Thunder

Thanks to a new bookmarklet from Sumaato the geotagging of your flickr photos just became a lot easier.

First things first, if you don’t know what I mean by geotagging check my earlier posting.

After you have figured out what goetagging is and you have your photos uploaded to flickr then visit http://labs.sumaato.net/tools/flickr_geocode_bookmarklet/ and drag the bookmarklet onto your browsers toolbar.

The next step is to view the photo in flickr that you wish to geotag, once loaded click on the bookmarklet.  A google map appears alongside your photo, navigate and zoom into the place the photo was taken, once you have pinpointed the location click on the correct part of the map and then select SAVE LOCATION.

The bookmarklet now automatically tags your photo with the lon & lat co-ords as well as adding a link to the location in google maps within the photo description.

Give it a go and let me know what you think.

Today I took my podcasting roadshow to Sir John Talbot’s school in Whitchurch Shropshire, this is my local secondary school.

It was the year 6 induction day and the headteacher had asked me to get a group of 20 mixed year group students to record the events of the day. Prior to the day, just like at OWS, I emailed the students with a link to their blog and asked them to comment on the first six posts. Unfortunately not many of the students participated in this activity, this lead to me having to spend time going through the questions with them to assess what they knew already. The applications I had asked them to look at where all new to them - so today was going to be a big, but enjoyable, learning curve for them.

So after getting their brief and planning the questions they wanted to ask the year 6 students off they went with ibooks, mobile phones, mp3 recorders and digital cameras in hand to record their discussions.

The students were given a brief introduction to Garageband, iPhoto and iTunes to enable them to produce their enhanced podcasts. All photos taken throughout the day were uploaded to the schools Flickr account, they even caught me doing some work - I think I should frame it!

The students were really motivated and engaged with using the ibooks and ICT being more than spreadsheets and databases. All the teachers that popped their head in during the day were impressed with the work ethic and the buzz that was going around the room. It was amazing to see how much they produced. You can read their evaluations of the day here, at present there is only a couple but they have all agreed to add theirs comments tomorrow.
Please check out their blog and leave them some comments.

It was great to see the students so engaged in their work, there really is great potential in developing this kind of experience for our students. I will have to put some time aside during this Summer break to produce a unit of work for KS3 ICT lessons based around these collaborative and social technologies.

Today I ran a workshop as part of an RE conference at Oldbury Wells School in Bridgnorth. I had 4 sixth form students and 2 year 9 students, that had worked with me a couple of weeks ago.

Our role was to blog and podcast (using Garageband, iphoto and itunes) the events in the morning and to record and publish the question time event in the afternoon.

The blog can be found here - it isn’t complete as I am waiting for the information that the ethics group completed so I can upload it. Photos taken during the morning, mainly of the food group for some bizarre reason can be viewed on their flickr page, unfortunatley we ran out of space on the free account so I will need to upload the outstanding photos in August (I hope I remember). The websites that formed the basis of the ethics research can be found on their del.icio.us page tagged by ethics.

The question time mp3 is 58Mb at present so I will try and splice it up over the next few days and then upload it to the blog.

The year 9 students were stars, and commented that they wished their ICT lessons were more like this and not just using Office applications!

Tomorrow I am off to SJT to set up a blog and do some podcasting with a mixed age group of pupils.

Several people have suggested that we shouldn’t be using the term web2.0 to describe the recent influx of web applications.  This being the case I was wondering what we should call them, I am keen to hear peoples thoughts…

Collaborative applications
Social applications
Social & collaborative applications

My Flickr experience increased today, while setting up my new tablet pc I was installing the Flickr uploaded and saw a link to Shozu. Shozu is an application for your mobile phone that allows you to upload directly from the phone to your Flickr account. The software doesn’t work on all phones, but I was happy to see it works on my Sony Ericsson W800i.

After downloading the software onto my phone and fiddling with the settings, following very detailed instructions on the website, I took a photo of Dale and sent it. It worked a treat as you can see from the photo.

I have just read this article (’Bypass the hard disk and head for the web‘) on Guardian Unlimited. I think Victor highlights a lot of the web based applications that I, and many others, have discussed as having great potential for learning.  I can see a lot of financial gains for schools moving to this approach, the cost of micro$oft office licences alone would save schools several thousand pounds (depending on size of school), but schools could move towards open source equivalents.

I actually use Writely and Flickr on a regular basis and signed up for Googles spreadsheet application a while back and am still waiting to get an account, they do provide excellent online storage for documents and photographs, they allow greater collaboration for users with some great functionality.  There are however several downsides to this approach that I see, and would welcome other peoples comments.  Some of the downsides I see are these:

• what happens if these websites just disappear overnight, most web2.0 applications are in beta, would users loose all there work?
• do the sites have perform regular backups, just in case you delete a file by accident
• multiple sites leads to multiple usernames and passwords
• what about confidential or private work, how secure and safe are these sites

In Shropshire we have had meetings with Digitalbrain (the LA approved learning platform), it is hoped that the new version of the platform, that is scheduled for release during next academic year, should have lots of the web2.0 applications built within it.

A while ago I posted on another blog that Writely was an excellent tool - well worth registering to use in an educational environment. I have used it with students to carry out joint planning during a podcasting workshop. Unfortunately just after I said this Google bought them out and they closed new registrations down. Now they have opened the doors again and allowing new users to register.

For those of you who don’t know what Writely is then, here is my take on it. Writely is a FREE online word processor that allows multiple users to work on the same document at the same time, complete collaborative working. From an assessment point of view you are able to see all the revisions made to the document, you can publish the document once completed as a doc, pdf, html, rtf or an open document format. All public documents can have an RSS feed so you can keep up to date with when changes are made without having to continually revist the document.

I would be keen to hear from anyone else who has been using Writely for educational purposes.

20 September 2006, 4-6pm, Crowne Plaza Hotel, Glasgow

What is TeachMeet06?

Learn something new, be amazed, amused and enthused. This is an informal gathering of those curious about technologies.
Anyone can share cool ideas they have or great ideas they’ve triallled in their classrooms. Join us in person or via Skype.
We want things that have succeeded and which have failed. Whatever it takes to further the knowledge of the education community.

Click on the logo on the top right hand corner of the homepage for further details.

The enhanced podcast from the Telford ICT conference are now online at http://edu.blogs.com (part1 & part2).  This was an excellent keynote and well worth the time spent downloading and then watching on your preferred device (ipod video, pc or mac).

Last night I had one of those ‘wow! that’s cool’ moments.

A couple of weeks ago Shropshire CC allowed access to Flickr from our schools so I decided it was time to upgrade my free account to a Pro account. It was time to see what else I can do with my photos, and I had been discussing with Ewan about setting up a project to geotag and share some photos of Roman relics etc in Shropshire for Scottish schools to have access to.

I searched around Flickr and via a geotagging group I came across FlickrFly (FlickrFly is a script that can be linked from the description or comment of a geotagged Flickr Photo to fly you that location in Google Earth). I tried out one of the examples and decided to give it a go.

My next challenge was to find the gps location for my photos, I tried using Get-a-map from Ordnance Survey. I was able to pinpoint the place the photograph was taken and was given a Grid reference but I didn’t know how to convert this into a gps location, if anyone could tell me that would be great. I then tried to use GoogleMaps to get the gps data, as with get-a-map I could find the place but this time I couldn’t find any location data. My next stop was GoogleEarth, the mapping data wasn’t as good as the previous two so I guessed at exactly where the photo was taken but it did give me a longitude and latitude figure.

Now I had the data I revisted my Flickr photos and when into my C2C set to see if I can geotag some of the photos I took while cycling across England. A selected my photo of the Gateshead Millenium Bridge as I thought this would be a an easy place to find. Google Earth returned me 54 58′11.24″ N 1 35′57.11″ W, so I tagged the photo:

• geo:lon=1.355711
• geo:lat=54.581124
• geotagged

I then copied the simple html code from FlickrFly into the description for the photo, it appeared like this:

Fly to this location
(Requires Google Earth)

I was so excited and clicked on Fly to this location, I told my browser to open the file with GoogleEarth. GoogleEarth booted up and started flying around, unfortunately I ended up not on the Gateshead bridge! I had a look around the preferences on Google Earth and noticed I could change the Lat/Lon from Degrees, Minutes, Seconds to Degrees. I went back to where the bridge actually is and I got the following, lat 54.969780 lon -1.599194, so I deleted my original tags and changed them to these:

• geo:lon=-1.599194
• geo:lat=54.969780

I clicked on the fly to this location link again and it worked - how cool was that! I then did another photo to check I had it cracked and it worked yet again, I was so excited I had to show my wife - I think she was impressed.

Just think of all the different applications for this in learning, school trips - geotag the photos and people could watch the journey you made, the romans study that hopefully Ewan and I will sort out soon etc.