Over the weekend I waxed a little around a project I had begun with my ICT club. We used Wordle, Wikipaedia and Google image search as tools in the collect and store phase of a web page header or banner project. This week the students engaged with the prepare and share phase, completing some of the banners they are hoping to see exhibited on the school website and class blogs, as devices that will add to the house style while individualizing each class page in school.
I decided to use MS paint in the end since this is a tool the students were already familiar with, and thought I'd share one or two of the outcomes here. The students are really pleased with them, and actually for a first attempt by them at something like this I think they are very cool. Looking at the objects it is interesting how even beginning with the same tools, playfulness and freedom to select final outcomes for display has lead to a deal of creative variation. I hope you enjoy.
I was pointed to this widget maker from the Digizen website by one of my students recently. Its an interesting tool and one I think I'd like to use to indroduce and support discussions around what it might mean to be a global as well as a cyber citizen. Rather than an outcome though I was wondering how it might function as a starting point for work with students. As an embeddable device, this widget, by copying the embed code can be inserted quite easily by many students to their personal blog spaces. This has lead me to wonder how I might use the widget maker with the support of VLE based student blogs and commenting to share and explore our thoughts and values.
This week my Y4 and 5 groups have been using their blog spaces to write about and share their experiences from a school journey. As part of the session plenary students were asked to visit each other's blog spaces and to read what had been said. They were then asked to leave a simple comment on each of the posts they read
1. about something they liked about the post, perhaps how the text was presented, how they had enjoyed a particular part of the journey mentioned too, or focussing in on the literacy aspect of the presentation and perhaps the way the author had used particular words or phrases and why they liked them.
2. to suggest one thing that they might do if they were the author to improve what they had read.
I was interested to see how unprompted some students had begun to take part in short conversations as they worked. Replying to comments left. This notion of commenting as a conversation has left me wondering about the possibility and potential for using short outcome based tasks such as this as a way to promote online discussion, and using commenting around the text free post itself as the vehicle to drive the central learning outcome for blogging activities.
Previously I have used Think.com discussion widgets to promote this type of activity, collecting student views around particular issues allowing chained and direct comments to be made that are visible to all. I am wondering about how allowing space for students to select from a limited menu of options such as that provided by the digizen widget maker, embedding the completed object to a blog post before initially providing students with particular spaces to visit and comment might be an interesting way to develop learning conversations through commenting.
Following the process the students have begun, perhaps they could find something as digizens they share with the author. Being limited to choose a particular number of items from the provided list need not mean they they do not share ideas presented in other digizens displayed. To break the ice and start the conversation they could ask questions about one or some of the choices that the blog author has made seeking responses and to identify what choices made by the author mean to them.
As a starting pont for work combining citizenship, literacy and ICT this could be an interesting stimulus for a longer term piece of Persuasive or Discursive Writing, the notion of an ideal world or a starting point to ground and discuss the many changes that are going on around us right now and how we see them. I am sure there would be much disagreement about some of the more personalised possibilities, but this would provide opportunities for students not only to express their "wldest ideas" but perhaps more importantly to be asked to explain, explore and express their reasoning behind them opening up space to debate and see more than one side to the argument, while identifying some of the shades of grey. As a collect and store process the blog comments also could form a useful resource as the presentation of a wide collection of modelled thoughts and opinions to be drawn upon in later writing, reading and speaking and listening activities. Something to further pondered.
Having spent most of this week culling the content of the current Primary Phase website, I began pondering a simple way in which students could be involved in supporting the development of the site theme. Primary Phase classes are named after birds, and within the learning communities section of our website I want first of all to create a gallery section for each class that will enable outcomes and processes behind longer projects, ICT tasks and digital works to be displayed, as well as providing spaces that students and colleagues can update themselves. The intention of the latter is that colleagues and students take greater responsibility and ownership of the content we publish, reducing the expectation that one person maintain the entire space, which has been the historical context. To this end the galleries for the time being at least will remain as standard web pages, locally developed and then updated by FTP, while each class will be provided with a blog space. I hope to create an aggregated feed for these allowing updates to be fed to the site's home page. However the subject of today's post is not this but a simple project I began this week to create class header images.
I began the process with my ICT club on Thursday, as we worked through the collect and store phase of the project.
Step 1 of the project was to collect and store from a Google Image search a number of graphics representing class birds.
Step 2 was to open an instance of Wordle in their web browser and to open a second tab where they accessed Google. Students were encouraged to choose a class bird from the school list and then to search for information about their chosen bird.
Step 3 and the next phase of the creative process was a copy and paste task, transferring text from the web pages that contained relevant factual information about their bird to the create "text box" in their Wordle tab.
Step 4 involved the create button, and time spent manipulating the resulting word clouds until they liked the outcome they had developed and discussing the appearance. Why were the words presented in different sizes? What were the key and most common words? What did they tell us about our bird? Within the creation process students could change font and layout, with the only real limitation that the word clouds as a group should have a consistent colour scheme. ( I have to admit to not being overly successful or persuasive in this matter, so we will have to wait and see how this pans out in the longer term, but such is the creative process and who knows!)
Step 5 Students placed their finished Wordle central to the browser window and rather than saving it, we used the print screen key to copy the browser window and then pasted this to Photofiltre, where we cropped our images and saved them for use later.
Our next step will be the prepare and share phase, involving provision of a blank header frame, and the use of either Photofiltre or Microsoft Paint to combine elements, the class bird we have collected with its Wordle. Yes I know... Microsoft Paint again... but it is quite interesting what can be achieved with this tool. Using more than one instance, images can be copied from one and pasted to another containing the template or frame and then resized within their selection boxes and moved around the canvas before deselecting and releasing them to the background. The above sample in fact was created in just this way. Using Photofiltre the images can be opened and then resized or scaled before copying and pasting for placement in a prepared template of a standard size, for placement in the completed web pages.
To finish the project students will be encouraged to export their finished header images as .jpg files and to upload them to a shared space on the VLE. From here they can be added to the website's image folder and also added to class pages on the VLE. Once on the web server and included in class gallery pages they will also have a URL enabling them to be included as header images in class blogs. Though I am still in two minds about which tool I will finally use with the group to compose the final images, I hope that the students will begin to identify with the website through their creative ownership of static page elements such as the headers, and with the inclusion of these objects and ongoing online activity through blogging in the VLE take a proactive role in developing class ownership of the blog spaces to be provided and also including their designs.
It seems an age now since Softease (now Lightbox Education) received their Award in the Content-free tools category for Podium at BETT this year. Having been ill, away from school and my blog for a while, it somehow seems even longer since I blogged about the day my students and I were visited by the film crew tasked by BECTA with capturing the tool in action and our thoughts about how it has supported teaching and learning in class. Logging onto Twitter the other evening after an extended break with family I was grateful for this tweet from James Watson.
If you would like to see how the video short turned out, and what we had to say about Podium, then it can be found on the BECTA website by following this link. Thanks for the heads up James, look forward to seeing you soon.
The students had a fantastic time today using our Worry Web to engage with character problems presented from the text we have been sharing this week. I was beginning to worry myself that the work done over last weekend to set up the static site model would flop disasteroulsy if I couldn't get the technology to work for me rather than against as seemed to be the case yesterday.
The problems/dilemas the children were asked to consider were those of three children
William who thinks he is useless at everything...
Greg, who says "I like this girl. I like her very much. I want to be her friend. I want to be her BOYfriend. I've gone all red and shuddery and yucky just typing it! I hate all this lovey-dovey stuff. It really sucks. I don't want to feel like this. I generally HATE girls."
and Claire who says "I have this nightmare. Its really scary. I don't know what to do. I dream it every single night. Does anyone else have nightmares or am I the only one?"
The three problems stirred up active discussions, and it was interesting to see this evening which of worries the children had chosen to respond to in most detail, and how responses had divided along gender lines.
Greg got some really interesting responses from the girls, who interestingly set about replying by changing the perspective for him by reviewing the problem and presenting a way of dealing with what he wanted to do from their point of view. Several of the responses included a "Well as I am a girl," viewpoint, while sharing with him their wisdom and outlining some of the things they thought he might do.
Claire seemed to gain most responses from the boys, who were quick to point out she was not alone, they too had nightmares or bad dreams, they tended to explain the reasons they thought they had "bad dreams" and made practical suggestions about how they had overcome these. These included sitting down and trying to relax before bedtime, emptying their minds and thinking happy thoughts. Perhaps the problem stemmed from the things she was watching on TV. One of the students explaining how he asked his mum to help him decide if the things he wanted to watch might be too scary if close to bed time. There were also some interesting suggestions about what to eat and drink and ideas about how to make yourself comfortable before trying to go to get off to sleep, perhaps taking a waterbottle and teddy to bed, putting luminous stars on the ceiling and so on.
It has been really interesting reading the responses to see how the nature of the space seemed to affect the boys partiucularly in terms of the things they said. The sympathetic and open way they said they too had nightmares, and the suggestion of a teddy bear is something some of the "cooler" guys would probably not have suggested so matter of factly. There was none of the switch to "she could" we would have gained in discussion, but more of the "why don't you.?" or "you could try.." type of response, that is exactly what Iwant to develop in our writing outcome. I am really pleased about how the task and environment engaged the students empathetically with the talk for writing process. It also began the initial drafting of models we will draw on for our guided write tomorrow.
During our writing task I want to build on today's using the comments collected as scaffolds to help us write Agony Aunt type responses to the characters. When we planned this process I was thinking how interesting it would be for the children to work with the responses we collected to write a Dear Claire, William or Greg Letter. I am now wondering about having the children create these collaboratively using a word processor and offering two publishing outcomes. One to be printed for display, the other publishing to their Blog spaces, in order to extend the conversation and commenting process as part of an AfL and review activity. Encouraging review of each other's letters not only in terms of the content or how they feel about the advice. But also in terms of our ongoing writing targets while extending our ongoing work around reading for meaning.
Today during our literacy session the students began their work using the version of the "Worry Website" I created in Honeycomb over the weekend. During this session our focus was on writing in role and how we might begin a conversation or response to character's problem. If these students/characters were in our class, how might we encourage them to talk or listen to us and the things we had to say?
The session was slow to start, even though the students are now familiar with the log in process to access our Wireless network and VLE from their Asus Ees, today was the first time we had visited Honeycomb in a while, and the first time we had visited it from the direct hyperlink added to our class page. Hopefully tomorrow the process will be quicker.
We did encounter a problem today however which we struggled to find a work around for, and currently I am not sure whether this is an issue with Honeycomb, something we will have to think about when using the Asus, or perhaps a combination of the two. The comment box in Honeycomb is fixed and does not float, its size in the browser, combined with the inability to scroll within this page element meant that the add comment button appeared in most cases out of view in the browser window. Thinking on my feet I was able to rescue the situation suggesting that for today the children draft their comments to Use on our Worry web pages in "write" to transfer later. This will mean students either going through a slightly extended process of tranferring these files to the network, and so as not to lose the work and impetus from today, adding these comments when we complete the task and engage with our comment reviews tomorrow.
One or two of the machines seemed to give different renderings of the environment, allowing use of the add comment button, and I thought I would share a couple of the outcome comments generated as part of the task today to give a flavour of how this task is beginning to effect the student's thinking process.
What I am really pleased with in these examples is the apparent empathy that the environment has begun to create in the two student comments. They have begun to put themselves in the shoes of Claire, and to draw on their own experiences as they offer advice and support about the problem using
"the you are not alone perspective," sharing how a similar event has affected them
"the in my experience approach" offering practical suggestions about the things that have worked for them.
It is still early days for this activity but these comments are useful beginnings to support the discussion I want to generate around language choices when we respond to others. They also offer models we can develop or use to frame our agony aunt responses during this week's writing outcome.
This term we have begun to use our Asus Ees in the classroom, and during one of our VLE blogging sessions the students began asking when we were going to be working in Honeycomb again. Well guys the answer is this week, and here's some of my thinking as I am preparing the tools I want to use with my class.
At the moment we are working on an extended literacy unit based on stories with dilemmas, and during our planning time last week, my partner teacher suggested using the text "The Worry Web Site" by Jacqueline Wilson as a stimulus. I loved the idea and an immediate thought was how much fun it might be if we could get the students to begin interacting with the text as if they were "Agony Aunts." The writing outcome we have proposed for next week after we have engaged with some of the children's dilemmas together from the book is to have the children draft a reply, to help a character overcome their dilema. Thinking about this for the last couple of days and how cool it would be to bring a version of the worry website to life that they could engage with in real time I wondered first of all about our VLE and creating an imaginary user space. But then I began to think about Honeycomb.
The space we need for this doesn't need to be all singing and all dancing, but does need to provide an environment where the children can interact together safely and socially, while experimenting with their thoughts and how they communicate their ideas and structure how they might offer their advice. I have put together 3 simple pages to act as a stimulus for this, all of them are simple web page like mockups.
The Worry Website Home Page
and 2 based on the Worries of two of the characters in the book Greg and Claire.
My original thoughts were to create a Wiki and allow the children to engage directly with the page adding their ideas as the week developed, however after some thought I began to see that maybe this might not work in quite the way I wanted the sessions to develop. I began to think instead how this might be an ideal opportunity to develop the space for "Role Play," as an interesting situation for the children to practice their commenting skills.
Honeycomb does not currently allow the creation of internal hyperlinks between a users pages. But colleague John Sutton has suggested a neat workaround for this. By saving the Home Page I have made as a Honeycomb Blog I can transfer the contents of each page in the model "Worry Web" I have already made to create a post and so allow navigation between the home page and the individual "worries." This has involved a little reworking of the material I made earlier, but now I can use this space to encourage the students to work together to plan and share their comments for each of our "worriers."
Commenting on Blogs is a real skill, and something I am not very good at myself. It should be really good fun to work with my students as they practice this skill. I am really looking forward to exploring this process with the class this week. Perhaps using it as part of our "Speaking and Listening" focus to develop a list of dos and don'ts that can help us work together more successfully in our other online environments.
Not bad I suppose its only taken 8 months to get back to this. The summer holiday was a busy time for me, one where I set out with every good intention of "getting to grips with Joomla" or at least how it works, unfortunately other deadlines kept me busy too and the project was shelved in the interests of completing my dissertation.
Why Joomla? Well essentially because this platform has been chosen to host, manage and develop our new campus web site. Having spent considerable time managing and establishing our exisiting primary school website as a resource, I was keen to engage with and learn the quirks of this new environment, in order to think about how to integrate this existing space with the projected new.
Joomla is an open source content management system. My personal experiences of building pages for the web have developed through using tools such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver to build and organise html pages before uploading work developed on my desktop to the host server by FTP. As such I might still be considered on so many levels a beginner. Joomla is a very different onion and experience for me in that it is a server based solution using a data base, among other less than familiar tools to manage and organise content created within it. I blog, code a bit when I need to, but have never really taken the plunge and dabbled too far behind the scenes so to speak. In beginning this project I therefore had some personal reservations about the experiences I was bringing to the process, how useful they would be and considerable trepidation about the gradient in the learning curve I would need to follow. I was however determined to have go. As with the students we work with I needed to start from the things I know, and a establish a frame to hang my new learning on. This post then represents my think around, and how I have tried to visualise and organise my thoughts comparing previous experiences while trying to relate these ideas to what was happening as I worked on and played with my experimental site and Joomla this week.
A Clean Slate
In beginning the project again I decided to start with a clean slate,
I deleted my previous installation,
Downloaded xampp afresh and the most recent version of Joomla.
And decided to devote a little more time to watching these tutorial videos than I did last time.
Working through the process outlined in the videos,
I set up the server and data base locally on my laptop :o),
Installed Joomla :0)
And followed the wizard like process to get the space ready to host my site:0).
A Different perspective on a familiar Viewpoint
Following the video tutorials in sequence the next part of the process was to set up sections and categories for the site. I wondered what this was all about initially, and it has taken a while for me to get my head round this.
My previous work developing our school site has been visual, each page built by hand, ocassionally using themes but usually by editing and revising templates and using these to frame and include content.
In essence, Frontpage enabled this process for me by combining the affordances of a Windows Explorer type environment with a wordprocessing like tool. A Folder pane allowing my "local server" or "site" to be managed like a hard drive. I could visualise and then create the folder tree where I wanted to store the files for each section of the site in response to the navigation structure I was physically constructing on my home page. The WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editor (the wordprocessing element if you like) allowed me to create the hyperlink and navigation structure for the site on the index page side by side and corresponding to the folder structure for the site. Using familiar drag and drop processes I could also copy, paste, open and save files as when editing or in reorganising the space.
In trying to understand how Joomla works I have been trying to reframe my thoughts within my existing model, this is probably really obvious to everyone else, so forgive me as I say I think I've just about cracked it even if an oversimplified view.
Pages in Joomla managed sites do not exist as pages per se, but are compiled through a data base when a visitor arrives at the site and begins their navigation. Administrator defined categories and sections within the data base, allow this to happen. Approaching site set up I decided to try to visualise these categories as if they were folders in my existing tree. First of all setting up categories, broad groups that match the folders and subfolders I previously created for our existing site, but modifying some for clarity. To allocate articles to the correct pages within these categories, I created sections using first of all the category list I created enabling each broad space to have its own page before adding further sections that correspond to other pages I would like within each section of the site.
Why was this so important? I guess this was the question I was asking myself when I began the project? It all seemed a bit back to front in relation to how I was used to working. I needed a way of seeing. The menu system within Joomla drives the page creation or generation process. To compile "pages," through the data base a menu manager is used to create items by linking these to categories and then sections, (in my minds eye corresponding to a folder and a page). Clicking on a hyperlink leads to a request for the data base to behind the scenes pull all these elements together along with style sheets and such to present the content as a page in a visitor's browser.
Where Next For Me?
The next phase for me if my model works is to begin exploring with colleagues the things they would like the site to include and perhaps what they want from it, setting up formally a space based on categories and sections that arise as a result.
Creating user accounts for colleagues and classes will then enable them to log in and use a WYSIWYG editor similar to those they have used in our existing VLE and blog spaces to write, upload files and contribute directly to the content and maintenance of the site, using the sections and categories defined for them eg year4/class name, to post items to the page allocated to it.
Additional modules can be plugged into the space for example breadcrumb trails and RSS feeds to aid navigation or subscription. The addition of common themes through use of shared style sheets will enable a corporate feel for the campus site to be added providing the whole with a consistent look and theme for pages generated across the space.
What has really excited me as I played this week was the ability to add items such as Windows media video directly to a page, and how with the addition of rss feeds, pages within the site could be allocated to support podcasting, while through the use an aggregator content syndicated across the site could be drawn together as a single feed published on the front page through a latest news module.
I still have a lot of playing and exploring to do and apologise wholeheartedly if what I say here is obvious to some or even overly simplistic. I'm not entirely sure what my feelings are right now about the solution as a whole, it does not provide for all of our needs as I see them. I am still wondering how much of what is provided could be achieved through other platforms such as self hosted blogs with the tweaking of design templates. For me the process has been a useful experience, and one I am sure I will be able to draw on further as we work with and develop use of online learning tools for ourselves.
Experiences of using spaces such as Think.com, have lead me to appreciate the dialogue that can emerge through working with students in online spaces. We are currently using the Netmedia Primary VLE in school, as part of an LA Pilot, and a couple of my students, building on their class blogging experiences, have begun maintaning their own blogs, using the space to write about things that interest them and building on the experiences from school away from class in the form of simple learning logs. Visiting the spaces is a treat, listening to the student voice, and gaining insight to how they interpreted things, or how they choose to develop and extend things for themselves. Last week we began phase two of our unit on stories from different cultures, and I noticed that one of the students had begun to write his own version of one of the stories we had previously engaged with. Added to this was a comment, asking what the text was about?
Reading the text which began so well, I could see where the commentor was coming from, as the plot began to slip towards the end. Commenting on a blog is a really challenging thing even for adults, so I decided to leave both a comment. First of all asking the commentor a year 6 if he could explain more clearly what he meant, and what the year 4 author might do to make his meaning clearer. To remind the author of the plot of the story I wrote a quick draft of my own, publishing it to my VLE Blog Space, and inviting both students to see what they thought of it by email. How could I improve the text? Would they like to have a go at developing the story for themselves, or perhaps use some of the ideas to clarify the plot.
On Monday morning I arrived in school not so much to a greeting, as a discussion around the typos I had made. I wasn't aware of these in my haste to get together the story frame, though no doubt my readers are. It was interesting though to see just how much detail my story had been engaged with as a starting point. I have been aware for some time that my students also visit my blog here occasionally, to share the things they have been doing in school, the potential power of these spaces as "models" for writing seem too good to miss, the sense of audience, purpose and need to be clear if our meaning is to be made. This is certainly something I hope to exploit more widely having recieved this today. I have been out today on a Primary Strategy day, I thought that Monday's dialogue was over but checking my email and the VLE inbox this evening I came across this "Your Corrected Story." Not only has all of my spelling and grammar been checked - thanks J!- but we also now have another starting point for discussion in part of our Literacy session tomorrow. Our plan was to review and evaluate the work the students have been doing today, building on this to edit and improve, but since J has spent so much time reviewing mine already, I am wondering about having him share his process as a starting point before sending the children off to engage with their own stories in pairs. Building on this to help students think about their texts framed by our marking ladders and agreed success criteria, seems quite a powerful in.
A lesson or idea I would like to share or take away from this is how a VLE even for the youngest of students need not be a web based flash drive or delivery platform. A way of transferring, accessing, storing or sharing work that teachers make for children and colleagues to use at school. If I am honest this is one of my biggest fears and concerns about how these spaces are often portrayed within the literature we recieve or in the conversations we have with colleagues. There is a danger also of seeing these environments as places where traditional homework types and tasks can be uploaded in a digital format in the assumption that this somehow makes them more appealing. I would like to see our space increasingly seen as a shared space where we all have ownership, and a sense of belonging. VLEs like classrooms and schools need to be considered social learning spaces extensions and mediators for informal as well as formal learning experiences.
Our Asus web books are just about set up, and ready to be used. What further opportunities will wireless access on a one to one and paired access have on their development and use of this space?
We have been back at school for two days, and my class have settled in really well to the routines. I was hoping they would, having agreed or asked to take them on into year 4 for a second consecutive year.
Last year I began my year with them exploring poetry, and this year have also taken this approach. A way to get them into the swing of things and playing with words. Our starting point is creating images. Developing the use of adjectives and figurative language, through the use of familiar frames and language games.
Our first pair of sessions, has involved innovating on a short poem called Butterfly Hatching, borrowed from this DFES document. We read the poem, and worked in small groups to act it out, exploring the differences between words that described action (verbs) and those that described the appearance of the creature. Taking the idea of the butterfly emerging, we developed this to think about the idea of us arriving at school, and in the classroom. What would the door look like? How would we/ did we feel when we arrived in school today? How might the way we feel effect the way the door appeared or how we opened it?
We worked in groups to role play and act out the different ways we might approach or enter the classroom, according to our feelings. Together we drafted 3 opening lines for the poem based on the structure of Butterfly Hatching, thinking about and catching wow words as we went.
The modelled starter looked like this:
Back To School
The cracked blue door clicks open I skip happily in Bouncing and excited.
The students then worked in pairs to draft their own starters. After a readaround, this is where we ended yesterday's session. Today we moved to the ICT suite, to complete and refine our poems, reviewing and refining before thinking about the actions that were to follow and how we would end our first day, thinking about how it had turned out for us. The completed outcomes were published to our new class blog this morning and there are still more to come. If you have time please pop by, visit, and perhaps leave a comment. Our poetry can be found on our blog by following this link. As the unit evolves we will also begin podcasting again, inorder to engage and develop performance aspects of some of the poetry we intend to create. Look forwadr to hearing from you.
Previously I used Filezilla Portable to set up the web space I need to host the audio and video files for my podcast challenge. Now I want to create a visible space, with a web address that visitors can come to, to find out a little more about us, review the content of our show. We may want to share our favourite podcasts but first and foremost we want to be able to customise it and provide a shopwindow where our visitors can sample our work before hopefully subscibing to our show, in order to watch or listen more often. This latter process requires an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed.
Even though I am trying to be more adventurous my personal experiences with coding is not wide. In my first post in this series I talked about how "blogging" like posting to Podomatic was, but as I progress I am aware I may be rushing ahead, and beginning to wonder about just how familiar some of my readers./visitors might be with what blogs are and how they work, so in this post I am going to take a step back, invite you to have a go at setting up a blog space to play with before moving on to show you how I have set up a Blog to act as a Podcast Station. How does a Blog Page Compare to a Podcast?
I don't want to spend a lot of time here saying what a blog is, how they work or how they might be used. This video from the Commoncraft Show does this much more eloquently than I ever could.
I also have a few notes from a session I lead introducing colleagues to blogs for use with students and some points to consider around esafety here.
The page that you arrive at when you visit the buzz (beesinapod) station, that I have been working on in these posts, is a Blogger Blog. The image below tries to share how a blog page is made up, and how these elements of the blog page will eventually relate to and compare with the features of a Podcast.
In this case as we create the station the "blog" will change its purpose, becoming the "podcast"
Each post in the Blog becoming an individual episode in the overall show.
What will make each "blog post" different is that as "podcast episodes" each one will use hyperlinks from the post to video or audio files hosted on the FTP space I set up in the previous post,and with a little behind the scenes tweaking at anothe website, (feedburner) will use the blog's existing RSS feed to allow visitors to subscribe to the podcast, in a podcatcher, but more about this later.
Blogger is the platfrom with which I am most familiar, so is the tool I have decided to use, though I don't see any reason why a similar process, to the one I am using here could not be used with other blogging tools.
So How Do We Set Up and Use a Space Like This?
If you can...
set up an online email account
write an email,
attach and send a file,
then you essentially have the skill set you need to set up and use a blogging tool.
For this project I have used Blogger, a free service from Google. You can set up a Blogger account by following this link.
Once at the Blogger home page you will be guided through the set up process. Click the Create your Blog Now link, and follow the steps.
Essential Blog Space Tweaks and.... Playtime
Once your account is created, there are one or two things you might want to play around with for esafety reasons, especially if you are going to use this space to publish student work. Certainly one of the things I have changed are the comment settings since I want to review comments before they are published, to ensure they are appropriate to the site. I did this by
Clicking the Dashboard Link
Clicking the settings tab
Clicking the comments tab
Scrolling and then clicking to turn comment moderating on, and and selecting the always option.
Scrolling and including an email address allows me to be informed if a comment has been made and needs moderation
I have also turned on "Show word verification for comments," so any one deciding to leave a comment must type in a word, presented as a random picture before they can send it. This is a really good idea, since it prevents machines using forms and what is called spamming.
Essentially that is it for the blog side of the Podcast station set up but---.
Why not play with the space for a while now the environment is set up.
Try changing the look of the space by visiting the "Layout" tab
Change theme
Change Colours
Add some Gadgets
All of these things can be removed and undone later, and were among the main reasons I decided to have a go at this project in the first place.
Before sharing how to use this space to publish a podcast maybe you should try it out as a blog for a while. This Blog published by New Zealand Teacher Allanah King, is a fantastic resource and point of reference while you play. If you like the space you create, and don't want to change it, then you can always create another space, by adding another blog to act as your podcast platform. As I have already said if you can send an email, you can blog. The Blogger Posting tool is really easy to use, and as you can see from this image is not unlike an online wordprocessor.
If you are already a blogger, then maybe you can see where this is mashup is going. My "Learning to Podcast" space, from last summer was the prototype for this project, and there are number of links here that will help you to move on more quickly. If you are new to this, then have a play, familiarise yourself with the blogging tools, and pop back later if you want to see how I have used this tool to develop the podcast station. I hope you will come back and share the remainder of this process with me, or offer comments about what you are thinking. I would also love to have a look at any spaces you are developing, leave a link so I can share.
" Am loving using Kwout to bookmark and post site links and other interesting things I come across to my tumblr tumble blog. Hopefully this "Kwout" from dictionary.com and the Guardian won't sum up the entire use I put this tool to. It may be a "sojourn" at the moment, but I am beginning to appreciate the neat Archive tool in Tumblr, that lets you flick between views and track your content. I can imagine this becoming a really useful tool for logging online research references later. Kwout also allows direct posting to blogger as can be seen above, and a number of other spaces including Flickr.
Thanks to John at Creative ICT for directing me to this really nice online comic strip creator. Called Comiqs, the environment is much more flexible than others I have visited, and mentioned so far, and in many ways is Comic Life Like, in how it is presented and works.
Within Comiqs, you can search for flickr images or upload your own photos and doodles to use, add additional pages and choose from a variety of page layouts and templates. Using the tools and uploaded images in your comic strip is a matter of dragging them from the palette space to the left of the screen, onto the work space where they can be resized and moved around. The Graphic tab, is where the page layouts can be found along with a collection of call outs and the caption box. Dragging these to the workspace and double clicking allows text to be added. To make my playtime easier and shorter I copied text from a file of Homerisms I already had, and pasted these to the bubbles. Not greatly creative on my part, but I did do a little something more with this one.
Completed comics can be saved to your personal space and then embedded in the slide show format below to your blog or webspace using provided embed code.
I am a big fan of comic strips, their potential as multimodal learning and literacy tools. Comic Life mentioned above and in several other posts, is a local application available for both PC and Mac. It has helped I and my students to write classroom learning stories, and played a key role as a data analysis and presentation tool, helping make sense of interactions in classroom based Video Data collected for my research project. This environment I think is amazing in that it utilises similar affordances and tools, as a web based environment, allowing direct sharing of content to the web, via other web2.0 services. I will certainly be considering how I can use this space with my students to support our blogging adventures, but without losing touch with Comic Life for other things. Having just visited the plasq site, I was interested to find the latest incarnation of Comic Life, Magiq, and to see versions of the tool now available for the iPhone and iTouch. Unfortunately Comic Life magiq is only available for the Mac, but I've embedded the video here for those who might be interested.
After recent TV programmes and negative press surrounding Web 2.0 environments, it was a treat to meet, download and watch this Teachers TV presentation 30 mins well spent, and potentially a great INSET tool to boot! School Matters - Online Social Networks - Friend or Foe?
