Thunder

Time to move house, after needing access to the db another time and not being able to due to this being a WPMU blog, I have decided to host a wordpress blog myself.

You can find the blog at http://20.me.uk/blog or just change your subscription to the new feed - http://feeds.feedburner.com/tarannau20

If anyone knows of any must have plugins for wordpress please leave a comment.

Hopefully you will all find your way over to my new blog, for those of you that don’t know I also write to a work blog at http://educationblog.org.uk/wordpress

I have just noticed a couple of new icons on the visual editor, the Yellow ‘V’ seems to allow me to embed video into my post, so lets give it a test:

After reading this post I have now found some more icons to press to change the look and feel of my post, the new functions are:

• Text styles
• Underline
• Full paragraph alignment
• Text colouring
• Two varieties of paste (text and Word)
• Formatting removal
• Code cleanup
• Custom character insertion
• Undo/redo

To be able to access these new icons, navigate to the new post/page screen and press:

• Windows Firefox: Alt+Shift+V
• Windows Internet Explorer: Alt+V
• Mac OS X Firefox: Ctrl+V

This is a nice move by Google to allow people who are browsing the internet on their Wii to be able to read their blog subscriptions via Google Reader.  As I am at work now and my Wii is at home I haven’t tested it but will do later today.  Details from the googlereader.blogspot:

Earlier this year, I acquired a Nintendo Wii. As I was recovering from Wii elbow, I began to explore the capabilities of the Opera-based Internet Channel. It occurred that Reader may be a lot of fun on the Wii, especially with many photo and video feeds.

Some weekend hacking confirmed my suspicions, and the rest of the team also seemed to think it’d be a neat side project. As some have discovered, we recently flipped the switch on this feature. If you’d like to try it out, simply visit reader.google.com on your Wii (you may find it even easier to just do a Google search for “reader”). Keep in mind that this is something very experimental, the labs of Google Labs if you will.

You’ll also notice that Reader on the Wii takes advantage of the famous Wiimote:

• up/down: scroll up/down
• right/left: next/previous item
• 1 button: show subscriptions
• 2 button: show links

When showing subscriptions:

• up/down: previous/next subscription
• right: select current subscription
• left: close
• -/+: collapse/expand folder

If you’d like to try the Reader interface in a regular browser, visit www.google.com/reader/wii to go into Wii mode. The Wiimote buttons all have keyboard equivalents (e.g. the “1″ key for the 1 button).

Just demonstrating how to blog to a really interested group of people:)

As some of you may be aware I am in ’sunny’ Torquay at the NAACE conference, yesterday I delivered by session on web2.0 in the classroom (you can find most of the sites referred to here).

It has been great to have so much positive feedback and a little constructive negative feedback. This has left me thinking about how to improve and where I believe we should start to go next. What I believe is that it is good to see the practical uses of web2.0 in the classroom whether they be the best use or not, from the primary school blog to the geography tectonics podcast, my use of del.icio.us to the gallery of student work. Where I believe I need to take this next is to start to look in more detail about the effects on teaching and learning from using these technologies, to me it is obvious but that is not the case for everyone.

I think in Shropshire we could be at a tipping point, we have spent the last 18 months or so piloting and developing our use of these technologies but can we start to exploit them even further, using blogs to support boys writing, podcasts to support speaking and listening, del.icio.us to support research etc

I am keen to hear other peoples opinions and set up some collaborations to develop materials to support the use of these technologies in the classroom. Has anyone already developed teaching units, that don’t necessarily teach the technologies but exploit their use.

Shropshire LA are just starting on the procurement process for their Learning Platform for September 2007 onwards, as part of the process to get opinions and consult with as many people as possible Keith has set up a blog - if you are using a learning platform in your school or educational establishment at present please leave a comment on the blog.

Cheers.

Atomic Learning are giving BETT attendees free access to Atomic Learning and the workshops within the site.  Some of the many workshops highlight blogger and itunes on both Mac and PC:

1.      Go to www.atomiclearning.co.uk
2.      Enter the following user name and password:
Username: BETT07
Password:  atomic

Blogging &  Podcasting/Vodcasting

The username and password is valid until 12/2/07

The blogging workshops covers mainly the use of ‘Blogger’ so is somewhat limited, in the earlier workshops they do mention other sites that could be used for blogging, from paid for sites to host your own solutions.

The podcasting workshops cover Garageband for the Mac and Audacity for Windows.

I often wonder what would be the best tool for a job, should I use a blog or a wiki, an email or an SMS.  Earlier this week I came across this blog that contains a nice decision tree to help me make the choice in the future.

About a month ago I was chatting to Tim in the bar at the Welti - the gym I am a member of, and we will leave it at that.

We were chatting about blogging in Shropshire and he showed me a couple of blogs from pupils at Shrewsbury High School, I was really impressed by the content and comments made.  Knowing that I was going to be talking about the use of blogs in education at the Derbyshire ICT conference I asked Tim if he could interview a couple of his students to discuss their blogging.

Unfortunately Tim didn’t manage to interview the girls prior to the conference, but he has done now, you can read his post that contains the interview here.  The blogs referred to are: http://archl1.wordpress.com & http://scuth1.wordpress.com