Sunday, August 30, 2009

Catching Up

It has been a while since posting - I could use the excuse of the school holidays but of course holiday time is when I have more time not less so that won't do. When I started blogging, Patricia Donaghy recommended "little and often" but I haven't managed to follow that wise advice, perhaps it is time to give that maxim a whirl.

It was nice to get a mention on the Silicon Republic news site alongside Noel Cunningham et al




It has been a busy summer one way or another. Once the state exams were over and reports etc. were all sorted out in the school, my time was taken up getting myself organised for heading to Kenya with Camara - www.camara.ie. I have written a bit on this over on the CESI website in a DigiTeach article . I dare say I'll write about it here too over the next few months.

Looking forward to the CESI Meet later in September. It is good to see CESI giving folk a chance to meet up outside of the conference. Organisation for the conference will be kicking off soon as well and again more on that over the next few months.

The CESI mailing list is ticking along nicely with just over 390 members - should be 400 before too long. If there is wisdom in crowds then this crowd has a lot to offer those taking up the challenge of integrating ICT into education.

Despite my interest and fondness for all things Linux and Open Source I splashed out on a Macbook Pro for myself as I'm getting more interested in multimedia stuff, video editing etc. and well ..... Apple is very much the way to go for this in my experience and I'm glad to say it is a really great machine. I took a lot of video footage while in Kenya using a cheap Kodak Zi6. The quality was pretty good and it was so handy to carry around. I spent a lot of time recently playing with the footage and combining it with photographs taken by other Camara volunteers during our time in Kenya as well as some Kenyan music we got from the people we were working with over there. The workflow combination of iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes and iDVD make all of this so much easier to pull together than anything else I have played with on Linux or Windows. I found the Zi6 great and I plan on getting a Zi8 for the school when it is released in September.

That's all for now - time will tell if I go for the little and often maxim.