Blog directly from Flickr to your edubuzz blog September 28, 2008
Posted by Gilmour David in : eduBuzz , add a commentIf you - or your school - has an account with the Flickr photo-sharing website, you might want to set it up so that you can post photos directly from Flickr to your edubuzz blog(s).
In Flickr, go to Your Account, Extending Flickr, then add the blog to Your Blogs. There’s a test, which will post a message like this to check it’s working:
This is a test post from 
, a fancy photo sharing thing.
Making Glow Happen (lessons from edubuzz) @SLF2008 September 26, 2008
Posted by David Gilmour in : Glow , add a commentMy slideshow from Scottish Learning Festival 2008 talk “Making Glow Happen: How lessons from deploying a smaller scale authority-wide web publishing system in East Lothian may help.”
Original PowerPoint presentation:making-glow-happen (22 slides, 1.8MB)
Here’s a link to it on Slideshare.net.
TeachMeet08: Live Flashmeeting Link-Up with Islay September 25, 2008
Posted by Gilmour David in : eduBuzz , add a commentFor Islayian’s benefit, and anyone else interested, this is a section of video just to show what his link-up looked like to those of us attending TeachMeet08 at the Scottish Learning Festival 2008.
This shows the sort of thing that Glow Meet enables within schools, where, for example, a visiting speaker in one school could be live linked to other sites.
If you’re interested, the original FlashMeeting can be replayed on-line, and Nicholas Hughes, who attended via FlashMeeting, has blogged a good summary of the presentations.
Law Primary’s Blogging earns HMIE Good Practice September 2, 2008
Posted by Gilmour David in : Student blogging, blogging , add a commentLaw Primary’s recent inspection report is now available on HMIE’s web site. The school’s blogs get seven mentions altogether, including in this Good Practice box.
Effective Use of ICT
Staff wanted to be more innovative in their use of ICT. They created a school blog to provide information on all aspects of school life and to encourage a regular dialogue between home and school. Staff worked closely with the local authority ICT team to set up the site and then took on responsibilities for maintaining it.Pupils were given a key role in providing the content. Pupils at the upper stages displayed and gave an account of their achievements and the range of activities that they had taken part in. Across the school, pupils used the site to provide feedback on school events. At P6 and P7, a pilot programme for homework was introduced with homework tasks and links to helpful educational sites posted on the blog.
The blog also helped parents to keep in contact with their children who took part in the P7 residential trip and let them know about the daily activities. Development and use of the blog has helped to promote pupils’ language, ICT and independent learning skills. It has also proved to be a highly effective way of highlighting and celebrating pupils’ achievements.
Hopefully this positive report will help other schools Scotland-wide make the case for using blogs for educational purposes. Unfortunately we know that Law Primary’s blog, along with all edubuzz.org blogs, are currently blocked by web filters in a number of Scottish education authorities.
Satirists Attack “Bottomless Abyss Of Formal Schooling” August 23, 2008
Posted by David Gilmour in : eduBuzz , add a commentHave we reached a new milestone with traditional school practices becoming the target of satirists?
The concept of wasting a majority of daylight hours sitting still in a classroom when he could be riding his bicycle, playing in his tree fort, or lying in the grass looking at bugs—especially considering that he had already wasted two years of his life attending preschool and kindergarten—seemed impossibly unfair to Bolduc. Moreover, sources said, he had no idea how much worse the inescapable truth will turn out to be.
New Teachers Ask For Email Training August 20, 2008
Posted by David Gilmour in : CPD, Glow, Schools ICT, infrastructure , 5commentsFeedback from an introductory training session on ICT for this year’s East Lothian NQTs apparently included the request that we should have covered how to use the school email system, in place of introducing Glow.
Maybe this is a sign of the times, as increasing numbers of younger people make less use of email, preferring instead the immediacy of MSN? If so, these people are going to be out of their comfort zone if they find they can’t keep in touch - with colleagues as well as friends - via MSN while in school.
Taking things a step further, we may be seeing a new generation bringing new expectations of what communication tools should be on a school PC desktop. Glow Chat may just have arrived in time.
New Glow Group Will Keep East Lothian’s NQTs Connected July 31, 2008
Posted by David Gilmour in : CPD, Glow , 2comments
East Lothian’s newly qualified teachers (NQTs) will be able to stay in touch, support one another and find their programme documentation, via their own Glow Group this session.
Their induction training before the session starts includes a day-long session on use of ICT in East Lothian schools. This year, the session will include some time on Glow. Of course, we wanted that to be hands-on and relevant, which is where the idea of a Glow Group to support the NQTs came from. By doing this, we’re hoping to make it easier for them to get their heads round what Glow is all about through practical experience.
So far the site has been populated with some sample links, Glow Meet, Glow Chat and a couple of documents from the Probationer Programme. It’s hoped that the group will have plenty of ideas for further improvements.
eduBuzz.org Gets Easier to Use July 29, 2008
Posted by David Gilmour in : WPMU, eduBuzz , 3comments
It’s become even easier to get publishing on eduBuzz.org following today’s upgrade to Version 1.5.1 of its WordPress MU software.
The interface redesign is the result of a lot of work by the WordPress community, including extensive usability testing. First impressions are good, but we’ll need to do some checks to see how students and staff react. Some differences bloggers will notice:
- a more up-to-date appearance
- a new arrangement for adding media
- the confusing term “slug” has been replaced with Permalink:…/ Edit
- a full-screen editor facility has been added
- “Timestamp” has been replaced with Publish immediately…/Edit
Testing is still under way, but so far at least things seem to be going well. An existing bug with creation of new blogs, which was leading to login difficulties under Internet Explorer, has also been fixed with this update, although a few existing faulty blogs still need to be fixed.
Update: There’s an issue with inserting images in posts. I’ve encountered it under Firefox, but have found it’s working OK under Internet Explorer 7. Thought things were going too well…
How To Change An Early WPMU Database from latin1 to utf8 Encoding. July 25, 2008
Posted by David Gilmour in : WPMU, WordPress tips , add a commentI’ve written a note on how to do this, which is on a separate page.
The catalyst for the discussion was a planning meeting today with Martin Brown and Karen-Ann MacAlpine of the Glow team for a probationer training session on Glow in August. We expect the probationers will be very experienced internet users, so might be particularly at risk of this confusion. So where is confusion occurring? Some examples are: What is it that’s happening? We’re presenting people with a very large, complex system which is completely new to them. We do it in relatively short training sessions of only an hour or two, inevitably fairly jam-packed with new terminology. To help make sense of it all, people will use their “best fit” mental model - in this case the one they’ve built up over recent years of how internet stuff works, and - mostly - that’s fine. The confusion occurs, though, when something happens that doesn’t make sense in terms of that model. What might we do about it? Today we were discussing the possibility of creating some big, simple, “building block” diagrams that could help speed teachers through the process of developing their own mental model of “how Glow works”. We talked, for example, about maybe showing Glow as an iceberg, with just a little bit - the web publishing facility - above the waterline and in public view.Helping Internet-Savvy Staff Make Sense of Glow
July 23, 2008
Posted by David Gilmour in : Glow , add a comment
We’re noticing that staff new to Glow view it through the prism of their existing model of how the web works. Most of the time, that’s fine, but in some areas it can cause confusion. Clearly it’s better if we can avoid that confusion, and we’ve been talking today about how we might do that.
