I just came across this rather fun use of Google Earth from Alan Levine. Look around your place and see if you can spell out your name by taking a series of screen grabs and putting them all together.
To do it find the images in Google Earth and take screen grabs (SHIFT APPLE 4). To put them all together I made duplicates of multiple use letters (Apple D), opened them up and did one long screen grab. Easy.
All the images were found within 5km of home base!
This is the first school holiday in a couple of years where I have had nothing to do and I am relishing the early nights and late rising to bank a reserve of sleep that I can draw on when school starts again- yeah right!
As you can well imagine I have spent a fair amount of trolling the internet, twittering and exploring. Here are a couple of holidays finds that are worth more than a save to my delicious.
1. Ten YouTube URL Tricks- I often see embedded YouTube videos on class blogs and wonder if teachers realise how few clicks away from porn they think they are! With these easy tips you can disable the search box and links to related videos and more.
2. My Delicious- I have spent some time tidying up my on line bookmarks and putting them into tag bundles. @AngeNZ asked for a look through and I thought others may like a peek as well.
3. iPhoto09 Faces and Books. I have just taught my iPhoto how to recognise photos of people and made a Photo Book of my recent overseas travels. That was so fun and the book of 68 pages ($122NZ) will be delivered in a couple of weeks. I can’t wait as I have seen the quality and professional look of iPhoto Books before but never actually made one. I could have printed it to pdf but thought I would push the boat out and have the hardcover book professionally printed.
4. Through Twitter links I have joined in on a couple of UStream professional development sessions in Canada and somewhere else. It doesn’t seem important really as to where the sessions were but thanks to Chris Harbeck for the invite to join in.
5. Drop Box- Drop Box is a handy Mac only tool- a bit like your own personal server to dump stuff onto between computers. You just install it on the computers that you want to be able to access your files on- in my case my home laptop and my TELA school laptop and it just sits in your top toolbar and you drop stuff in it to collect it from another computer. By recommending the tool to others I get a little extra storage but 3GB will suit me fine for the free version. Great for when a file is too big for an email and you can’t be bothered finding your flash drive.
6. Styks is a cross platform Pivot type animation free download in beta. Nice and easy for kids to handle- definitely in my 2009ToDoList.
The title of this post was going to be ‘When the real and the virtual collide’ but as I grow in the use of these Web2.0 tools the virtual becomes the real. Just because you haven’t met people before or don’t see them on a daily basis doesn’t mean that the interactions with them aren’t real.
I have just spent the last few days at the New Zealand Learning at School Conference in Rotorua. Unfortunately I missed the Andy Hargreaveskeynote as my plane didn’t get in on time but from all accounts he was well received and his content was relevant. I will catch up with his keynote when things settle down a bit.
After quickly meeting up with some of my Twitter/blogger mates I launched into my first breakout session with Tony Ryan. I took a quick screen grab of one of his slides which was an excellent quick resource as to what I need to do to move on some of the sparkly ideas from the conference. I agree- you have to integrate what you want to do smartly or it will get gnawed away at by AsTTle tests, planning for camp, Meet the Teacher meetings ……. I have already moved on a couple of things so all is not lost. Best quote from Tony to me mid breakout session- ‘It’s all right, I can speak louder than your cellphone.’ Note to self- gotta put it on vibrate for next time! Thought of Jamin who last text me mid-keynote in Tauranga last month to ask if I had remembered to switch my cell phone off and to find out where I was sitting!! Congratulations Jamin and Jamie on the birth of your son, Noah. Love to you both.
✩ Next up was a spot of Blue Screen Magic. Like most things- its a lot easier when you have friends to help you.
Jane left instructions for the ‘how to‘ on her blog so all the hard work was done there. Fun techy stuff that you could use with kids. Thanks David, Disa and Jane.
✩ Next up was my workshop on Free Adobe Apps on Line which was done in the heat of the day. Unfortunately participants didn’t have wi-fi access of their own so the session was limited to a show and tell- not as interactive as it might have been. If you want to see the slides in a Google Presentation click here.
✩ I was in awe when Wes Fryer turned up in my next breakout talking about making enriched pdfs embedded in Google Apps for Educators and made into digital portfolios. He live blogged the whole thing which was great. Thanks Wes- that’s never happened to me before!
✩ I had the privilege in attending Wes’ breakout session on Powerful Blended Learning. We used Chatsy as a backchannel which worked well if you had had wifi- which I didn’t!
If you’re not sure that hyperlinked writing really is the most powerful form of writing try clicking on any of the words- they link to web sites randomly plucked from my recently bookmarked Delcious bookmarks.
✩ Next was a taster presentation ‘It’s all about Learning’ talking about unpacking the Curriculum and engaging children in meaningful dialogue about what it really means for them as learners. Good stuff. I liked that they had examples of the kids work- all messy and real. They had taken direct quotes from the curriculum and de-constructed it- just like you could de-construct a piece of text in a story you were reading as a shared book. Thanks Lisa and Belinda.
✩ Pam Hook shared her vision with SOLO taxonomy. I have read about the rubrics before and frankly if hadn’t made a lot of sense to me but hearing her talk about it an and seeing videos of children talking about it all made it make sense to me.
✩ The last workshop was a one I aimed at beginners just talking about the sorts of things that I do in my classroom to foster a sense of community and collaboration with my class. During the session we quickly Skyped in with Brian Crosby from Nevada while he had a little classroom release time. I didn’t provide much in the way of a handout for this one but some of the key postings are here on a quickie wiki I made last year to show ERO some of the things we did. If you were in that workshop please ring me, email me or Skype me if you get lost or need some help.
✩ A scary, fun, last thing that finished up the conference was Wes’ keynote. We sort of flashmobbed it with the Collaborative Dance Video that we made last year. Just as Wes was about to start we all leapt up and did our happy dance. Not to be left out Chrissy and a few kids from her class were able to join us via Skype at 6.45am from Bangkok International School. How cool is that. Wes was such a good sport about it all and joined in the fun. I am sure the video of Wes’ keynote will be on line soon but in the meantime here is a short clip of how our beginning bit went recorded on my computer with Skype and Call Recorder. If you are keen to find more look for the Flickr tag #lats09.
Here is Chrissy’s post and video about how it looked at her end. It was great fun for us all to catch up with Chrissy so far away in Bangkok and for her to catch up on our news!
After my heart had stopped racing at the scariness of doing a happy dance in front of all those people I was able to listen to what Wes had to say but again my battery let me down so I wasn’t able to record what he said but I am sure others were able to more eloquently than me any way but the two things that stuck in my head were…
Hyperlinked writing is the most powerful form of writing there is.
He aha te mea nui. He tangata, he tangata, he tangata. ( In my own words- What is the most important thing? It is the people- we need to give kids the tools to be able to connect and learn.)
At the end of the day Wes, Glenda, Pesa and I had a great look around Whakarewarewa. What a nice way to end the conference- and I bought a beautiful possum and merino wool jersey for winter for half price when I went shopping on Saturday morning. Bonus!
I came across PhotoPeach via a comment on Chris Betcher’s blog about using Twitter and thought that I would give it a try and I liked it. PhotoPeach is a mash up with YouTube to get the sound track or you can use their audio. I wonder how it will play if YouTube is filtered at your school but it’s worth a shot.
I quickly turned out a post on Bling4yBlog to show how to do it but it is really that simple that instructions aren’t necessary. It sits easily inside Blogger without changing the size or anything which is nice.
What a great New Year’s present for 2009. All NZ teachers now have free access to the LEARNZ virtual field trips. Usually this would cost $75 per year for your school. All you have to do is verify your Teacher Registration number and provide an email address and you are away laughing.
If you haven’t explored the Virtual Field Trips before they have a demo link to a previous field trip about Mt Bruce Wildlife Park that has been archived that can be freely accessed but it will give a good look around the site. The virtual field trip has links to curriculum guides, audio, video, photos and heaps more.
If you chose to participate in a live field trip you will be able to talk to people on site via an audio bridge. All very cool and engaging for children.
The first field trip starts at the end of February and looks at Marine Reserves and there are others coming up on renewable energy, earth science, wind power, ancient NZ, freshwater ecology and much more. Give it a go- there’s nothing to lose.
A while ago posted about Photoshop Express but hadn’t used it in a while as at that stage it was very new and rather slow. While with Adobe I learnt about the upgrades and the speed is vastly improved.
I had a great chance to play with the new features and learnt a little about non-destructive editing. For example Photoshop Express has this cool effect where you can pop the colour. This is what it can do with an image of a bright red tour bus. It takes the two predominant colours and by rolling the mouse over the samples it changes the colour you decided to pop. Your photo changes instantly but you can still reset all your changes back to original if you want to.
It can also do the basics of crop, rotate, resize, correct exposure, red-eye removal, colour saturation and do touch-ups like blemish removal and fine tune your photo. Under the fun effects you can play with the hue, tint, change varieties of black & white, cartoonise and distort.
Three great finds today- one was going to the afternoon pictures to see the NZ movie, “Second Hand Wedding“. I was really impressed with this movie- it had a great mixture of comedy and sadness, joy and angst. I would recommend it to anyone.
The second great find is a mixture of two really. A lot of people have been posting about Wordle which can have all sorts of classroom uses. But the best find is Flowgram which is in beta testing but it is an excellent tool for capturing and discussing web pages. To do so you sign up- add the URL to a web page you would like to discuss and then hit record and you are underway. You can also annotate and embed. To see what it looks like and to hear my cold ridden audio click play! Magic!
I strolled across this little beauty this afternoon- this Be Funky cartooniser makes an outline from your photo and then you colour it and add some cartoon like text- great for a bit of fun or to make an interesting avatar for a Voicethread or for those who are not allowed to put their direct images on the internet.
Here I am in Sydney by the bridge. BTW this is my first post written with the aid of my new Wacom INTUOS 3 tablet that Wacom gave me to play with while I was at the Adobe Summit. I am quickly getting the feel of it and I think it is speeding up my workflow.
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.
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!
Again through my Twitter network via @Murcha from Aussie and @MrKp from the UK I found a link to a fun website, Feedjournal.com, that makes your most recent blog posts via the RSS feed into a newspaper
To see what it looks like click on the above link or the graphic. Great if you’re not fond of reading on line. A thought ran through my mind as I re-read the newspaper- without this blog I would not have the motivation to write at all- and I have written and shared quite a bit over time!
And then to finish off I uploaded it to Issuu an on line publisher to give a cool little page turny look to the whole thing. To see it in a better size click on OPEN PUBLICATION.
It’s not like I don’t have plenty to do but I keep getting sidetracked by new finds and interesting conversations. The school holidays are great.
The writing of my first cluster milestone is starting to weigh heavily on my mind. I suppose its a bit like writing school reports- a necessary evil.
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.
Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach wrote an excellent post that reflects what has been festering in my mind since taking up the ICT Facilitator’s role this year. I have attempted to ‘make the shift’ in my classroom but how can I best encourage others to make similar moves in the way they learn and teach. She highlights nine principles needed to make a shift to 21st century learning pedagogies.
If I can quote her- “Real change, transformational change happens when there is personal ownership of the new technologies and concepts. Today’s new economy is all about human capital, which starts with the educators in a school and then extends outward to all members of the school community.”
People- change is best sustained if people are able to support each other on their learning journey if they can learn in supported groups- we are not islands and the collaboration we strive for in our classrooms needs to be modelled by ourselves as adult learners. This is where action research can be such a powerful tool. He aha te mea nui? He tangata. He tangata. He tangata.
Leadership- because any sort of change can be threatening the support and guidance of those in leadership roles can be critical- the process can be so un-necessarily difficult when classroom teachers are not well supported by those they look to for leadership.
Including all members of the learning community- everyone is part of the process- efforts need to be made to bring all on board- whanau, support personnel, professional colleagues, the wider community.
Developing a shared vision for how things need to be- the need to make sure that teachers together articulating the core beliefs. Our new NZ curriculum statement goes some way to addressing this issue.
Own it- this phrase has been very powerful for me since I first heard Sheryl say it at TUANZ last year. It’s good to use 21st technologies personally before ‘going public’. Become familiar with them, practise and become used to them. My first experiences with communication on line was through the use of email- personally with relatives overseas- because I could see the immediate uses of it I became better at using it.
Communication- we in NZ at the bottom of the globe can be as connected as anyone globally- geography has become less of an issue through UStream, Skype, Twitter etc. Communication with teachers and students outside of your classroom. I am able to communicate with people from UK, Australia, USA, Canada, Uzbekistan- all over.
Know your culture and try to anticipate trends- Sheryl says that participatory media has a tendency to ‘go viral’- we need to try and think ahead of the possible consequences of giving these tools to children. A number of children in my class now have their own personal blogs not moderated by me. I endeavour to have given them the skills and common sense to be safe on line.
We do not know what we do not know- new things will come along that are totally random- we can expect the unexpected. We will need to be able to run with these new challenges.
The power of collective wisdom- we all learn together. We are all learning and what each of us thinks matters.
Thank you Sheryl for insightful post. I encourage my readers to read Sheryl’s blog in its entirety as she is able to write in much eloquently than I but I wanted to write my own version to help me move my own thinking along by giving it my own ’spin’.
I have a Lead Teacher day coming up focusing on Movie Making and I am looking for movie making on the web using things like Animoto to compliment the straight ‘how to’s’ using iMovie or Moviemaker. This one is a great find- from National Geographic- you quickly select your film clips, accompanying sound, music and caption and drag them onto the timeline and voila! A movie that is there for retrieving using a code (Here’s my great effort- 992811893) – a great way for children to get the idea of dropping things into a timeline. You could do all sorts with this one- sorting, classifying, researching, just having fun.
Our video based on events in New Orleans at the time of Hurricane Katrina- made over a period of one day and based on Bloom’s Taxonomy. Uploaded to our Podomatic podcast page. Click on the the big grey triangle to watch it play.
Cue Prompter- turns your computer into a teleprompter
Animoto- upload your own photos to make a 30 second video with music
Vlog- how to compress for the web and other video tutorials
Voki- create an animated, talking character for your blog
Flixn-record for the web directly from your webcam
Motion Box- Basic members can upload, and share up to 300mb of video, for free!
Gawker - is an application for Mac OS X that creates time-lapse movies using a webcam. Images from your camera can be shared, allowing other users to record your image stream. Streams can also be combined to create a time-lapse movie with up to four locations side-by-side.
I am the Bloggers Cafe at L@S and John (sorry John but I can’t remember what your real name is now) asked what’s a blog?- This photo shows fellow blogger Lorraine Watchorn showing him and this blog post will help show the power of it- just like Mark Treadwell did for me a couple of years ago. All done in the seven minutes before the next workshop.
I am in a bit of a blogging frenzy at the moment but couldn’t resist sharing this great find from Andrew Churches of Educational Origami fame. The Historic Tale Construction Kit is an on line storytelling site that is just so easy to use and I could imagine it hooking some kids into wanting to write a whole series of slides, developing character and plot along the way. Cheers Andrew.
At the beginning of the school year (in the Southern Hemisphere that is) you might be keen have you students build themselves an avatar if you are not sure about putting individual photos on line or as a identity in Voicethread. Chris Betcher recently posted this find ‘Build Your Wild Self‘ from the New York Zoo. You can build your avatar and add animal features to it. Kids would love the opportunity to be wild and wacky.
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.
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.
I got a phone call at 6:45 this morning telling me that Dorothy had been knocked down with the flu and wasn’t going to be able to fly down from Auckland to facilitate our Waimea South ICT cluster’s Pedagogy and Podcasting day and could I possibly step into the breach! I have not taught for the last eleven weeks while I have helped my mother cope with a diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease so the prospect of paid employment was welcomed. Back to the chalkface next term though!
Filling Dorothy’s shoes was a daunting prospect but I had a good part of my ULearnpodcasting wiki already prepared and was intending to put the finishing touches on the presentation next week. I needed advice with a couple of points so I turned to my Twitter mates for answers.
Firstly- could multiple people edit a wiki page at the same time? Thanks Chris Betcher from Sydney for your advice on this one- the answer is basically no! So we used Webnotes instead to record or podcasting topics and I will collate them to one page later.
Then I wanted to Skype in an expert in podcasting- luckily Jane Nicholls, from Dunedin was available and Paul Harrington from Wales offered as well.
Lastly I had forgotten the keystrokes needed to zoom in on the cursor on my Mac- not having taught for a while I had forgotten what it was (OPTION+COMMAND+PLUS) BTW- thanks again Jane! And I also learnt a whole new way I had never heard of before from John Pedersen from Wisconsin and Chris again from Sydney. You hold the CTRL key and scroll in with your mouse wheel). I love it- thanks guys!
Anyway the day went well and the room was full of concentration and podcasts by the end- we even managed to embed some of the podcasts in our blogs using the Firefox Unplug plug-in and a clever bit of code that I had already given directions for in my Bling4yrblog blog!
Don’t tell anyone but I would have done it for free!
I went to school today to gather up the reins from my wonderful long term reliever and think about what I want to do as next term starts in two weeks. While there I was able to take charge of my new TELA laptop- I took it home then and started customising it and I thought I would list here the things I do so that I can refer to it and not have to think too hard when I buy my new personal laptop with the next version of Apple’s operating system when it comes out in the near future (hopefully). While I was at school I saw them digging the trench to put the Loop cable in- maybe a welcome back present- due 12 weeks ago!
Try to plug in my wireless mouse but get too scared- last time I tried a little too vigorously with a new laptop it could have cost me $1000+ as a little wire thingee got bent and it was attached to the innards!
Chuck out stuff I don’t want in the dock and add stuff I want to be there. Enjoy watching things fthwat into a puff a smoke!
Let it access my home wireless access. Note that there are now two other wireless networks within cooee!
Do the updates- restart.
Install Firefox2. Increase the font size so I can see text better and set the home page.
Deactivate CAPS LOCK.
Add Delicious Plug-in for Firefox.
Add some often used links to the toolbar- class blog, edublog, bling, podcast, Twitter, Bloglines, Blogmeister, gmail, hotmail, mySkitch
Download and play with video Skype- ring some people and tell them I can see them and they can see me. Think that maybe a video image is maybe not quite such a good idea after all!
Download Skitch- find login and password on iPod and bookmark mySkitch.
Subscribe to our own podcast in iTunes- make a mental note to go to Brightwater School and download the rest of the episodes!
Watch a widescreen DVD-I always enjoy Finding Nemo! Note that Skitch lets you take screen grabs of DVDs.
I have just taught my iPhoto how to recognise photos of people and made a Photo Book of my recent overseas travels. That was so fun and the book of 68 pages ($122NZ) will be delivered in a couple of weeks. I can’t wait as I have seen the quality and professional look of iPhoto Books before but never actually made one. I could have printed it to pdf but thought I would push the boat out and have the hardcover book professionally printed.
