Sharing the Addiction

I had a very quiet first week back this term. I haven’t been working in many schools. Therefore, I took the opportunity to look around and experiment with some of the latest technology available at the moment. I thought I ‘d put a round-up here of some of my favourite finds.

ProfCast
This software is $30 US but gives you a 30 day trail. Basically, it allows you to record your voice during a Powerpoint or Keynote presentation and then it syncs your voice to the slides and has tools to help you easily share it as a podcast. I used the software to record a presentation on digital storytelling (click on podcast link in the left-side column). On listening back I realised my voice could be far more inspiring but I’ll work on that for next time This could be great for sharing presentations by children with parents or for the children to listen back to and assess their presentation. You could also use it to record your presentations on a topic that you have made to the class for them to listen back to in their own time. It is designed to work with Mac applications such as Garageband and iTunes. I found it very easy to use.

Google Apps
Basically, Google Apps gives you a suite of online applications that can almost do the same thing as School Zone. You can take your domain name with you and then have email addresses using that domain name. You can manage setting up users on your account. You can build webpages using their tools. You can have shared calendars and shared address books. And all of this is FREE. Imagine the savings to a school if you don’t have to pay anything for webhosting or account management.

Other Google Toys from the Lab
Google labs is where online Google applications are trialled (Beta). There are some great new tools in there such as Google Notebook, Google Page Creator and Google Maps.

With the notebook, you can download an extension for Firefox that puts a button to click on at the bottom of your webbrowser. This opens up a small window with your notebook contents. You can then clip the url or just a part of the site you are on and it is saved to your notebook. This notebook is great if you are working on more than one computer as you can have access to the same contents in the notebook. No more trying to copy and paste to a word document. Do it all in your notebook and then export into Word.

Page creator allow you to make websites using templates (not the same as a wiki). Very customisable and gives you the ability to edit the html if you know how. The websites are attractive and kids could easily make pages. I have a test page that you can visit by clicking here.

Google Maps allows you to search for one than one place on a local map. When places are found, you can attach pointers to each place which gives you more detail when you click on them. Great for showing people different locations that will be visited on a trip. See this map made for our trip to Palmerston North as an example.

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