but looks like I’m getting to be a Glow mentor!

Geek out!

Google reader! a personal, online RSS feed aggregator and reader! I’ve been using it for a few months and can find no better. Simple to use, sharable, and now has great statistics for each blog and your own preferences. All of it’s starrable and taggable too, and exports OPML files! You can control it with your keyboard!

 Hurrah for Google Reader!