Why wait till CPD catches up? If you want to learn about podcasting, you could go here for free!
Thanks to Christopher for keeping me up to date. Would be a good idea to del.icio.us-ise or digg this and let teachers you know who might fancy it!

PODCASTING WORKSHOP
presented by John Harris and Michelle Kasprzak

at the Electron Club, Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA), 350
Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow
Wednesday 10th January 2007, starting at 7.00 pm
admission free - no booking required

A hands-on introduction to creating and publishing your own podcasts.
Podcasting is a system for distributing audio content over the
internet. This workshop will take people through the process of
creating and formatting audio for podcasts using the Free Software tool
Audacity, putting your podcast online, and publicising it through RSS
feeds. It is presented by two practitioners experienced with podcasting
and online distribution, John Harris and Michelle Kasprzak, who will be
happy to answer questions, explain the jargon and discuss issues of
copyright, copyleft and ‘open content’ publishing.

Equipment and software for producing your podcasts will be provided in
the workshop, but please bring your own headphones!

If you have a laptop and would like to have the software used in the
workshop installed on it, or just prefer working on your own computer,
bring it along - network access will be available to all.

ABOUT JOHN AND MICHELLE

John Harris runs the experimental music podcast label Seven Things.
Download podcasts by leading Scottish and international composers and
sound artists at: http://www.seventhings.co.uk

Michelle Kasprzak is the Programmes Director of New Media Scotland.
Check out New Media Scotland’s podcasts and find out more at:
http://www.mediascot.org

ABOUT AUDACITY

Audacity is a Free Open Source Software tool for creating and editing
audio files. It is simple and easy to use and available for Linux,
Macintosh and Windows - absolutely free.

For more information, and to download your own copy, go to:
http://audacity.sourceforge.net

Beginner’s tutorial: http://www.yourmachines.org/tutorials/audacity.html

ABOUT THE ELECTRON CLUB

The Electron Club is a voluntary project creating a public space where
people interested in things like free open source software, circuit
bending, hardware hacking, computer recycling, streaming, audio and
video editing, green technologies, and amateur radio can meet, use
equipment, and share and disseminate their skills and ideas. All are
welcome. For more information see:

http://www.electronclub.org

Electron Club, Centre for Contemporary Arts, 350 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow
contact: info@electronclub.org

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!

Ten top mac shareware apps for an 85% discount - already raised $150,000 for charity! Mind you, only 5 hours left. Go go go!

MacHeist 85% discount top 10 mac shareware bundle

1. Go to http://www.rsc-yh.ac.uk/advent/ (Web 2.0 Advent calendar)

2. Click the links in a school

3. See how many are blocked

There’s been a flurry of excellent posts by Ewan McIntosh about learning, over the past few days, filled with interesting questions about how the read/write web enables learning, and (I think) by extension, autonomous learning. There are autonomous learners in school already - guitar players, programmers, dancers, illustrators, and other kids who have a keen interest in something. These kids have built up, over time, highly complex skills and knowledge of their interests. I’m struggling at this point though. If we want autonomous learners in the classroom, then which of the following are true?

1.  Choosing to learn means choosing subjects that reflect interests - the challenge lies in providing meaningful subjects that also offer futures.
2. It is not possible to engage children completely in subjects that they dislike - they will not take it upon themselves to learn something they are not interested in. As job requirements, not pupil interest, must dictate the direction of schooling, the only pupils that can autonomously learn are those that are interested in general, academic pursuit (as it currently the case?)
3. Engaging pupils with their interests can encourage them to be autonomous learners. Relating these interests in a meaningful way to our (and by our I mean the government/society’s) interests is the bridge to providing better learning.

Again, this is all thinking out loud. ACfE encourages me that the people in charge may understand this in the same way as I do. However, I’m not sure, really, how it all will fit together.

Moving house on Monday so will be without Internet for a bit. Or so I thought till I broke my old mobile, and upgraded to a wee MDA Vario. Still working it out, hence no pictures etc. A fair few other bloggers have praised these wee devices (though mainly the better Vario II) - maybe the persuasive power of blogs is more extreme than I thought!

You’ve probably seen all this before, but I had the kids try out this when talking about search engines - pretty nice I think!

Kartoo - visual search engine

And for hours of fun:
Ms. Dewey - Microsoft’s avatar search engine. Kind of rubbish, but fun to show the kids (maybe not a class of 3rd year boys, though…)

I love seeing what other people are doing with free web tools - there’s a lot of free tools out there empowering teachers and students to make great stuff. I’m always still drawn to embracing the geek in me and programming my own tools for use in the class. I don’t actually have the time, but I still feel the urge to.

It explains the fixation with moodle, anyway.

Kids have been doing ok with the third year blog. I feel that their summaries and comments are still quite unfocussed. I’m giving them a few weeks though - I’m betting one or two pupils will write a stunner and the rest will fall into place. Summaries, coming as they do at the end of the lesson, will need to be in bigger writing in my lesson planner. The lack of priority over the many many other tasks the kids must do means that I feel it is getting rushed.

Just a wee thought, there.

In other news, no progress podcasting, as I’m waiting for some materials to arrive. Thanks for all the comments on this blog and the old blog - some very nice things said. I’ll try to keep updating regularly, particularly about the podcasting.

Just a quick live example of Moodle in action - collaboratively building a glossary of terms about a unit of work - I hand out flash cards with a term, pupils use their knowledge, the web and their notes to find definitions.

 Moodle Glossary Collaboration

 The terms you’ll find there at the moment were done by students working at General/Foundation level. There were 4 of them, they did 22 terms. The quality varies dramatically, some are witty and well thought out, some are copied (!) from notes. Some are too basic. But for a first attempt, I’m happy at their level of work. Comments are enabled for the class - the next stage is peer assessment (Two yays and a boo) and discussion of Copyright issues

The best thing (for me) is that I can then turn auto-linking on on the course. Every time a term that is in the dictionary is in a wiki/webpage/forum post/chat/message/quiz - it can be clicked for a popup definition! Go Moodle!

I’m going to set up a site offering installed Moodle sites to any teacher or school in Scotland that needs it.

The thing about that is that if you want to make a point, you cannot rely on just arguing in favour of what you think is right, what you can do is create the tools to show you are right. Grandiosity aside, I’m convinced that Moodle is being overlooked because of the complexity of its initial setup, so I’m getting rid of the setup part by hosting Moodle sites on my server.

I’m wary of the verbosity-meter going red, so here’s what I’m after:

Can you think of a good name for a Scottish Moodle collection? Make it wacky, web2.0 stylee if you feel like it.

(P.S. - fire this out to anyone you know who might be keen, the better the response, the faster I’ll get going with this..)