Category: web2.0

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Thanks James

Kudos to James Farmer, who runs the Edublogs service. He has outdone himself.

The server was upgraded last week and the new functionality is fabulous. We can now easily embed Flash, Director, YouTube, Google Video, and iFilm files directly into blog posts, which is a greatly appreciated feature. As well as that, he has installed additional WordPress plug-ins which enable us to do a heap of cool stuff, like the “listen to podcast” option through Talkr, and a link to easily add photos directly from your Flickr account, like so.
Playing the didj and Carmella and Doug's place On Lake Koshlong More Huskys

Thanks James for continuing to make Edublogs (and I’m hoping Learnerblogs too!) better all the time.

By the way, all this funky Web 2.0 spelling of words like Flickr, Talkr, Frappr, etc is making me wonder if I should start spelling my own last name as Betchr?

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Thoughts from Both Sides

Here’s a link to another fine post by Will Richardson from his Weblogg-ed blog. I feel the same frustrations that Will is talking about, and I think he raises some excellent thought-provoking points.

I find it interesting that Will’s post arrived in my feedreader at about the same time that I received this beautifully written post by one of my students on her class blog. I asked the kids to write me a short piece on the topic of Communication… I told them they could interpret that pretty much any way they liked, I was just interested to see what they might come up with. I was blown away when I read Michelle’s post. I’d encourage you to take a moment to read it, and please, if you can, leave her a comment.

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The Speed of Web 2.0

I made a little video the other day. It was just a simple time lapse movie of my students carving a pumpkin for Halloween. Nothing really tricky. You can see it here if you like…

What’s interesting to me about it however, is the speed and simplicity with which I was able to publish it to the web. I’ve put plenty of stuff online before, including videos, but it always involved creating an html page, embedding the video using code, uploading to a server using FTP, yaddah, yaddah… the process usually took a fair bit of time, some specialised software, a place to upload to, having the correct ports open on the network, lots of messing around, and a hat with a propeller on top.

Thanks to Web 2.o technologies I was able to upload the video directly to YouTube, which took care of all the compression, rendering, hosting and other technogeek stuff, and it was online within minutes. I then posted a link to it to the class blog so the students could watch it, and within a few minutes the kids had not only seen it but had posted a few comments on it as well.

All of this happened before the bell rang for the end of the class, using nothing more than my web browser.