@catspyjamasnz asked for people to contribute to her project What My PLN Means to Me and to add a video to the wiki.

So here’s my contribution.  Like I’ve said before, we have to put ourselves out there and get over our dislikes, fears and phobias.  How can we expect children to do this if we don’t?

A Saturday morning tweet by @betchaboy-

prompted me to refresh my memory…

I’ve blogged about this Oblong interface before, but I’d forgotten how slick it really was (apart from the naff gloves).

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

Here it is being used to edit video/movie elements together.

oblong’s tamper system 1801011309 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

Breed it selectively with this…

a handful of these….

and don’t forget the “glass” wall at the beginning of the Microsoft Future Vision 2019 video. That’s not a glass wall, its a touch screen offering real time translation of voice and text.  The children could be separated by half a world.

Is the combined DNA of these products a likely future tool of interactive education? Or will schools, as we know them, have ceased to exist by then?

Our class blog is provided by Wordpress.com and it’s been about three years since I’ve done any real work on a Blogger based blog.  Before writing and recording my audio-post I needed to find out how to embed an mp3 audio player in Blogger.  Blogger (Google) doesn’t make this easy, which is a strange omission in a blogging platform that is otherwise so media friendly.  I thought I recalled doing it previously, but wasn’t sure.

In response to a question from @jlamshed I sent this tweet-

Which was met with a couple of responses.  One from @wmchamberlain suggesting I use Vocaroo (an online recording service) and another from @winetimejs saying I should find somewhere to host the audio file and link it in the blog.

Neither of these matched exactly what I wanted.  They’d both work perfectly well, but I wanted to edit the audio in Audacity to remove any “umms” and hiccoughs I might make.  I also wanted to embed a little player into the blog rather than have a link like this- listen here.  Don’t bother clicking – it’s not a real link!

After following several pomising leads from Google I eventually found this page.  It documents several ways of adding an audio player to Blogger. I used number 1 on the page to produce this player below.

You’ll need somewhere to host your audio file (I actually uploaded mine to Wordpress).  After that you need to follow the instuctions, copy and paste the player code and then paste in your mp3 file location. I’m not going to reproduce all the steps here in any detail because they’re all included here.  Just make sure you paste the code into the html view in Blogger.

The page offers other options for embedding mp3 audio in blogger, none of which I’ve tried.  I like the sound of number three, which adds code to the Blogger template so that a player appears automatically whenever you paste in an mp3 link.

One final note.  This only works with mp3 audio files.  If you have any problems you can leave questions and suggestions in the comments.  Happy recording and listening!

I just had a most amazing collaborative experience.  @Mrs_Banjer tweeted on Twitter that she was in an etherpad opened by @mbarrow and would anyone like to come and try it out.  I’ve played with etherpad briefly, but not like we did tonight.

Each contributor is allocated a particular colour to help identify their additions and edits (there are eight colours).  We realised that only eight people could work on a document together at any one time when someone had to leave and was denied re-entry.  EtherPad isn’t perfect, but it is very impressive to watch up to eight live edits appearing on screen simultaneously.

After brief introductions and locations were informally exchanged we went to work, asking and answering questions, experimenting to test etherpad’s limitations and getting a feel for how it worked.  We shared links about software, tips about Twitter, but eventually settled to thinking about how students could use it.  About an hour after we first logged on (it didn’t seem like that long) we had co-created a list of ways that etherpad could be used in the classroom by students and teachers. Thanks to @mbarrow  for starting the etherpad and to @mrs_banjer  @scratchie @mwclarkson @juecov and others who popped in and out to contribute during the session.  Here’s the list we came up with.

This was a real collaborative effort and great fun too! Give it a go with some friends at http://etherpad.com/

I got a new follower on Twitter today and, as usual, checked out their profile to see if I wanted to follow them back.  That led me to a blog post about Twitter and how effective it has been as a PLN and PD tool for @kgustin.

I’ve been meaning to write about Twitter for a while now, but there doesn’t seem to be anything left for me to say that hasn’t already been said by other Tweeters.  Twitter has brought me out of my hole and into the light, connecting me with a network of like minded educators and people that I would otherwise never have “met”.  Thank you Twitter and thank you my Tweeting Twitter friends.

If you haven’t checked out Twitter for yourself yet, I recommend you do.  Give it a little time and you won’t regret it.

Here are a few blog posts that describe the Twitter experience and the benefits of being “connected” much better than I could.
Common Sense Classroom

Durff’s Blog

Steedy’s Blog

Sharing the Addiction

It wasn’t at all.  I have Opera Mini on my phone and most of the web, e-mails, social networking and news that I access on my laptop were there on my phone.  Yippee!  So I could check my gmail/hotmail, read my rss feeds, browse my favourite sites, tweet on twitter and check in with Facebook.  Great!

I’ve noticed more and more that people are using their phones and mobile devices for some of their internet browsing.  Companies like Vodafone or Telecom want you to use their portal to do this.  It’s easy to see why.  To get anywhere you have to pass their “homepage” complete with ads and downloads, which must be a real revenue earner for them.  Coupled with the fact that you pay them for any data you use (basically if you’re connected to the internet via your phone you’re paying for data) they have little interest in optimising your phone web browsing for minimum data use.  You don’t have to use their browser.  Don’t click that Vodafone Live! button or little blue globe.  Download and install Opera Mini on your phone instead!

First choose your download method.  The recommended way is to got to mini.opera.com using your phone’s built in browser.  Opera will detect your phone’s make and model and ensure you download the correct version.  When it’s on your phone just install it.  Different phones and operating system will vary in how you do this, you may get a series of permissions dialogues, but just go with the flow and follow it through.

Once installed Opera Mini will be sitting in your applications folder or similar location. Click/open it and you’re off.  It’ll ask you to mash the phone keys a few time and accept a user agreement before it opens the startpage.  The startpage is preloaded with bookmarks, you’ll soon replace these with your own.  Here’s my startpage.

The default setting has most webpages opening as minimized images of the full page with an area that zooms in to view your selection. I apologise now for the news story, but that’s life.

If this works for you then you don’t need to make any changes.  Personally I find the tiny page version too difficult to see.  I changed my default view to mobile view like the image below.

It’s easy to do.  Just follow these screenshots below, tick mobile view and press the left softkey to save.

That’s it.  You’re all set to go. Like anything else you’ll learn by doing, so get to it.  Visit your favourite sites, login to your webmail, check your rss feeds. Post any questions you have in the comments and I’ll help if I can or there’s the opera mini faqs page.

TWITTER and SLANDR
To tweet from your phone I recommend m.slandr.net. Just enter it into the address bar at the top of Opera Mini or google it.  Log in with your twitter details and then save the page as a bookmark when you’re logged in.  It’s pretty easy to use, though the icons can be difficult to see.

Have a play. Have fun and remember it’s cheaper than texting to twitter! $$$!