Sharing the Addiction

Comic Life for Windows!

Yes, Plasq has now put out a Beta version of Comic Life so that you can enjoy all of that comic goodness that the Mac community has had over the last few years. A few people did the Comic Life Workshop at the Expo and they were all raving about it so get in and have a go.

The best thing about it being a Beta is that it is free and it has already gone through a few revisions so it is probably fairly stable.

Download it from the Plasq website

Second Life Has Finally Caught Up With Me

I knew that it was dangerous to download Second Life (which is free) as I could tell that I had the capacity to become very addicted. After spending eight straight hours on it today, that fear has been realised! The reason the picture is so dark is that it was nighttime at the Bloggers Cafe. This cafe is a place where educational bloggers from around the world meet to talk. I dropped into a conversation earlier today about Harry Potter!

Uploaded with Skitch!

I have also been playing with an excellent tool called Skitch which is from Plasq (the same people who brought us Comic Life which you can now download from their site for Windows!!). The arrows and comments on the first picture I made using the Skitch tools.

Uploaded with Skitch!

You have to get an invite to try out this tool (thanks Allanah for letting John know!) but hopefully it will soon be available to a wider audience). It is extremely versatile.

Three times in one day - Unheard of

I’ve just watched a Ted talk by Sir Ken Robinson and felt I had to share it. Fits in very well with Multiple Intelligences. Sir Ken is a natural speaker and had me laughing out loud in a number of places.

Blogging twice in one day!

I have just seen something else that makes me happy

There is a Google tool that looks incredibly useful. It allows you to create Custom Searches which will only search sites that you have indexed for that search. This makes setting up ‘Kid safe’ searches a breeze!

You can go to the Google for Educators page to get more information.

I have just stumbled over the Creative Commons (CC) Licensing website and I am excited by two things I found there.

The first is the search engine that will search for just CC materials using Google, Yahoo, Flickr, Blip TV and other sites. This is great news! I had known how to do a CC search in Flickr but didn’t know how to search outside of Flickr.

The second thing is a great video that clearly explains copyright and the ideology behind CC.

Now we really can encourage children to work legally.

I think I have found a social networking tool that I can imagine using with a class of children. It is called Imbee and it is designed for children ages 8 to 14. It is a chaperoned site which means that you have to be validated to join and then all the sites by children can be monitored.

They are specifically courting the use of the tool by teachers with a special area for teachers with lesson plans and information on how the tool can be used in education.

I found out about this site by listening to a MediaSnackers podcast (thanks for the link on your blog Allanah!)

I felt the need to blog about a really great course I went on yesterday. The title of the course is ‘Effective Speaking’ and it is run in Wellington city. I think that everyone who presents regularly should have the opportunity to take part in a course like this.

Key Points for me were:
1. Really distill what the key message of your speech is - down to a short sentence only!
2. For each ‘assertion’ you make in relation to this key point, make sure you have evidence to back this up. Evidence can be direct examples, metaphors, numbers and stats and expert endorsements. Assertions without evidence means that the audience is not engaged.
3. Put transitional phrases between each section of your presentation summing up the section you have just finished with and outlining the next one.
4. Use dark grey slides to focus the attention back to you as a speaker - you don’t need a slide for every aspect of your talk (I used the grey slides to remind myself to transition!)

This is just the tip of the iceberg! So many great practical tips. I even learned things about Powerpoint and I thought I knew a lot. Did you know that you can type a slide number during your presentation to jump to that slide?

This course goes for two days and I’m sure that the second day next Monday will give me even more tips so I’ll post more then.

The holidays are upon us - I hope everyone enjoys them and comes back refreshed for our Expo. Just a quick note to let you know that you can now try out a draft version of Blogger which allows you to directly load videos into your blog rather than having them stored somewhere like Google Video first.

I have found a number of interesting online mindmap programs recently that can be embedded in wikis and blogs.

There are more applications like this online on my wiki.