Moblogging in Zaragoza

Well, the Zaragoza blog this week has just had its 1000th hit! Angel Lopez, who runs our Spanish blog here at Woldingham, done made a fantastic job of uploading slideshows, audio interviews with the students and of course photos, resulting in a colourful and engaging blog. Back at school we have had some problems ensuring the students can access every aspect of the site, including being able to comment, but they have now been ironed out and we look forward to increasing our readership and more active participation next week when our students are in Bondues.

Moblogging again

Summer term and time for a couple of moblogs. We started moblog experiments last year with our Montpellier trip, and tried out some cross-curricular blogging with St. Petersburg in the Spring. Now we are branching out with two moblogs operating at once, one from Bondues one from Zaragoza, thanks to the Spanish Department's purchase of an additional camera phone.

Last year we used gabcast and podcast pickle together to publish some audio as well as photos from the phone. This year, thanks to Adam Taha's's very clear video featured on Joe Dale's blog recently, we are going for including audio via divshare and a tiny mp3 recorder.

Tomorrow I brief a group of students and accompanying staff on the basics of moblogging. Having set up blogs in blogger for both parties and linked their camera phone to the blog to post directly, once they are abroad our mobloggers just need to take pics, add an accompanying text, and click on "send to blog". In addition internet access in the evenings from host families/hotels gives an opportunity to add further photos from other devices or simply more cheaply. I'm hoping the students will also be able to make recordings of reports in the Target Language of their day's experiences, which can then be posted in a divshare player directly onto the blog.

I'm looking forward to seeing (and hearing) what they have been up to and hope we will have good interest and participation from parents and friends. Watch this space for an update on how they are getting on.

Moblogging from Montpellier

This week two colleagues are accompanying a trip to Montpellier with 14 Year 10 girls. We set up a live blog at http://www.montpellierlive08.blogspot.com/ to record their progress and so far things are going really well. They have blogged a number of photos and have made their first gabcast recording - a clip in French about how they are settling in. The most exciting part is watching the site meter and seeing parents and friends repeatedly log in to check for news. Given that Woldingham girls come from far and wide our blog community is already global, with visits from Thailand, the USA, France, Belgium and of course the UK. Have a look this week and maybe post them a comment!

Moblogging

Gerry and I attended a very informative and thought-provoking course on steps forward with IT systems today in Kent College, Pembury. Thanks Gerry for allowing me to post this snap remotely today (the idea was to catch him napping in a session but that never happened, despite some quite jargony stuff!) Blogging from a mobile is two clicks away once you have taken a photo, and posts go up instantly -as you'll see from the timing of the one below. Our school Sony Ericsson is going off on Geography field trips, the French trip and the Namibia trip this summer, so watch this space for more info - and please let me know if you are interested in using this tool for your department on trips out.

Moblogging and PowerPoints

Keep an eye on www.haythorneg.parislavieenrose.blogspot.com over the weekend as Niamh is going to be getting the students on the Paris trip to moblog (remote blog) using their internet/camera phones from France.

It is easy for you to post a comment for them to read while they are away, if you wish. You will just need to type your e-mail address, an anti-spam word and a comment in the relevant boxes on the website above.

Would welcome any feedback or ideas after the weekend.

Meanwhile, Toby has found out for me how to embed PowerPoints in Blogger. Whilst it is a bit more complicated than the obvious route in edublogs it looks really neat. Sign up to www.scribd.com and upload your file to the scribd website. Then paste the code they give you into the html tab side of a new post in Blogger. Done. If you have problems, it may be that the width of your Blogger template is not sufficient to accommodate the PowerPoint. If that is the case you can go to "Templates" and "Edit" from your dashboard to check out what width you have available and edit te scribd code down accordingly. Anyway, I have to say it worked really easily when I tried (i.e. without extra editing) and you can see the results below.