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Here is another piece of creative fun. Great for use with the Wacom Tablet and a pen to draw with. With Imagination Cubed you draw and then the site re-draws your pen strokes in fast forward and you can email it to someone. If you had more drawing skill it could be a lot of fun. Click on the drawing to see how I draw my tea cup.

I like to think I am getting the hang of Lead Teacher Days and this one was on Digital Story Telling at Mapua School. We started of with a few exemplars of great digital stories like this one from a Robert Lloyd- a Brit describing his kiwi adventure.

We followed that by a look at where digital story telling fits with the curriculum- we quickly gave up as it fits just everywhere. That was my point really. Digital stories are an excellent media for improving literacy across the spectrum really. We then looked at some of the tools we might use- iPhoto, iMovie, Garageband, Keynote, Powerpoint, Moviemaker, Photostory3 and a number of Web2.0 tools thrown in for good measure. My favourite at the moment I would like to use with a class is Videocue.

Videocue picks up your iSite camera and with a scrolling autocue you read your script that you can change the speed of if you are a slow reader. When you are done it automatically saves a Quicktime version onto your movies. Makes a girl almost want to have a class of her own to practice with!

We then set about creating digital stories based on a couple of poems I had pre-selected. People worked in groups as would happen in a classroom and our progress was recorded on our Discover IT Tasman cluster wiki. The afternoon was spent sharing and planning for our next school tour and Eric Frangenheim’s visit in early July.

My life seems to be a whirl of late which could be a good thing or could be a bad thing. In case you missed it- Adobe have asked me to join Brenda Frisk and Colin Gover from Auckland to be Adobe Educational Leaders and last week I went to Sydney for a couple of days to find out more about what was involved.

I thought I had better get my thoughts about our Adobe meet-up recorded while they are still fresh-ish in my mind. We spent a good deal of time learning about the Adobe family of products. Adobe gave us the entire Adobe Creative Suite 3 Master Collection which was pretty jolly generous if you ask me. I don’t think any one person could know everything about all of the products that are in the package but Soundbooth, Photoshop and Visual Creator are the ones that I would like to focus on. The thing that I like about Soundbooth is the graphical way you can edit annoying sounds that you can see on an audio track- great for podcasting when the bell goes in the middle of a great sound byte. The draw of learning more about Photoshop is obvious and I have a project in mind already. And Visual Communicator is a video editing software that I know that Colin uses for television editing in schools.

Another great outcome of the meet was that Wacom gave us each a Intuos3 tablet to use when we are playing and presenting. It took me a bit of brain exertion to work out that it was not just one enormous track pad and once I was over that I was surprised at how great it was in speeding up my workflow and how much easier it is to use a pen rather than a mouse to move about the screen. I have a friend who is a really good artist and can’t wait to let her play with it and see how she goes.

They also gave us some insider information about the sorts of things that Adobe does and plans for the future which are really exciting. We got to talk to some of the people like Paul Burnett who is a Worldwide Evangelist for Adobe! What a great job title! Just for fun he showed us his Adobe Air app Melissa that he made. Turn the sound down and Melissa sits on your desktop and lip-synchs with you when you talk- aren’t these people so clever. Melissa reminded me a little of Marvin but without all the tricky input code- give her a try- she’s very clever.

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The two days flew by and I was very fortunate to be able to extend my time in Sydney with a quick visit with my cousin and fly home on Sunday which was an added bonus. We only had the one day but we managed a wander round the Opera House and Botanical Gardens.

Chris Betcher recently blogged about another new Adobe tool- Buzzword- an online word processor written in Flash. Very cool. The features that I particularly like are that you can upload a Word document and it looks just like it does in Word. You can create documents in Buzzword and export as a pdf or a Word document onto your desktop. Ideal for those without the $$$ to spend on Microsoft products. You can insert tables and graphics and do all the usuals that a normal person would want a desktop publisher to do.

Then you can share that document with others just as you might do in Google Docs. But here’s the really cool thing you can do as well. On the far right hand side of the screen you can see the icon- MEET. Thought I would give it a try and find out who I might meet.

Turns out it takes you to Adobe ConnectNow- through which I can share my desktop with others. OK this looks fun but I need someone to share with. Enter Skype and Twitter. Raewyn from school was on Skype and I sent out a general Tweet asking if anyone wanted a little playtime! Colin Warren a educational tertiary level blogger from from Geelong, Australia, answered my call. Together we played and found out pretty much how to work the screen sharing application by talking about it with Skype and sharing the iSite video. The screen capture is of how it looked from my end as Colin opened up his desktop for us to look at. Through this medium we shared photos and movies directly from my desktop.

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I liked the interface and it all worked smoothly after we had played about for a bit trying to get the sound working. We nearly had to resort to using the HELP tab but resisted the temptation.

It is great to have a PLN that is so wiling to try new things and learn with each other across the globe.

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This post is for the Kiwis and Aussies.

A couple of years ago I asked the powers that be in NZ if we could have a NZ font- you know the one we’re supposed to teach in school. They said that would be a good idea and that was the end of that. So I hit the internet and found John Greatorex in Australia who makes fonts. I emailed him and he said he would make me one if I snail mailed him with how they were supposed to look.

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About a month later he sent me the trial to test. I have used that font ever since. It is great for wall displays and making up really neat personalised writing exemplars.

A teacher asked me today where I got my font from and it prompted me to pass on this really practical find from a few years back

Click on the font graphic to see the whole set- $60 for a school site licence.

This is not an endorsement as he would probably no longer remember who I am but I thought it was worth a shout out!

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OK- I am deep in milestone reporting - crafting lofty statements that should focus on student learning outcomes and teacher professional development. What do I do? I show @efreeman down Christchurch way how to do Skype, chat with @achurches in Auckland and end up playing in iChat video with a couple of un-named types who I won’t name because they should be working too I suspect! Now that was very cool. I didn’t realise that we would all show up in video at the same time- we ended up morphing ourselves using PhotoBooth while we were chatting. A spot of light relief is a wonderful thing!

Good for Animoto for sharing their educational account so that teachers can now create longer than 30 second videos for free and download them for playing and keeping on your computer- great for playing and sharing if your internet is slow and spends a lot of time buffering.

As Ewan McIntosh says- it takes zero skill levels to create great videos. To access the educational side of Animoto use this link and ask Rebecca for an educational registration key. She does ask to be kept in the loop as to the kinds of things you are creating.

The quick example I made celebrates my first term as ICT facilitator for Discover IT Tasman.

Last night when I was checking out Twitter (as you do). @BrianCaldwell from Plasq twittered that he was keen to give away some registrations for Doozla- first in first served. I like everything Plasq does so I went for it. Doozla is a vector drawing programme for the littlies. It is interesting that Plasq has a Twitter log in so you can subscribe to updates and news about the application. A good idea I think.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch! You can colour in, add to a pre-drawn background, add to your photos taken on your iSite camera and just straight draw.

 I liked it in that it automatically smooths your lines as you draw them and gives your etchings a nice even look.

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I liked the little extra prompts as you chose the colours- happy sounds. The littlies would love it I think. Worth a play for the little tackers. You can play with it through a free month’s trial like Comic Life.

I couldn’t resist the temptation to play with Microsoft’s Australian piece of software- Marvin before I got taught. I was looking for something new to do while I couldn’t use the internet much as my broadband allowance for the month is all used up and I have five days left of dial-up before I can be set free again.

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Being Microsoft of course I had to fire up Parallels so I could work with it on my Mac but that only took a second or two. The software is as intuitive as Microsoft ever gets but the end results are visually quite stunning. I see some great possibilities for digital story telling and a way to give voice to children using the product.

After adding the background and loading your avatar you can customise your creation by having it do a variety of actions and speech. I didn’t try to have it record my own voice- I wonder if that is an option? When compiled it can animate on your screen or you can export as an .avi and upload to your blog like I have done here for my class blog.

It is a pity it is only a 30 day free trial before it expires. When compared to a Comic Life registration for $4 I wonder if it won’t be a bit of a novelty which wears off after a bit. Has anyone published anything created with Marvin to convince me otherwise?

The word clouds being generated by Tweet Cloud are interesting as they give an indication of the sorts of things a person who tweets talks about.

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I thought the cloud generated by my tweets was interesting. I highlighted some of the most often used words- they emit a sense of what I want my interactions with my on-line network to be like so I am quite pleased.

Here is another beauty from Paul Harrington- Adobe Photoshop Express for the poor! You register and upload your photo and use simple versions of the fixes available in the paid for Photoshop to fix your photos.

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There are some great features that are simple to use. The one that I used most here is ‘get rid of the annoying people in the background that spoil my wonderful prowess as a salmon fisherperson!’

The correct was a little blurry because I got a little carried away but you get the general idea.

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Other available editing tools are crop, rotate, auto correct, exposure control, red-eye removal, touch-up, colour saturation, white balance, sharpen focus and a variety of cool effects. For children I like the crop and straighten tool because it imposes a thirds grid on the photo to help children see where the thirds are. (We are doing a bit of that sort thing at the moment in some of our sessions).

You get 2GB of on site storage as well which could be handy. When you’re done you can email the photo, make a public slideshow or do what you want with it.

It has been a while since I have played with Art Rage but since I am busy migrating from my old computer to my new I thought I had better get the latest upgrade. What a wonderful Kiwi made product.

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There is a free version of Art Rage to download which is fully functioning but has access to less of the drawing/painting tools than the paid version. Good to play with until you get hooked. Last year Art Rage offered Kiwis licences for $1 each you can’t get any better than that so we bought 25! It is available now on PC or Mac for $25NZ.

There is a really good forum linked to their website for sharing your finished work and collaborating with various users’ nominated themes.

I am a pathetic artist but managed to create this masterpiece by using a photo from iPhoto (it meshes like any other Apple product) and used it as a template to grab colours and textures from. Seeing I took the original photo and painted the textured layers you can probably say it was the best art work I have ever created.

You can bet it will be one of the first things I will play with when I get a Mimio interactive whiteboard to play with for the year.

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Yesterday was a big day with a very early start to drive over the Whangamoa and Rai hills to the Marlbourough Colleges’ Cluster Day- it was a major undertaking- they had closed the colleges for the day and given the kids the day off- the day before Easter Friday. 160 or so teachers came along to hear Greg Gebhert speak followed by two two hour workshops. With lessons learnt from the previous Lead Teacher Day I heard little of Greg’s keynote as I was busy making my computer behave and connect to the network before feeling comfortable that everything was going to go smoothly. I was presenting sessions on blogging with newbies- two hours was a good length- long enough to spend some time showcasing what a blog can be used for then long enough to actually play and make one.

I used our Moturoa class blog and our Blogmeister blog as examples and my Bling4yrblog blog resource with pdf handout on how to get started and how to add a few extras. The sessions were really humming along and I got a good buzz from the groups which was superb.

Photo credit: Marlborough Express On Line

Then it was off the Warren’s place for help with a migration of my 12inch Apple G4 iBook that I had won in a radio competition to my brand new nearly all paid for 15 inch Mac Book Pro with RAM to burn! Things did not start out well and there was a few nervous moments as disks failed to be recognised but it all came right in the end and after a drive home in the dark I spent till 2am playing! Not to worry- the long Easter weekend looms.

The sensible path was not to migrate the applications downloaded off the net but to re-download the latest versions with Leopard fixes and the like. Everything is going smoothly and I am re-populating my dock. Only a few little question marks- KidPix and Microsoft Apps to replace. Click on the photo if you want to find out what made it back to the dock and what missed out!

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I have yet to locate the install disks for KidPix and Microsoft and then I can take up Ben’s kind offer of Parallels and we will be underway.

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Skitch did give me a little grief until I remembered our slight change to the SYSTEM PREFERENCES- NETWORK- AIRPORT-DNS settings of the additions of these two numbers!

Kudos to here for help to do this and to the soon to be departing Chrissy who pointed me to it last year and to my Delicious who let me store my bookmarks on any computer which made it very easy to re-locate that much needed web reference.

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People have been asking me what this Twitter is all about? Today I was able to show them! I was at Tasman School showing them ‘Possibilities’- some of the incredible things you can do with a little imagination, a little skill and a little time- via the internet. We looked at blogging, wikis, podcasting, linking Skype, collaborations- the works.

I mentioned Twitter in conversation- not really meaning to go into it but got asked about it and found it hard to explain without a demonstration so put out a quick tweet asking for a hello. Within seconds I had received tweets from Brisbane, Sydney, Shanghai, Washington, Vancouver Island, Regina, Winnipeg and Wellington! Awesome stuff guys. Thank you.

On another Twitter related moment. Last night I got an iChat request- did I know how to get rid of the outside link you get when you upload a Powerpoint to Slideshare? No I didn’t!

I posted a Tweet asking for help. Simplyarun from Slideshare caught the tweet and gave me a hand to look good! He posted a fix for the problem within minutes. Awesome stuff, Slideshare. Well done.

I am back home now after an excellent few days away at the L@S conference. I have ideas buzzing around in my head and I need to get them posted before they whither.

Simon Evans hosted a workshop entitled, “Did you Know, New Zealand?” focussing on Karl Fisch’s video and we debating what it meant in a NZ context.

Simon used his interactive whiteboard to lead the discussion using DeBono’s hat thinking which was a good way to do it. He recorded the session with our handwritten notes in a slideshare which is best downloaded to read clearly. I was impressed with the technology.

Click here to see and download the presentation.

There was only six of us in the room F2F but more joined us via Skype and with the Cover It Live Blogging Tool. It was a very powerful session I thought on a variety of levels-not only with the way Simon facilitated the discussion, the way we brought in other people via the live blog commenters and Skype but also in the way the people in the room worked together to enhance the presentation.

As you can see from my screen grab it certainly made us keep intensely involved with the number of communication modes- listening, responding, researching, recording, typing, twittering. We really had to concentrate to do all these things at once.

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Well done Simon. It was a ‘high risk’ session that paid off.

For the last six weeks or so I have been interacting with a myriad of educators, superintendents and teachers, in America as an ‘expert voice’ in a Ning administered by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Will Richardson. The idea is that six ‘expert voices’ from around the globe are asked to contribute their voice and assist in the building of a Personal Learning Network for those educators.

I am most honoured and humbled to be invited into such an austere community and hope that my contributions have proved to be worthwhile. As the first round draws to a close I would hope that some of those connections made can continue from outside of that Ning.

Because our school holidays were on I was able to join in a couple of Elluminate sessions with the cohort. It was great to be able to participate live in rich conversations about harnessing the power of the connections made on the web to create a Personal Learning Network.

In this introductory video Will talks about how we might build these networks, how they might look, the transformative nature of a PLN and how we might help children navigate their own networks safely, ethically and effectively.

I am so looking forward to facilitating the 14 schools in the Discover IT Tasman ICT cluster throughout 2008 achieve just those sort of connections. In case you haven’t heard via Twitter I have taken leave from Appleby School for 2008 and will work as a roaming ICT facilitator based in Motueka.

What a wonderful opportunity for me learn and make a whole lot of new face to face connections and develop that sort of network with students and teachers so close to home.

Exciting times are ahead.

Today was a slow day on the net- in all sorts of ways. Darren Kuropatwa tweeted about a Muxicall, a fun musical toy he was playing with and invited us to join in to make music in a collaborative Web2.0 sort of way.

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The idea is that each user decides on an instrument- strings, drums or piano and we all get together to play on a large chord grid. You can chat while you are doing it and give each other prompts and maybe orchestrate your contributions. When I first toyed making music there were about eight of use all banging away- a cacophony!

I gave it a rest and came back later when only Assaf and I were playing. It was almost a conversation of music as we communicated only through the keyboard. Magic really.

Have a listen! For those interested I used Audio Hi-jacker to record the audio.

assaff-and-i.mp3

I quite like it in a soft sort of sweet way!

Steve Hargadon constructed this Voicethread to celebrate ten years of blogging. Add your voice

Hey there! I love finding out new things and thought I would share this little gem with you all. Three posts in one day is an all time record for me!

As you may know our main class conduit to our community is our Moturoa Class Blog and Allanah’s Appleby Showcase podcast.

They link to each other but until this evening I have had to convert the .m4a enhanced podcasts made in Garageband to .mp3 audio only files, upload to another Podomatic page that I made just for that purpose, use the Firefox add-on UNPLUG and through a tricky piece of code embed the .mp3 into Blogger. The ‘how to’ on this procedure is on my Bling4yrblog page if you still want to do this.

But tonight, just for fun, I tried to upload the .m4a file to Blogger movie and it worked! Now our enhanced podcasts play right inside our Blogger posts without having to click on an outside link. I didn’t think it would seeing it says they only process AVI, MPEG, QuickTime, Real, and Windows Media. Yay!

I still prefer to view our podcasts within iTunes but I like the visual appeal of viewing as well as listening to our podcasts from within our blog. Click on the screen grab to view how it looks. Kieran will be ever so pleased now he can add another video to his blog.

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As our Waimea-South ICTPD cluster enters its final phase I thought I would construct a Voicethread to chronicle what we have learnt along the way with responses from all seven schools in our cluster.

I was really proud of the way my nine and ten year old students at Appleby School articulated what they felt their learning with computers had achieved this year.

I was also pleased that a number of teachers locally and around the globe were able to record their views. It would be great if you were able to add your own comments and grow the resource.

If you want a ‘how to’ to on using Voicethread go to my Bling4yrblog for help.

Thanks to Chrissy for quicktips on adding Voicethread to Edublogs.