Wow - what a wonderful thing the internet is - a pretty cool place - Today in our classroom for instance -at 10am this morning 2 of my pupils were involved in a Skype conversation with Allanah King in New Zealand, the conversation was flowing well specially when it got onto one boy's pet subject of dinosaurs on which he is practically encyclopaedic !!! But that was the way it was he was talking over the internet via telephone as if he was speaking to his mum on the phone - the only difference - 13,000 miles and half a world.
This evening at about 10pm I logged onto our Podomatic account as it said we had mail, and found a podmail ( audio e-mail) from the e-pals that my pupils were sending the messages to this morning - how cool is that - pretty mind boggling actually, for an 'oldy' like me who still has to come to terms with snail mail!!!!

One thing is for certain this form of conversation using VOIP is certainly proving a boon in our e-twinning as replies are almost instant ( considering the 13 hour time difference).

'Real' school work took a bit of a back seat this evening as I had an interesting Skype chat with Joe Dale about creative IT projects in schools. He told me about the work of Richard Peace who has begun blogging on The Weather on a blog called Take The Weather with You - the blog has some excellent pod weather forecast embedded as mp3 files. Do check these out.
I tried out a new piece of software while online with Joe that is a Pretty May recorder this is a Skype ad-on which allows you to record and run an answering machine on Skype and more important in our e-twinning allows you to record Skype conversations as mp3 files, which can then be easily added to podcasts or simply run as mp3's.

I also found some welsh edu-bloggers in Newtown Powys ( at Newtown High School ) great to know that there are more of us weird blogging types out there in the wastes of Wales. Usually to be heard muttering about England and Elc's and lack of funding for projects in Wales - I got so fed up I decided to do it myself as I now have with blogs, podcasts and more recently a Welsh Edu-Blogger Wiki which I can only hope will grow to the likes of Scottish Edu-Bloggers, perhaps one day Welsh Podcasters and Bloggers will be able to meet up and chat about the things they are up to - we'll see that's a long way in the future I think .... and that all for now as Monday turns to Tuesday here and I still haven't done any work on my Planning File !!!!!!