Kids Can Make You Cry!

Only one week of my 2008 employment to go and on my last official visit to Riwaka School the kids sat me down to watch a video they had made entirely by themselves over the last week and then presented me with a stunning bunch of flowers. This year has passed by in a whirlwind and I have loved every minute of it- the kids, the opportunities, the connections, the freedom, the learning, the people, the friendships.

Riwaka Farewell Video

This text will be replaced

Thank you to Janice Gulbranson who saw the job advertised in the newspaper and told me about it. (One pitfall of no longer buying a newspaper!)

Thank you to Jill Hammonds who suggested I apply for Adobe Educational Leadership.

Thank you to Adobe, who helped by sponsoring my exciting journeys to Sydney and San Francisco.

Thank you to CORE for hosting such great ICT conferences where I get to meet such open and wonderful people F2F who help me and encourage me.

Thank you to my Personal Learning Network who are always there for me anytime of the day or night scattered about the globe.

ImageThank you to all those wonderful people I met along the way this year.

Thank you to my dearest Mum, who passed away this year, who would have been so proud of me- my biggest fan.

Encapsulated by Capzles

If you have good people in your network you learn good stuff. Last night I caught a tweet by Wes Fryer about a another great digital tool called Capzles. He was impressed and so am I as I quickly made a Capzle from a few photos and a class digital story movie. I added some feedback text and an audio mix of my commentary and some FreePlay music. The features of Capzles that I like are the intuitive interface, the quick ease of uploading content and the timeline effect. It harvests the data from your photos and knows when they were taken and puts them in a timeline. It has great quality in full screen mode as well.

It fits well inside Blogger. A bonus is that as it embeds you can chose to only have the audio play when you click on the little speaker icon. That’s great ‘cos I find it irritating to have audio play on a blog when it hasn’t been asked so the audio doesn’t come to you uninvited. The only downside I can see is that comments go live immediately. For school I would like to see some form of comment moderation or at least notification of new comments but I don’t think it would be a huge problem.

For next year I thought it would be fun to take a photo everyday- children could add a photo highlight a day and we could grow our portfolio over the year embedded in our blog.

Give it a whirl and create one of your own!