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The ScotEduBlogs site is dear to my heart. An opensource effort by teachers in Scotland to aggregate and redistribute the posting by Scottish educational blogger of all shapes, ages and sizes ScotEduBlogs has become an more than every day read for me.

At the Scottish learning Festival side dish TeachMeet07 4th Edition I made a plea for support for ScotEduBlogs. At that time it was being hosted by Jonesieboy, Robert Jones, who is also the main programmer of the site. I was approached during the dinner following Teach Meet by Joe Wilson of the The Scottish Qualifications Authority, who proposed that the SQA and Learning and Teaching Scotland should support ScotEduBlogs. Ewan who is National Adviser: Learning and Technology Futures at LTS was quick to agree.

To cut a long story short; ScotEduBlogs has now moved to its very own server which should lead to (and Robert will correct me if I am wrong) more stability, better updating etc, etc. The SQA and LTS logos now sit prettily on the ScotEduBlogs sidebar.

It might take a few days for ScotEduBlogs to settle into its new home, so if you notice anything strange let us know.

If you are a Scots Educational blogger you can do your bit to support ScotEduBlogs too:

• Make sure your blog is listed.
• Make sure the tags on your listing describe your blog.
• Link from your blog to ScotEduBlogs (there are some images and help on the wiki).
• You might want to help out by designing a new graphic or in other ways, see the wiki again.

As well as just reading the front page ScotsEduBlogs can be used in lots of other ways:

• The front page has an rss feed.
• On the Blogs page you can filter blogs by tags and get a rss feed for your tag or set of tags.
• You can even follow the ScotEduBlogs tweets on twitter.

See the wiki for more ideas.

As there are more and more ScotEduBloggers ScotEduBlogs will become more and more useful as a learning tool, enabling you to get ideas that you might not pick up through your favourite feeds.

These are the slides I used at TeachMeetPerth Last week. You can see the images on a Flickr set.

I first got the idea for OpensourceCPD from TeachMeet at the Scottish Learning Festival in 2007 [you can see some pictures here]. Ollie Bray is widely quoted as saying that TeachMeet was his best Continuing Professional Development (CPD) experience. This had me thinking about Teachers as providers of CPD. I also talked to Con Morris of LTS’s CPD Scotland team, when he mentioned that reading my blog could be a CPD opportunity for someone!

My favourite learning experiences at conferences and inset have always been the ones presented by teachers. I include in this the more informal TeachMeets and the social continuation in the pub or restaurant afterwards. I’ve also been aware of the open source movement as a great deal of the software I use day-to-day is open source software: this blog, Firefox, Vienna and many more.

This got me wondering if this might be a useful model for distribution of CPD material by teachers, material that is not locked into a Local Authority, business or agency. Teachers as providers and consumers. The CPD material would be freely available and could be used by individuals or presented by a provide, the teachers supplying the material on the wiki could be providers/consultants. Of course, because the material is freely available it can be supplied as CPD by anyone. So the idea came together based on a casual reading of the Open Source Definition

1. Free Redistribution: the software CPD materials can be freely given away or sold. (This was intended to expand sharing and use of the software on a legal basis.)
2. Source Code: the source code must either be included or freely obtainable. (Without source code, making changes or modifications can be impossible.) This might be a little more difficult, hopefully it will not mean that folk would be put off uploading a PDF which is hard to edit, but more the spirit that material shared here is for mashing up.
3. Derived Works: redistribution of modifications must be allowed. (To allow legal sharing and to permit new features or repairs.)

The Open Source Definition has a lot more, but you get the idea. This project will probably follow the Open Content model more closely:

Technically, it is royalty free, share alike and may or may not allow commercial redistribution. Content can be either in the public domain or under an open license like one of the Creative Commons licenses.

but at this time I thought that Open Source CPD was a snappy title, so I have started a wiki OpenSourceCPD to support this idea. I hope it is going to be connected to CPDFind in some way. At the moment the site is sitting on a temporary server and I probably will not get a lot of work done until the spring break. Several Scottish educational bloggers have added Profiles and there seem to be a far bit of approval at TeachMeetPerth. The focus to start with will be Social Media or Web 2.0 in teaching and learning.Nothing is set in stone (it is a wiki) but I’ve begun three main sections:

• CPD Materials A basic outline of various social media tools that can be used in teaching.
• Cpd Opportunities CPD courses for self study or to be used as a skeleton for leading cpd.
• Profiles A list of practitioners that could lead such cpd (this could be on a paid or free, online or face2face basis).

If this idea appeals please get in touch, if you want a password to edit the wiki leave a comment or send me a mail. If you have some material you want hosted on the wiki but have not the time or inclination to edit it get in touch and I’ll be happy to post it for you.

So have a look at OpenSourceCPD.

Have you ever seen a theremin played outside Bill Bailleyesque comedy? Let me recommend this short video featuring Pamelia Kurstin.

Lest you fear that the timbre is going to be a little samey throughout, try to hang on until at least 2:45 when the sound changes dramatically. At 14:15 there is a lovely arrangement of Billy Strayhorn’s Lush Life featuring Makoto Ozone on piano. What’s nice in this film is the juxtaposition of sensitive playing with extremely merry explanatory dialogue between the items.

The musical sensitivity is all the more surprising when you realise that the only parameters specified by the hands approaching the instrument are pitch (frequency) and volume (amplitude). Pupils interested in both science and music might enjoy puzzling out which of the two is responsible for producing vibrato, an Int 2 concept. And just in case you haven’t already clicked the Theremin link, try to guess when the instrument was invented.

My esteemed colleague across the water Dr. James Frankel, flagged up an interesting story from the NY Times which featured a mobile with a ring tone of such high frequency that people over the age of 30 were unlikely to hear it. This way young owners of the phone could get away with having their phone on in class or way past their bedtime.

As I was reading the article, a colleague, sitting near me but facing another direction asked, “can you hear a high pitched noise?” I’m too much of a gentleman to reveal her age. Suffice it to say I was impressed by her range!

See how you get on: ringtone

I was surprised that I could hear it as I tend to use the car as my main hi-fi and pump up the volume.

We previewed the Asus EeePC last month, a tiny computer which is cheap enough for most areas to buy in en masse. They’ve since sold out until January! Bill Kerr carries a great analysis between it and its closest competitor, the ‘One Laptop Per Child’ machine which has been designed for use in the Third World.

It shows that they are both very closely matched and perhaps how the Asus, with its low price and competitive features, might ease the pressure on demand in the Western world for the One Laptop Per Child machine which was destined for a market more in need of connectivity.

As I’ve mentioned before I post a set of interesting links onto LTS’s Masterclass community every week or so. Masterclass is still looking for new members. I thought that the links I just posted there give a fair flavour of what is going on in some of the educational blogosphere and that I might share them here too:

• Ian from Islay is in Monaco, Different world - Same issues, to consult on the introduction of effective ICT. He notices I was not familiar with the International Baccalaureate curriculum but my research has shown a great similarity in ethos with the Curruculum for Excellence (ACfE).
• Two Whizzy points to Text Jumble a fridge magnet thing. I remember playing with the same sort of thing a few years back: Their There and They’re.
• Dave Warlick sends My Apologies to teachers. Dave thinks teachers need:Time to plan, collaborate, research, assess and adapt, build, and innovate (I tell them 3 to 4 hours a day — everyday).
• Jim Wenzloff writes Boring Spreadsheets? and points to a free online spreadsheet tool: Online Spreadsheets - EditGrid
• Ollie Bray writes ACE in Action at MGS
• Ben Rimes mentions Sesame Street on your iPod!
• Gordon McKinlay starts to Get to Grips with GLOW Groups - Early Adopters Discussion
• Two Whizzy again, Christmas whiteboard resources: A Christmas present From iBoard
• Lots of folk point to Blogs in Plain English. Nive video from common craft.
• Some of my children’s work Christmas At Sandaig, quick flash animation using Geoff Dellow’s templates. See the Teachers sharing their work with Flash blog for more details and links to free flash resources for teaching.

The Edublog Awards are probably the closest thing we have in the Edublogosphere to an “Oscar” ceremony, but I wonder if I’m the only one thinking that there is something missing? What I want to know is, why there aren’t categories for pupil entries… and is it time to start a separate Awards ceremony for the great work done by pupils?

It’s always an honour to be given recognition for good work. It is a vindication of your efforts, and in the education sphere, it is also an acknowledgement that you are making a genuine and positive difference to the lives of those you are responsible for educating. Events like the Edublogs Award ceremony are a fantastic and worthwhile idea, not least because they introduce you to new people and ideas from the world of education. I really can’t fault the whole process (even though I think that Don or Ewan should have won their category! ) …but…

I was very disappointed to see the lack of representation of student work. If you’re involved in edublogging then you are unlikely to have missed the launch tomorrow of Student2.0. This attempt to give students a genuine forum where they can give an end-users view of Education2.0 is, I hope, the thin end of the wedge. However, it did remind me that the categories in the Edublog Awards are geared to the educators… they highlight the pedagogy and practitioners… they reward the good teachers… they do not praise and celebrate the innovative and incredible work being done by the pupils…

I think we now have enough pupils and students and learners producing blogs and wikis and goodness knows all what to justify having an Awards Ceremony to celebrate their work. I think that we have to realise that the pupils and students deserve to have their work praised and recognised on a national and international scale, and there is no intrinsic reason why this should not be the case… so I have an idea!

Awards2.0

I propose that we should set up an awards ceremony to celebrate and share the great work being done by the people we are educating….
It should be open to any pupil or group of pupils, anywhere, in any language…
The categories could be based on those used in the Edublog Awards, with suitable additions…
The results should be decided by pupil and educator voting…
Students and educators should be allowed to nominate entries, with a final nomination list selected by a panel of suitably qualified judges (made up of students and educators)…
I don’t necessarily think there should be prizes per se, the awards should be a means of recognition rather than an incentive…
I think we should get started on this idea now!

How…

My initial thought is to aim to hold the award ceremony in September during the Scottish Learning Festival. This is one of the best education conferences anywhere in the world, and has a strong history of focussing on education rather than being a trade show. It has a superb and dedicated ‘Education Village’ which illustrates the work being done in Scotland, but the SLF has always had a very strong international flavour. As such, I think it would be a superb venue to have a ‘real’ awards ceremony which would also be shared live online using a variety of tools such as Second Life, uStream and GLOW….

What do you think?

I know this is no more than an idea at the moment, but it is one which I believe has merit and which should be developed. I am willing to coordinate the idea if you think it has potential, and I already have a few ideas for potential support. I’d love to know what you think, and would appreciate it if you could leave any comments and ideas here at the moment. Similarly, I’d appreciate it if you could pass this post on to anyone you think might be interested in the idea.

What next?

Initially, I want to see if there is enough interest in the idea, but I’ll move to a wiki to start hammering out the details later… so, please give this some thought, and use the comments to make your suggestions about any aspect of the idea… and please take the time to talk about this with your students and pupils…. after all, we know they have something worth saying so isn’t it about time we started listening and recognising this?

In this video snippet see how some principals and headteachers-to-be are learning the skills on the job. 

You can view this video below or by visiting the Connected Live Blip.TV Channel.

Every year the Scottish Learning Festival welcomes visitors from across the world. What is in it for guests from outside Scotland?

You can see the video below or on the Blip.TV Channel.