EduBuzz Up-date

We had our latest edubuzz open meeting tonight after school. The very nature of these meetings is about conversation and sharing ideas. The meeting lasted about 1.5 hours and we discussed a number of points.

Edubuzz Site

The general feeling of the group was that the edubuzz site needed to have a little bit of work done on it to make it a little more user friendly. Dave Gilmore is going to direct the edubuzz.org URL to the current edubuzz blog home page. The re-designed home page will also contain more information on what edubuzz is and does. This will be similar to the original content found on the old exc-el site.

Use of Social Software Tools

We had a quick discussion about the use of social software tools and how they are being used in some schools. Don showed a few examples of East Lothian school websites, teacher and pupils learning logs. We discussed how easy it was to use some of the tools within edubuzz (in particular wordpress multi user). There is a definite need for more ‘child friendly’ tutorials / short course to help pupils develop and work on their learning logs independently.

Extreme Learning

We had a quick up-date on extreme learning. This was useful for me as I wasn’t able to make the last extreme learning meeting. I like the ideas of using agile software development model to help nurture the extreme learning projects in there early stages.

Getting more people involved in the edubuzz project

We discussed a number of ideas for trying to get more people involved in the edubuzz project and the use of social software. I made a number of suggestions, which I will come back to in a future post.

I gave a quick up-date on the recent edubuzz skype call. Overall I thought the experiment had been successful and I explained the reasons for wanting to re-visit the idea of an edubuzz conference. We are yet to decide when, where or how the conference will take place. But after a quick discussion around the table one of the suggestions was using Musselburgh Grammar as a venue and trying to hold the conference on a Saturday sometime in October / November. Keep watching this space to watch the project develop in more detail.

Comments

[Neil Winton]

Ollie,
I'll hopefully be able to come down to the conference at the end of the year. I know it's early days yet, but what do you see as being the format for the day?

PS: You're it! (see http://nwinton.wordpress.com/2007/05/15/tag-ging-along/ for an explanation!)

[David Gilmour]

Discovered today that Haddington's Corn Exchange http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=haddington+corn+exchange&sll=55.955399,-2.783833&sspn=0.0296,0.079651&ie=UTF8&z=14&iwloc=A&om=1 is now linked to the ELC network, with standard RJ45 network sockets all round the periphery. This was installed for the election, but is permanent. This offers much more potential for live demonstrations than any of the school halls, as far as I'm aware.