Electric Chalk

I was shown this ages ago then promptly lost track of it but Indiana Jones-style, I’ve dug it up from the Mediasnackers blog archive.

It’s a nice, easy way of creating timelines from a list of events (either type them in or import a CSV file) and then link the events to explanatory text and/or bits of media.

The results can then be viewed on the x-timeline site or embedded in another site like I’ve done here. SPOILER ALERT - if you don’t want to know what happens to Dumbledore don’t look at it.

I can see great applications in history but also english if your analysing a novel or play or even an author’s output. What about the timeline of a natural disaster?

Enjoy.

Cards on the table: I don’t think so.

Fiona Miller in the Guardian this week says it better than I could.

I’ve worked in a large telecoms organisation with a very well run IT services team. The hoops that I had to jump through to justify the procurement and installation of something fairly standard (Macromedia Flash) were numerous and fiddly (fiddly hoops?).

Picture a teacher. She has just found an IT resource that will transform a difficult lesson but she’s only found it at the last minute. A school-based IT team is more likely to be negotiated into getting it installed at 24 hours notice than a outside provider with a central call centre working to a 2 week service level.

Make IT more complicated and less people will use it as a tool. Teaching’s hard enough as it is.

Well, top marks for a speedy answer from the previous post. Here’s what they said…

“We have some disabled (because buggy and limited) development code that permitted upload of already exported files to a FTP server. This was last available in 1.3.3 Beta:

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/audacity/audacity-win-1.3.3.zip

We have longer term aims to improve this and allow direct exporting from the Audacity window to a server but this is not a current priority.

Also the FTP implementation has a number of potential security issues to be worked out. 

I don’t personally use SharePoint so I can’t advise you whether a FTP solution would work or something else is needed. Web searches are not all that helpful, but there is an article here about uploading files to Sharepoint:

http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/sharepoint-blog/windows-service-to-upload-documents-into-sharepoint-2007-14358

Audacity projects require the .aup file and the _data folder to be present, so those would have to be put in a zip file. If the project includes imported files, they must be copied into the _data folder if they cannot be accessed locally or on the network:

http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php?title=Sending_your_work_to_others     

If you can advise more about the Open Office feature to export to web folders, we can certainly log it as an Audacity feature request. 

Thanks 

Gale 

Audacity Team“ 

I’m shattered! 

We’re working with one of our partnerships schools on a project with some 11-year olds where they record a desert-island diary entry in Audacity and create an mp3 out of it.

We want to be able to then put the mp3 onto the VLE but have hit a real snag.

Far from making the process of saving and sharing work easier, having the learning platform involved makes it harder.

The issue is that when you log into the VLE (MS Sharepoint in our case) where there is a document folder for saved work in some applications like Open Office and MS Office you can see these folders when you click on “Save Project As…” 

The problem with Audacity is that it can’t see these web-based folders so at the moment we have to go through a lengthy process of saving the work in progress to either a document folder or the local machine and then copying and pasting into the web folder.

This is harder than it sounds when you have a reluctant, stroppy group of Y11’s and understandably the partner teachers are anxious about taking the project on themselves as it seems too complicated.

I have a dual plan of attack on this and I’ll keep you updated on the outcome.

I’m going to BETT this year so will accost the Microsoft stand for their advice but I’ve also emailed the Audacity developer team with the suggestion that they include the ability to sve to web folders in a future release.

It’ll be interesting to see how much value they developers put on finding a solution and whether a pleb like me can influence development of a piece of open-source software.

NOTE: Here’s an update… (10th Dec 2008)

Another good piece from Teachers’ TV. Part of their excellent ICT SOS series.

I’ve talked about using VLE’s to list suggested links for students rather than free-Googling. Here they suggest using MS Publisher to create an HTML page and including writing frames in the document to help them structure their responses - a great idea as just expecting the students to write what they find isn’t effective.

Check out the resources page for instructions and lists of software.

The 2nd part is about podcasting to help with revision and is also worth your time.

I’m going to have a play with the Podomatic podcasting software featured and post an evaluation for you before Christmas.

(Note: The spelling on the link in the resources document is wrong - my link should work fine)