foolfillment: the blog

Another post about a resource, I’ve just found Scrapblog (via meish.org). This tool lets you easily create scrap book style webpages where you can bring in photos from loads of different sites like flickr and photobucket, videos form youTube, then style them as you like, add text and colours.

Once it’s done you can publish it to a load of different places, you can produce DVDs, or flickr photosets, or books, even embed it in your own website.

It seem very easy to use and links in with loads of different sites so it could be a fantastic tool to use in schools to create reports about school trips, experiments, shows, anything.

Go and have a look at the scrapblog tour to see how easy it is to use.

Until tonight I thought bubbleshare was just another photosharing site, then I came across this post from Pam McDowell and saw the story she had created. It is similar to flickr but it does have great potential for stories and tutorials for kids, it’s just a lot more fun than flickr.

Anyway, I spent a wee while (longer than I had hoped but there you go) making up a quick tutorial on using Inventor, a 3D modelling package. While it doesn’t go into detail about how I made the drawing it does I think show how quick and easy Inventor can be.

I think I probably broke all of the rules about good design with this tutorial, in fact I feel like the person who uses 18 different animations and sounds in Powerpoint, but it was fun, next time I’ll be more restrained

I was pretty happy with most of bubbleshare but it still felt a little rough around the edges, so I still prefer flickr but will definitely think about this in school.

Anyway, are you ready to see my work(!)? Here you go:

This album is powered by BubbleShare - Add to my blog

Update:Having looked at it on this page I think you’d be better seeing the slideshow on bubbleshare itself to get it full size.

I’ve been playing with a plugin tonight (while keeping half an eye on the football) called Ultimate Tag Warrior, I’ve been very impressed with the possibilities it’s presented.

Underneath some of my more recent posts you can now see a list of tags, click them and you go to a page with all posts that use that tag. Currently most tags are only used once but that’s because I’ve never been very good at adding tags to each post, this plugin should make it much easier to add them though.

Better is there is a new page that allows you to search all the posts by tag, and another page that has a lovely cloud of all tags. I may try to integrate these into the sidebar sometime.

One of my favourite features about this plugin is that it creates a tag system for this site so it organises all the posts here instead of other plugins I’ve used which just use tags that technorati can pick up on. Not only that this plugin allows you to have those self-same technorati tags in the background as well - so there’s no give for the take.

I looked into this while I was trying to figure out how how to get another exciting project to work - hopefully more about that in the future.

I just picked up a post on the ScotEdublogs feed from Glassary Primary School. The pupils there were set a good challenge - to get their Headteacher from the school to his brother’s house in Tasmania, all by public transport. They had to scour the internet for information about buses, planes, hotels, and everything else they’d need, then present their route to the class. A great challenge and a great use of technology with maths, geography, and other skills.

Even more interesting was a comment left by the Head’s brother - his route from Britain to Tasmania was more challenging than public transport - he cycled all of the 21000 miles from Edinburgh’s Calton Hill to Mount Wellington. Quite a feat!

Historically when a new technology comes along the trend is to initially use new medium in the same way, with the same content as what already exists, in education the example is to use the internet to post papers, or to make lectures available outside of the lecture theatre. This is fine, but it doesn’t aid learning, in a lot of cases it can have a negative affect. Making available a set of lectures that were recorded one year isn’t a replacement for giving the lectures again the next year. The challenge is to use the new technology in a new way that makes use of its potential, a good analogy might be using teletext just to present a newspaper review of a football match; later it was used to present real time scores and match summaries.

One thing the internet is very capable of is storing information and making it available to you. It is very easy to make your own information available to everyone else. This doesn’t necessarily mean that by putting information on the net you are helping people to learn about whatever topic it is. Sharing information isn’t the same as sharing knowledge.

For a learner what is important is finding the right information and then constructing some sort of understanding of it. This understanding can come out of discourse the learner engages in - with their peers, their lecturer/teacher, themselves. This is what needs to happen with the internet, it is what is happening in the places where it is being used well. Face to face discourse shouldn’t be disregarded though - very little comes close to that - but it can be complemented with blogs/wikis/podcasts/VoIP…

This is a post that I’ve had in draft for a while, then over the last few days there has been discussion about Blended Learning with a comment on why there will probably never be such a thing as a ‘Glow lesson’, and a presentation from BarCampScotland has been made available to listen to on why lecturers shouldn’t record their lectures. All this has prompted me into finishing this post off.

So what is it that I actually have to say? Well, my main point I suppose is that it is going to be interesting to see how Glow develops and what use teachers make of it, I personally don’t know enough about what is going to be possible for me to do (I don’t know what school I’ll be in, what subjects I’ll be teaching, what access I’ll have to computers; I also don’t know enough about how Glow will actually operate) but I will have to keep in mind that what I am doing with Glow has to be something worth doing with Glow, if it can be done as effectively without it then I need to change what I’m doing, or do it another way.

Another point I wanted to make is the importance of teaching not just certain subjects from the curriculum, but also teaching people how to make use of the information available to them and how to select the useful bits from the useless bits. With such a wealth of information available we need to know how to cherry pick the good bits - this is a more important skill than ever before.

And one final thing was the importance of making the most of new technology and not just using it in the same old ways, and also making other people realise this too. It is all to easy to just share resources that enable pupils to complete course related work (don’t get me wrong this is enormously useful - you shouldn’t expect every teacher to create a great resource for every topic, and often it is good to see things from another person’s perspective), but the best part comes when you can take the resources and create new activities around them that maybe weren’t possible before.

[tags]learning, glow, web2.0, education, collaboration[/tags]

I’ve just finished conducting two interviews as part of my final year project, and they were incredible, really really positive.

I should give a quick summary first of what has gone before: I’m looking at using wikis in a learning environment, to investigate how useful they are I wanted to run a course where the learners use wikis in some key way. With some help from my supervisor I set up some wikis within Moodle (the OLE that the uni use) for this year’s second years to use throughout their first two design projects. The first one was a bit of a headache, it was the first time they’d done anything like it, I was out at school and wasn’t really able to support them, and perhaps the nature of the project didn’t really match up with what was expected of them.

The second project went much better in many ways. Their task was to split into groups of 4/5 then pick two designers and investigate their differing approaches to form/function then present their findings. Each group was given a wiki to use with the encouragement that they put all their findings on there and use the space to collaboratively filter out the relevant bits, with the hope that the way they would do that would require/prompt discussion and help them develop their opinions, and in turn help them learn by making them construct meaning around their findings.

My interviews today were with two people from the same group, I don’t think I can really quote them here just yet because of the Faculty’s ethical procedures, but the gist from both of them was that they found it to be incredibly useful and that they would love the opportunity to be able to do it with other projects. There was such enthusiasm for what they had been doing, it was pretty heartening to hear that these wikis hadn’t just been viewed as another loop for them to jump through and that it had actually helped them. The feedback I’ve been getting from other interviews and questionnaires has been on the whole positive but I have been given the feeling that most of them wanted to take a very tactical approach (which is to be expected from second year uni students) to the projects and the wikis made this quite difficult. I’ll no doubt write more about this in the weeks to come but I’ll finish off with this:

One interviewee basically said that it became addictive, they kept checking back to see what had been added, if anyone had added an opinion about what other people had written, if there was anything new there that would help them understand more… As an aside I asked him if he had heard of feeds to which he said he had but didn’t really know much about them, I briefly explained what they were and I could see his eyes light up with ideas. It was a good feeling to share something like that with some one who was grateful to hear it!

[tags]finalyearproject, wikis, feeds[/tags]

I’ll admit this is a bit of a non-post as it’s being mentioned in a lot of other places and I’m not adding anything new to the conversation but all I want to do was further raise the profile of an exciting new project from Learning and Teaching Scotland that was surreptitiously launched on the first of this month. ScotEduPedia is a wiki based encyclopaedia on Scottish education. The rough bones are there now, and content is trickling in at a fairly impressive rate. Go and have a look, the more people aware of it the better chance of it turning into something fantastic.

I’m not sure how but this has passed completely under my radar until today. BarCampScotland is happening in Edinburgh tomorrow, with an unsocial meet up at the Edinburgh rugby match tonight. I don’t think I can make it to either parts unfortunately, the timings just don’t match up with some other things I have to do this weekend.

It’s a real shame as there are a lot of people there who I’d like to meet and hear present, including Duncan Smeed who can justifiably claim to be my blogfather but I can look forward to seeing all the photos and slides appearing over the next few days.

[tags]barcampscotland[/tags]