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.

In an effort to kickstart this stalled blog I’m going to take a leaf out of the books of @dajbelshaw, @jukesie and @sboneham and do weeknotes, summaries of what I achieved, learnt, reflected on etc. that week. I’ll hopefully publish it every Friday.

They will get better…promise!

Follow Doug, Steve and Matt’s weeknotes.

Pecha Kucha’s

At the Netskills planning meeting last week we all had to do a 5 minute presentation on a topic of our choice. Particularly enjoyed @carlvincent’s on agile project development (going to use this model to develop my next workshop) and @sboneham’s on the convergence of internet of things, web3.0 and mobile usage, although all of them were interesting and enjoyable. I tried to explain “slicing” as a way of assessing reflective learning through the use of Play-Doh (need a full blog post to demonstrate this). What did I learn?

• It’s liberating doing a presentation without any form of technology other than pens, a flipchart and cutlery.
• Be careful not to rely too much on a quirky visual hook, spend as much time on getting the verbal explanation right as well. It can also be distracting.
• 5 minutes is not a long time, pick a topic that you can comfortably cover in the time.
• If I’m anxious about a presentation it tends to go better than if I’m quietly confident. This is annoying!
• I’m my own worst critic. It probably didn’t go as badly as it did in my brain.

Augmented Reality

Thanks to Steve’s quick presentation I’m going to investigate spatial tools for a possible workshop/set of resources. I had a go using a range of tools over the week:

Hoppala – requires you to set up a  of developer account on Layar and quite fiddly for non-specialists

Junaio – a much quicker route to sharing information about places to a network of friends.

Wikitude – the app I’d heard most about but I’m quite disappointed by, mainly because it doesn’t remember my settings and keeps crashing.

A full blog post will be forthcoming shortly but my overall impression was that the tools are still pretty crude. The second and third generations will be much more interesting especially if Google Goggles is as good as people suggest (please can we have it for the iPhone now!).

New workshops

Netskills is running a season of workshops in Newcastle and London in October and November. I’ve been writing the new one on Digital Storytelling and adapting the workshop on Blogging and Social Networking and Supporting the Student Learner Experience (not advertised yet) so they fit better with where technology is now. Really looking forward to getting these on the road.

Doug Belshaw’s Google Earth site

In preparation for the Google Teacher Academy UK’s launch, Doug asked for help compiling a site with guidance on using Google Earth for education. Being a geographer and interested in the tools I said yes. Doug’s done a huge amount really quickly and I’ve only added a little bit to the Advanced Use section. It’s a really useful resource for anyone interested in making the most of this fantastic application. Please contribute as well.

I had a wee word with myself about signing up to get involved in things and then not actually contributing. With so many collaborative projects and requests for help out there, there’s a risk of getting all keen, signing up and then not following through on commitments. I want to avoid becoming one of those people.

Diigo

As I’m using Diigo much more now for bookmarking and sharing stuff I’ve set it up to auto post new additions to my library on this blog every Sunday. I think this will be a further incentive to use social bookmarking more constructively.

I’ve also been setting up a series of “lists” on different subjects. Here’s my collection of links on Digital Storytelling. Check out the rest of my Diigo Library.

FOTiE 2010

I’ve not been doing a lot of horizon scanning recently so  I signed up to go to the Future of Technology in Education conference in London on 1st October. I’m really looking forward to this as it seems to carry quite a buzz with it.

It’ll be great to finally hear Ollie Bray, James Clay, Miles Berry and Matt Lingard, all of whom I follow on Twitter but have never actually heard speak.

Of particular interest is James Alliban and Miles Metcalffe who are doing 2 20 minutes slots on AR and Geolocation (see above).

Steve and Will from Netskills will also be there. Come say hi!

And on a personal note…

We need a holiday Chez Chalk! It’s 4 months ince we came to Newcastle and we’ve not really had a proper break. Both Chalklets (elder and younger) seem to be at the end of their tether but they’ve been through such a massive change and dealt with all mummy and daddy’s wobbles remarkably well. They’re still my inspiration.

We failed to complete on the purchase of our house on Monday (someone else’s solicitors at fault) but we should be moving next Monday. One week either way isn’t going to make much difference in the grand scheme of things although I was a little repressed ball of fury in the office on Monday. Sorry, m’colleagues!

After all that, I’m still thrilled to be in Newcastle.

Image – Xavier de Jaureguiberry – Att-NC-ND

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…

I’m quite pleased with the way the blog looks and the visitor numbers are good (nearing 60,00 hits after 10 months ain’t bad, although I suspect that I only get a few dozen regulars) but I’m a bit demoralised that visits are short and virtually nobody is leaving comments.

I had a few aims when I started:

• Keep track of all the resources, apps and equipment I came across. I have a useless memory!
• Experiment with blogging as an educational tool.
• Keep track of my own professional development.
• Create a forum for the teachers I work with to share ideas and the outcomes of projects.
• Contribute to the wider edtech community.

The first 3 I think I’ve done OK with. Aaron and I did experiment with a link directory for all the web2.0 apps and resources sites I came across but it was clunky and no one used it so when we did the latest redesign it joined the d-ed pool. More on this shortly, though.

We’ve successfully used blogging as part of a transition project in the CLC and othe bits and pieces we’ve picked up like Fliggo and Prezi have been invaluable in other ways.

My thoughts about edtech are certainly a lot clearer since starting the blog. Writing opinion pieces forces you to think critically about what you are saying. It’s even helped me to plan out where I think I want to move my career in the next few years.

I”m really disappointed about the last 2, though. I may be a being a bit unfair on myself as I’m comparing myself with some big hitters in the blogging world but the lack of comments does sap the enthusiasm somewhat…

…and I know that has everything to do with the blogger rather than the readers. I perhaps need to particiapte more in discussions on other blogs but I have this chronic problem of writing responses to other people’s posts and then chickening out and not sending them.

So, where now?

I think I can live without comments. I know people are reading the blog and the fact that it’s a useful development tracker makes it worthwhile keeping going. Worrying about comments suggests vanity.

What I’m not so sure about is the bit about keeping track of apps and resources. There are better blogs than mine for reporting the latest stuff to come out (See Free Technology for Teachers or follow @russelltarr or @web20classroom). They’re very prolific and I can’t keep up enough to be adding much value.

With Doug Belshaws’s discussion of heuristics in mind, Aaron and I are hopefully going to put together a searchable directory of education-friendly web2.0 apps that allows people to rate the apps’ usefulness and share classroom experience.

Image credit – http://www.flickr.com/photos/cayusa/ 

The boss has sort of given the nod to me and my line manager going to BETT this year.

If you are involved in ICT in education in any sort of planning or strategic sense in the UK then BETT is a worthwhile trip. Just make sure you have a game plan before you turn up. Don’t expect to wander round and discover stuff although some explore time is recommended. Pick exhibitors that have something to do with your plan for the year and build a route map round them.

Also, pick some decent seminars.

I didn’t go last year as I failed to do the above in 2007 and came away demoralised and exhausted.

I’m going to try and blog/vlog/twitter my experiences this year partly to share the chalk-love but also ‘cos I’ve never tried blogging from the field and that’s quite a useful educational tool.