Tomorrow afternoon I’m speaking to the newly appointed Glow Mentors in South Lanarkshire. I’m going to help them set up a blog to start talking about their plans with the world at large. In Argyll & Bute we set up a blog for each of our Mentors, so that they all had a place to develop their own thoughts and style of writing, but I really like the idea of having one blog for all the Mentors to post on. Fingers crossed all the technology works!

It’s great to see so many Local Authorities wanting to start their Glow journey with a web2.0 perspective. Using the ‘glowscotland’ tag, it is really easy to keep up to date with what is being discussed. It is fasciniating to see the early development of community, and hear what people are thinking about Glow and how they will use it.

I’ll post the URL to the South Lanarkshire blog once it’s up and running tomorrow, but please head over as soon as it’s up to welcome them to the web2.0 world!

Tweet This Post Delicious

If you don’t have web hosting facilites, then MediaFire is a great service to check out. Upload a file and it is assigned a URL, or you can email the file directly where you want it to go. No fuss, no limit.

Tweet This Post Delicious

Found this link to a bit of software called ‘Picklish‘. It allows you to create simple flash galleries of pictures and videos to put on a web page. Nice and simple, with a slick Flash interface. Well worth a look.

Tweet This Post Delicious

I saw this when it came out, but for some completely unknown reason I didn’t blog about it! For those that don’t know what Captivate is, then follow this link. Still no product for Mac yet though?
It’s come back to my mind for two reasons:

1. I was at a meeting this week where we were discussing the ‘future’, and training people how to use web2.0 technology. Captivate is absolutely perfect for this – especially as it now has support for FLV and enhanced branching capabilities. I would far rather be shown something, and revisit that whenever I want, than have to wade my way through notes – for my style of learning, this works perfectly. In Argyll & Bute, we made a start at this with the ‘help and training site’, but it should be expanded.

2. I was going to speak at TeachMeet about facilitating a sharing site for such tutorials. Basically, it would be a site that would allow users to search for tutorials, to add in tutorials, or to add in links to tutorials already on the web. I’ve made a start at it already, but I’ll come back to this in the very near future. As an Education Support Officer, I was acutely aware of the amount of time I wasted showing people how to use applications, when what I really wanted to be talking with them about was how using technology was impacting on the teaching and learning in the classroom.

Anyway, check out Captivate if you haven’t already. You can download a 30 day trial of it for free. You won’t regret it.

Tweet This Post Delicious

Jenn of ‘Pocketables‘ fame has reviewed the Sony Mylo for ‘Anything But iPod‘.  It looks like quite a nice device, that cures the issues I had with the Samsung Q1 – size and battery life. I completely agree with the second comment on the review though! And only supporting 802.11b? Wake up Sony – what could have been brilliant, turns out to be mediocre. I wish I could remember who first said “I cannot contain my indifference”.
That said, it does take the debate on what a handheld device should be capable of doing further. The cost of this is significantly cheaper than the UMPC form-factor, but the screen resolution is probably too poor for using the web well. If you do have a wireless network that runs at ‘b’ though, just think that all your kids could be Skyping and IM’ing in class – if that doesn’t give you a ‘classroom management heart-attack’, then think of the collaborative opportunities!

Tweet This Post Delicious

Picked this up on Trond Ulseth’s blog this morning.

When doing design work I often find myself wanting a suitable font for the given situation. Looking for fonts on the net is often time consuming and frustrating. Today I accidentaly came upon this site.

Here is a bunch of font categories to choose from. However, what really caught my attention was the “All Fonts” link. A page displaying all the fonts in all the categories, so that you can quickly scroll through and stop by the ones that catches your eye, without any cumbersome back and forth clicking. It takes some seconds to load as there is a good selection of fonts, but the selection seems useful and versatile.

As far as I can see all the fonts are free to grab and use as you like.

It’s nice to get a really useful link, isn’t it? My only hope is that teachers reading this don’t descend into an even bigger spiral of ‘death by worksheet’!

Tweet This Post Delicious

Over at ClacksBlog, Kirsteen is talking about how much freedom some of their Pre 5 kids have when using ICT. Should we be learning from this, and figuring out how deal with prior knowledge and experience better later on in our kids education?

Tweet This Post Delicious

Is it just me, or does anyone else find it ironic that Sony market a pack of 007 gadgets that it doesn’t yet sell in the UK? Come on Sony, if you are going to use a British icon to publicise your kit, how about selling it in the UK?

Tweet This Post Delicious

it’s not often that I wish I was in America, bu this week sees the MAX 2006 show in Las Vegas. To read a review of what happened at the keynote on Day1, click here.

I’ve heard Kevin Lynch speak a few times online, but never in person. For me though, he seems to be approaching things from the right direction. Take for example his discussion about web design starting in Photoshop – I have long held the principle that web design ought to start from a ‘design’ point of view rather than a ‘language’ point of view. For me this is central. I want to first think of the experience I want to convey online, before thinking through how best this can be achieved. When Maggie and I first received professional training in Dreamweaver, our tutor laboured this point – start with big bits of paper and magic markers. You are designing an experience, which the coding language is there to support.

I was particularly pleased to hear about the future native support of Photoshop PSD files in Flash, and was not surprised by this. Integration of Adobe’s powerhouse was long overdue with Macromedia’s strongest application. It was encouraging to hear that Fireworks is still going to be developed and supported however, as it offers many aspects of ease of use that Photoshop does not (and to be fair vice versa).

Think about the reach of Flash across the web though. 97% of internet users running the Flash player, and less than a year to develop and deploy a new version. Add to this the power of Flash video, and it seems clear to me that the future of web/desktop application development lies here. If you are not sure about this, then think how often you have had to ‘compromise’ or ‘work around’ browser limitations when developing online resources (for example, if you are reading this on my site as opposed to the feed and are using IE, then a completely separate CSS had to be written just for you). As you are only writing Flash applications for the Flash player, this ceases to be such a big issue. You also have far greater control over the presentation of your content, which, coming back to my first point is where we should be starting from – design.

Tweet This Post Delicious

I’ve been on holiday this week. Nicola and I have been packing the contents of two flats into boxes – which has got to be simultaneously the dullest yet most interesting thing to do with your time! I am constantly amazed by the amount of ’stuff’ that we have both independantly amassed. This is of course the best time to seize the opportunity to throw things out, and a fair amount of stuff has been ditched. It’s interesting how we decide what ’stays’ and what ‘goes’ though. We both have more than our fair share of books, but at no stage was it suggested that some of these should go. Funny how we hold books, or the knowledge they contain in such high esteem. In this digital age, there is something wonderful and pleasurable about opening a book – the texture of the pages on your fingers, the sound of pages turning, the smell of paper, ink and dust – something to which reading off a screen can never compare, but presents reading and connectivity in an entirely different way. There is nothing better than finishing a brilliant read and then discussing it with someone. I remember being both appalled and intrigued when Alan November pointed me to ‘beyond books‘ for the first time. I often wonder where things will go in the future.

Boxing up all my notes from university I was temporarily transported back to an age when I would sit with my A4 pad and pen and take copious notes from books taken from the shelves of the university library. I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of these, despite not having looked at them for the entire time I have been in this flat.

Why share all of this in the blog – well three reasons really. First of all, I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about RSS, and how the majority of internet users will embrace it now that it is incorporated in IE7. One problem with RSS is that it takes away a great aspect of a blog or site – its presentation. On a number of blogs that I read on a regular basis, the author puts the book they are reading in the sidebar of their page. If I didn’t visit the site, I wouldn’t get this important bit of info.

Secondly, packing up my university notes with my web2.0 head on I should be scanning them and sharing them online. When I was at Boclair Academy the then PT of History Dennis Topen was doing exactly this with his higher history notes. Using blogs and wikis, teachers could share their notes with students in a much more practical way, and get on with significant discussion about the notes in class time.

Thirdly, when packing up some pictures I came across a framed quote in Nicola’s flat – “whether you think you can, or think you can’t, you’re right” – Henry Ford. Today, Nova writes about what motivates us – do we share this enough with our students?

Tweet This Post Delicious