Via Techcrunch comes the bizarre, yet brilliant ‘Toondoo‘ – ‘comic life’ for the masses! (but with rss…)

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Today and tomorrow, technology coordinators from around Wisconsin are taking part in a course on ‘Information Fluency’ with the Illinois Math & Science Academy. I hope you find the wee tutorial on social bookmarking useful! Occasionally I put up other tutorials – check out the ‘tutorial‘ category of my blog – or better still, subscribe to it! Not sure how to subscribe? – then check out my wee movie about tracking blogs.

I hope the course goes well!

So how did this happen? How does a wee movie by me, end up getting used in America? For those of you remotely interested I’ll explain -

I recently put a statcounter on my site – It’s truly bizarre what you discover – aside from the ever growing number of people that find my site by searching for ‘Pimp my photo’ (don’t ask – just try it and you’ll see!) or ‘unblocking beebo’ in Google, there are a number that have searched for something to which I feel I have made at least a worthwhile contribution.

One of these searches was for ‘delicious’. A few weeks ago, I put up a Captivate movie explaining in very simple terms what delicious is and does. One of the people that found it was Graham Wegner from Adelaide. It was then picked up from him by Dennis O’Connor from California, who asked very kindly if he could put it in a course he was running.

So, one little movie, made in my kitchen on a rainy day in Helensburgh, Scotland, gets noticed in Australia and then put into a course for educators in America.

So what’s my point in sharing this? Well, it’s quite simple. I spend 15 minutes of my life creating a wee movie that explains a really useful tool. I then share it, and people all around the world get to see it and use it. Collectively, we have saved time, by sharing knowledge and skills. I know there are some significant gaps in my 2 1/2 minute tutorial, but it introduces it.

Sharing is a really big thing for me. The more we do this, the more we will collectively achieve.

Enjoy!

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Today Adobe announced Flash CS3 Professional – no surprise that Flash ‘9′ was coming out, but interesting to see it fully integrated into the next incarnation of Creative Suite. Why was it Adobe were interested in aquiring Macromedia again…?

This could have huge ramifications for education. I haven’t seen pricing yet, but CS2 was prohibitively expensive for the majority of schools. Flash on its own was about £50 (ish), or bundled with the other Studio products seemed a reaonable deal at £120 (ish). Even at education pricing, CS2 was around £600 – simply outwith most schools capacity for software purchase.

I’ll be interested to see what happens with the other Studio products?

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For all the time I have been out of the classroom in an ICT role, there has been an ongoing debate about whether ICT should be a discrete subject or not.

The very first time I went to BETT in London, I had the opportunity to attend a seminar which was excrutiating. I wanted to curl up as the individual leading the session had it hijacked by an overbearing individual in the audience who disagreed with her initial remark that ICT needs to have it’s own place in the curriculum. He from his seat in the audience, then asked everyone present in a loud voice “Who else thinks ICT should be taught throughout the curriculum?” almost everyone put up their hand, with the exception of me and a handful of others. I was appalled that someone could ruin a talk being given by another individual – sure I’ve seen heckling before, but this was attrocious.

Why didn’t I put up my hand? Well for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, I didn’t like the way it was conducted. I felt for the presenter, who was a bit of a rabbit caught in headlights.

Secondly, I simply don’t agree that ICT can be taught throughout the curriculum. Allow me to draw a parallel:

I’m going to create a new course on Christianity – we’ll look at a few things, but I’m not going to include anything about Easter.

Or how about another parallel:

When I was a teenager, I was really interested in the mechanics of how bicycles work – something that has served me well throughout my adult life – if my bike breaks, I can fix it. My car however is a complete mystery. If something goes wrong there I have to take it to a garage, as there is little point in me even opening the bonnet and having a look. I don’t know anything about it, or how it works. Sure, I can drive a car, but the mechanics of it are a mystery. Fortunately, there are people that know what happens under the bonnet – I rely on their expertise.  

My parallels are simple, but hopefully they get the point across. If we don’t teach discrete ICT, then we have completely missed the point. We will fashion a generation of individuals that know how to use ICT, but don’t know how to make it or service it. Forget intellectual advancement for a minute (although this is reason enough in my mind), but in the global economy that means other countries make and service ICT – not us, as we haven’t developed the skill set through education. And I don’t mean ‘bolt the bits of hardware together’, either – I mean design the hardware and software. It’s one thing to know how to blog, but it’s another thing entirely to know how to make a dynamic application from the ground up.

Why write about this now? Over the years, I’ve watched as we re-write our expectations of our pupils. The ’skill set’ that we previously expected our pupils to gain has moved further down the school – where 10 years ago we expected our P7 pupils to be able to collate and analyse data in a database, we could now realisitically expect this of our P4s. We hope to teach digital literacy or technological fluency, but this isn’t enough. ICT aren’t just tools that we can use for other things – someone has to design and create those tools. If we don’t teach this, then quite simply it isn’t us that are designing and creating the tools.

Does this mean we need to re-skill? Yes. Constantly. But get a group of people together centrally to write a course on turning the P4 science project database into a dynamic website. Or turning a simple animation into a dynamically generated animation at runtime. There’s progression, and the kids learn a valuable skillset in the process. Oh, and we are also sharing the workload by having a group of people write a course that anyone could use?

Any thoughts?

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Like thousands (or is it millions?) of bloggers I subscribe to what Kathy Sierra has to say. I am shocked by her post today.

I’ve spoken about anonymity before, and we in the extremely sheltered world of education don’t know we are born on this issue. Kathy, like many prominent bloggers has been receiving death threats, and has taken the necessary step of cancelling speaking engagements and has stopped blogging. Robert Scoble and Andy Carvin suggest taking a week off blogging to consider what can be done about this. Wes Fryer suggests that we should be discussing this online. I like so many others that have commented on this hope the authorities can resolve this issue quickly – not for any technological reason though – merely for Kathy as an individual. No one should have to live in fear – yet many do, in so many walks of life or in countries where civil liberty is not so highly valued.

In a previous post, we discussed how anonymity can allow us to say what we think or feel without the fear of reprocussion – in particular this discussion was aimed at the TES forums or the like, but what price are we willing to place on anonymity? At what point does something cross the line? I know the TES forums are moderated in some way, but the blogging world largely isn’t – it is done by a personal moral code on the blog owners part.

My understanding of Glow will be that you are presented in chat rooms and meeting rooms as ‘you’ – you don’t hide under a pseudomyn. Hopefully this will create a more ‘honest’ online society, as you can only say things as ‘you’. The fact remains though, that there are sick people out there. Perhaps one of the best skills we can teach our young people is how to deal with that, and to develop a strong enough moral framework to know when something is unacceptable. I know I have a bee in my bonnet about this one, but in my mind that makes RME yet again one of the most important subjects that can be taught in schools. It’s a shame far too many Head Teachers see it as something that they ‘have’ to teach because of their own personal prejudice about religion. For the record, it’s not about teaching religion – it’s about helping an individual develop their own moral framework, and how they relate to others.

I digress – keep the faith Kathy.

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Yesterday evening, Nicola and I journeyed to Cardross Primary School for their whole school extravaganza ‘Musical Treats’.

(Full disclosure here- Nicola works in Cardross two days a week in her Network Support Teacher role, and my sister is also the Head Teacher – that said, I like to think I form my own opinions?)

Each year group put on a section – P1’s ‘Caterpillar Boogie’, P2’s ‘Mr Noah’, P3’s ‘Scottish Singalong’, P4’s ‘Viking Times’, P5’s ‘Footprints on the Moon’, P6’s ‘Bully’ and P7’s ‘Pop Connection’.

What a brilliant evening! The kids (and staff) had obviously put a lot of work into the show, and it paid off – everyone was having a great time, and I’m always impressed when kids have the confidence to get up on stage and sing in front of a packed (and I mean packed) school hall.

One of my concerns about school shows in general is that invariably they only involve a select few who get up on stage and perform – Cardross put on a show where everyone was involved, which was wonderful to see.

Not only that, but the presentations each class put on were clearly part of what they had been learning. P5’s footprints on the moon began with a pupil quoting J.F. Kennedy “We choose to go to the moon…” How many of our pupils know and can quote such famous speeches to an audience of adults? Quite fabulous.

Successful learners? …Check
Confident individuals? …Check
Responsible citizens? …Check
Effective contributors? …Check

Well done Cardross, you’re doing it already.

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Yesterday afternoon I joined with colleagues from LTScotland to hear a presentation by Dawn Adams and Ron Rossvoll concerning Phase 2 testing of the Glow portal. This time, along with the 14 local authorities taking part in trials, 105 members of LTScotland staff will be taking part, and I am to be one of them.

If I’m being honest, I’ve always found it quite difficult to muster any great enthusiasm for the Glow portal, as there a number of useful features that we use on the web at the moment that will not be part of it, but seeing the portal presented yesterday changed this somewhat for me. Yesterday I saw the chat facility and the Marratech meeting room facility being demonstrated, and I could immediately see direct curricular application of both – so much so that it was a shame it was only being demonstrated by a couple of adults in adjoining rooms! Coming from a Local Authority that is quite rural, I could immediately see the meeting rooms being brilliant for distance learning. Why should a kid on an island not be able to take a subject remotely in another school? I know Argyll & Bute dabbled with this in the past with the video conferencing initiative, but this was not widespread enough, and the kit was really expensive. Now, any machine connected to Glow with a webcam will be able to do this. I find that possibility very exciting, and can see loads of opportunities for it to develop. This was one of the reasons we were very interested in ‘Breeze’ meeting rooms in the past, but to have similar functionality (all be it not as beautifully sculpted ) on a national scale will be quite frankly fantastic.

Here’s looking forward to Monday then when the trial begins for the LTScotland staff (and I never thought I’d be typing that in relation to Glow!)

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Yesterday was a busy day – hence why I didn’t get round to writing these until this morning!

Yesterday morning I had the pleasure of speaking with a number of the content editors at LTScotland. I had previously been asked to speak about the participatory web and new technologies to the NQ online focus group, and today was a follow up to that, as Frances Sibbet thought what I had to say then would be beneficial for all the content editors to hear.

It’s strange, but I still always get a little nervous when speaking with a group of people that know a lot. You’d think that after post-grad research, training to be a teacher, being a teacher and then working with adults for the last 3 years would have kicked this, but obviously not! Anyway, you can find my presentation here. No accompanying audio (I really must remember to record what I’m saying and add the audio track in the future?), but you’ll be able to see the images anyway.

I always worry about covering old ground with people. I must remember though that for some it’s not old ground, and even for others, hearing my take on things can show a different perspective? The benefit of shared bookmarks seems to have caught a bit of imagination. I said that finding Adobe’s del.icio.us bookmarks was a bit of an epiphany. Wouldn’t it be great if LTScotland kept a set of bookmarks that everyone could see and add to? Hearing my wee story of about RSS may have helped some too.

Anyway, thanks for the opportunity to speak. I hope it was useful, as I know time is precious!

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Some days you just find something that is way too cool…

‘get the glass‘ is a fabulous Flash game set up by the California Milk Processor Board.

Absolutely brilliant, and breath-taking in its animation.

you have just got to check it out!

A word of warning – this is fun, animated and educational all at the same time.

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I’ve been watching the development of this product by Adobe with great interest. What Apollo does is facilitate the creation of Rich Internet Applications that run on the desktop – think iTunes, but for anything. It’s a free download at the moment for Mac and PC, with a Linux version coming soon.

Maybe its time to start thinking how we could free ourselves from the browser?

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