There’s a shiny new app for the iPhone, iPod and iPad that looks really promising: Dragon Dictation from Nuance Communications. In a nutshell, it’s a tool for dictating text which can be added to a document or linked to social networking accounts like Twitter or Facebook. It’s spookily reliable (unless you happen to be a five year old girl – it had difficulty picking up my daughter’s voice generating gobble-de-gook sentences which she found heeeeeelarious!).

Dragon Dictation in action

James Clay has done a really good post on it which you should read.

2 things really appeal to me about this app;

1. It’s reliable enough for people with motor function problems to be able to quickly create large amounts of text giving all sorts of benefits for accessibility, inclusion and social participation in education (and beyond).
2. It’s another tool that moves the smartphone away from being primarily a content delivery system. On devices like the iPhone, text entry on anything other than short snippets of information is tricky thanks to small buttons small buttons so Tweeting is fine but blogging or document writing can be quite tricky. With Dragon Dictation you can get round more of those shortcomings and contribute more.

I’m looking forward to using this in the future and it’s sister application Dragon Search.

CC Image - Karen Cropper - Attribution

Martin Weller’s blog, The Ed Techie, was the first technology blog that I followed and he’s a constant stream of intrestingness. His latest post is really valuable for anyone interested in ed-tech generally, but also open educational models specifically. He has done interviews with a number of OU luminaries (Martin Bean, Grainne Conole, Andrew Law and Simon Buckinham-Shum) and basically asked them 4 questions:

• What are the benefits of technology for learning?
• What are the interesting areas around openness at the moment?
• Are there any interesting trends we should watch over the next few years?
• What do you think about the open, online approach of the conference?

The interviews are between 8 and 15 minutes long each.

I was particularly interested in Grainne Conole’s point about moving towards more open models of research and blogging ideas in progress to get the communities input rather than waiting to publish them in closed  journals.

The conference is running next week on the 22nd and 23rd June and he’s posted the agenda here. Follow Martin’s blog and his Tweets for more info.

PS: Trying to embed this playlist was an unexpected hassle. Ended up having to go into the source code of Martin’s blog and copying the embed code from there. Thanks to Steve for his help. Do you know an easier way?

CC Image - Brendan Wilkinson - A-NC-ND

I’m going all gooey about AudioBoo at the moment. It’s sat around in the perpiphery of my vision for a while now but in the last month or so I’ve started to see it as a really useful addition to my network of tools, especially now I’m a JesusPhone user.

If you’re not familiar with AudioBoo have a look at their site and check out the video intro.

Here’s why I’m gushing:

It’s simple – Using the iPhone you can go from recording to publishing in a matter of clicks. The audio record function allows you to pause during recording and append. It won’t allow you to chop your audio around in an Audacity stylee but adding too much functionality would get in the way of the simplicity. I can live with that.

It’s social – There aren’t as many people using AudioBoo as Twitter, for example, but it still has the same mechanisms for following and you can also comment on Boos bringing your network in on the act.

It’s fun – Sound is overlooked, I think, but still plays a massive part in our lives. I love the idea of taking sound snapshots and sharing them. Listening forces you to take things more slowly and experience the world differently.

It’s mobile – I’m surprised by the quality of the audio you get from recording on an iPhone (none of that compressed MP3 gurgle you get with many online audio recorders). The fact that it’s mobile means that you can record your thoughts regardless of location and allows you to easily bring in other sounds and voices where hulking round large amounts of equipment or dragging someone near a laptop aren’t feasible. I find it really useful for reflecting on conferences or other events where I’m likely to be on the move or in a hotel room immediately after. The iPhoen’s great but trying to type an extended blog post on it would make me want to cry. It also helps you to capture serendipitous bits of discovery or random thought in awkward places bringing informal and formal learning together.

It’s personal – Hearing someone’s voice, especially when they’re speaking conversationally and not off a script is a great way of feeling your getting closer to someone. It gives you more clues about emotion and personality than you would get from written text.

It’s spatial – As a failed geographer I still love the idea of landscape and space and I’ve done work with schools before where students have captured sounds in a location and then mashed them together in Audacity to create soundscapes. AudioBoo geotags your recordings but it will also let you export your recordings as mp3 for use elsewhere (see handy tip)

It’s connected – Boos are public, sharable, embeddable and you can link to other apps like Twitter, Facebook to get your recordings out to your network quickly and easily. Adding a hashtag into an AudioBoo title when you’re linked to Twitter automatically hastags the Tweet which saves retweeting later.

Oh, yes. It’s free!

As a learning tool it’s something powerful to include in the arsenal for capturing formal and informal experiences and introducing a sense of play into things.n I’m going to be investigating more about the possible applications of digital storytelling in FE and HE soon and AudioBoo is likely to figure quite prominently.

You can listen to my Boos here. Also check out Doug Belshaw’s Thinking Digital conference chats here.

Right, I’m off to run through a sunny cornfield hand in hand with AudioBoo while recording the pretty birdsong.

Hi all,

I’ve been asked by Edge, a charity “dedicated to raising the stature of practical and vocational learning”, if I would host a stream for this debate taking place on the 22nd March at 16:30.

I’m not endorsing Edge’s manifesto but having said in my previous post about being nervous for the future of education it seemed a good opportunity to help facilitate some discussion on the topic.

I don’t intend to make a habit of hosting other people’s material on this site.

My blog theme didn’t like the embed code so you can access information on the debate on Facebook here and the debate will be hosted on Facebook here.

Image Credit - Tom Barrance

Film Education’s CP3 conference is a routinely excellent occasion and well worth your attention if you are involved in using digital media in education. I’ve blogged about it before.

The last event was in Liverpool (way back in July) and CP3 has now completely revamped its site and updated it with the resources from the event. Have a look…

This is extraordinarily good value! You can download podcasts and transcripts of the keynotes and the materials from the many workshops (the best bit of the conference). The quality is as high as ever.

Have a look at James Durran’s Keynote and Tom Barrance’s Image, Text and Sound workshop as good examples.

Keep your eye on the website for details of next year’s conference.

Did you attend the Liverpool conference? Review it for us…

Myna from Aviary

Aviary has recently released a web based audio editor called Myna and it’s well wrth a look regardless of what area of the curriculum you’re from.

Aviary already has an established web presence with its fantastic suite of image and graphics tools (all named after birds – go see!) and this is a welcome diversion from them. It’s getting to the stage where they are seriously challenging the likes of Adobe’s Photoshop Elements and Illustrator for the education market.

Anyway; Myna…

Picture a halfway house between Audacity and Garageband, add in that it’s a web tool and so comes with easy options for sharing and embedding and you have Myna. Here’s the demo video…

The interface is intuitive if you have used loop-based audio editors before and is reasonably straightforward for neophytes as well. It certainly looks more engaging than Audacity which, athough a thoroughly excellent tool, isn’t the friendliest-looking thing.

The Garageband-like functions are interesting. You can create pieces of music quickly and easily without much musical know-how using intro’s, loops and endings. The production values on the original clips are high so the results are highly listenable.

You don’t have as much flexibility to mix instruments as Garageband. Essentially, they’ve chopped up ready-made pieces of music and you just reassemble the chunks in the order you want. For most uses that’s as much flexibility as you need.

I did have problems trying to record audio using a mic because I couldn’t get the server to respond when I tried it. It may be to do with being behind a proxy server at work. I used the feedback tool in Myna to flag it up but haven’t received a reply yet. I’ll update the post when I know more.

At the other end, saving and publishing work is a breeze. You save your work as you go then select Mixdown when you’re ready. It gives you an option to save the MP3 or copy the URL and embed code of the finished audio. A lot more painless than getting a class to export an MP3 using Audacity with it’s Lame encoder complications.

The possibilities are huge with this. It’s easy for a class to create podcasts in the classroom or at home, flex their creative muscles and then share what they’ve done. If you have class blog or use a VLE then htis could make homework very interesting indeed.

There’s no cost to set up an Aviary account but a pro subscription is available for $25 a year and there’s education pricing too which isn’t clarified on the website.

See Danny Nicholson’s earlier blog post for another review…

Image - CC from Flickr

Not a hugely inspiring piece of ICT but this data poster has come from New Scientist via Digg. It’s worth a moment of your time.

Things that struck me were the growth in deaths from HIV/AIDS and the relationship between arms spending and number of conflicts among other things.

Thought it might make a nice bit of work in Humanities – ask the group the question at the top of the page to generate a bit of discussion and then give them the data and have a debate to decide whether it’s true or not.

It could be the starting point for a range of ICT activities. e.g. the students creating media resources to back up their conclusions or maybe using your VLE to host an online discussion out of class time.

In the meantime check out their article on “13 more things that don’t make sense“.

Image – venetia joubert sarah oosterveld on Flickr

It’s a nifty wee tool for making a collage of images, videos and music presented in a scrolling format. Have a look at this quick example I put together…

The images were all from Flickr on Creative Commons unfortunately I’ve lost the list of where they all came from so if you want an image credit just send me a comment and I’ll update the post. The music is called Bereft by Paul Mottram and come from the Audio Network Production Library (education license – see here for the commercial site).

As far as uses go:

• A gallery of a student’s artwork projects
• Create a collage of abstract images, add music and use it as inspiration for a piece of poetry or creative writing
• A lesson starter for a topic in history, geography, science etc
• For displaying pictures from a school play or activity and linking to it in the school blog or website.

Have a go. It’s really intuitive and there’s some nice image editing tools.Let’s hope they sort out the embedding issues, though.

I thought it needed sharing. Please have a look and let Catherine know what you think.

Now, go and look at the Sheffield South CLC blog for more ideas and a showcase of the work they’re doing.