Yes - that is a bold statement but I am loving Vuvox!!
It is hard to believe that it is completely free! You can search your photos on Flickr, PhotoBucket or upload them from your computer. You can also do general web searches for images to use. You drag the photos you want to display into your storyboard area and then apply a style to use. Many aspects of each style can be customised to suit your purposes. You can save it to their server and then they give you the ability to embed the code on a wiki page. Way cool!! Click on each of the photos on my ‘emotion tree’ to get a close-up of them (I took these photos years ago - the quality of the photos isn’t all that great which is not Vuvox’s fault)
This is the first of about three blogs I am going to post about some cool tools. This is a short, quick entry about the Directory of Learning Tools. There are a huge number of tools indexed by type here and I think this is a site that is going to keep me busy for quite some time (now there’s a change
I have also found a couple of tools that I think I really exciting.
Photo Album Builder The first is one that makes digital learning objects for you to use with your class and it is called Photo Album Builder. You find some photos to create the activity about. You type in all of the content for the learning activity to match your photos. Either you or your children could build one of these.
There is a starting activity in which the student spells words.
The main activity consists of matching captions to photos in the album.
Selecting an image brings up background information about it.
The student then answers a multiple-choice question about each photo.
PikiWiki PikiWiki is very different from other wikis I’ve worked with. You can record audio or video directly onto the page and each object you add to the page ends up in a moveable box that can be dragged anywhere on the page. If you upload pictures, they appear on the page whereas all other files turn into links that people can click on to download them to their own computer. Quite a cool concept! I’ve had a go at making a page which you can visit and edit at: http://pikiwiki.com/ews/editor.jsp?2YUd3B2K6Pl1moy9oNZBuNQ Some features seem a big buggy and I had to change over to Safari from Firefox to get the file upload feature to work. When I pushed save and then close, it kept me in edit mode which was a little frustrating. Still, I think this could be a really cool way to use a wiki!
I’m still playing with an awesome graphics editor called fotoflexer and will post on this shortly.
Just a quick note to say thanks to the Ohio Treasure Chest Podcast that has highlighted this blog on its regular podcast about great K12 resources. While I couldn’t get the podcast to play (the site seems to be unavailable at this time), it is great to get such positive feedback from the great unknown that is the audience for this blog. Go check out the website of the Ohio Treasure Chest where they have a large number of reviewed sites and tools for education. I have also now subscribed to the podcast so thanks Eric for the email and the feedback!
I was trying to go through all the Mashable posts in my reader (it has to be one of the most prolific blog out there!) and so far tonight I have found a few really interesting tools as a result.
This software is for free language learning. Lessons are structures on slides. I am learning Spanish at the moment so I checked out those lesons. There were just over 100 lessons with each lesson having around 70 slides. That’s a lot of content! The only thing I found slightly frustrating was that there was no way to skip the instructions on each slide when they weren’t necessary at times. You can to beat the clock to give your answers and the time you have can be adjusted. They are offering lessons for Spanish, Russian, French, Italian, Mandarin, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Greek, English for Spanish speakers, and English for Polish Speakers.
This is an interesting search tool that lets you look for content from Amazon, eBay, Flickr and YouTube. It then gives you a visual display of the results which you can say how you’d like them displayed such as in a stack or pile. If you want to keep one of the results, you can drag it into your folder for safekeeping. Quite interesting but I think it needs a few new places to get results such as Google Images and I think it would be handy if it let you do a search for Creative Commons work.
TalkShoe This service allows for up to 250 people to join into a TalkCast. Each person can use phone or Skype to access this. They provide free unlimited recording, free storage, free bandwidth, and uploading of existing podcast episodes. People can listen to, download or subscribe to the TalkCast afterwards from your stored recording. You can put widgets for your TalkCast on your blog or wiki. This could be a great tool and I’d like to have a play with this at some point so let me know if you want to join me for a TalkCast.
This tool allows you to record 30 seconds into four separate areas in a split screen so that you can be your own band or pretend to be the Partridge family with your friends. I thought this would be fun for a music lesson where you were doing rounds. Kids could each record a different part to play together at the end. You could have recorder parts or make up actions for a song with each action being slightly different. I could see that this would be a lot of fun!
This post is not really to do with education but I wanted to share with you the power that technology can have once you are using it personally. I am a Facebook user and love the way that it keeps me in touch with friends and people I had lost touch with until I got in contact with them again through Facebook. The power of this social network became apparent to me when one of my best friend’s father was killed in a car accident last week. New Zealanders may have seen this on the news - his name was Graham Condon and he was a councillor in Christchurch and a paraplegic and was killed when riding on his modified bike when a 15 year old girl crossed the centre line. I had often called Graham my ’second dad’ and he hosted my hen’s party earlier this year so I was pretty upset and went down for four days to be part of the funeral.
Before I headed down, I felt that I wanted to do something for Graham and this is where technology became a way of expressing how I felt. I set up a group on Facebook called Tributes to Graham and then went through all of the news articles about Graham and made a video about him celebrating his life’s achievements. People started joining the group and started writing stories about Graham. My friend Craig started reading these and was really touched and a little comforted at how many people wanted to let him know that his dad was important to them. He also really appreciated the video. I was able to post of photos from the day of the funeral so that people on the other side of the world who would have wanted to be there were able to share in the day. Facebook really showed me the power of these types of networks during this time.
I think that social networks have a long future ahead of them! What are your thoughts about social networks?
I found a reference to this on another blog. I hadn’t heard of this video platform before. You have to have your request to be an educator (which means you can upload and moderate content) processed before you get login details. It is another safe site for schools to use in education. With the problems some people have been having with TeacherTube at the moment, this could be a good option. It has a very attractive interface and seems a little more geared to secondary school but there are no restrictions on what age groups can participate in the site.
I’ve removed the movie because it has an annoying habit of autoplaying! I can normally find where in the code to turn this off but couldn’t this time.
I think this has to be the ultimate list of Firefox extensions organised by type. Happy surfing! (thanks again ScribeFire - really enjoying this blogging extension!)
The PlotBot website is fun, easy to use and would be a wonderful addition to any classroom writing programme. This web 2.0 tool allows you to quickly and easily write scripts and more than one person can be part of the project. Imagine planning out a story outline as a class and then the kids take turns on the computer writing sections of the script. You could then print them off and workshop them and you could easily go back on and change sections that didn’t work as well as others. The tool gives you instructions on how a script works and does all the formatting for you making it just a case of selecting whether you are adding an action or dialogue section and then typing away.
I have also used ScribeFire to complete this post. I have had this Firefox extension for quite a long time but have only just had a look at it in the last couple of days in more detail. You click on a small icon at the bottom of your browser window and it pops open with an area to type your blog entry. You can drag in items or blocks of text from the website that you are blogging about and then click publish without ever needing to actually visit your blog.
I have had an evening of playing around on the computer and I have picked up a few more interesting sites.
Searching Mahalo is a search engine that is written by human beings rather than machine compiled. Each returned entry is guaranteed to be of a high quality and spam free. There is stuff on education but most of it is written at a higher level than primary. What I did see looked really good and I have signed up to ge a writer on Mahalo where I get money for each entry I add. I will let you know if I get accepted! You can install a Firefox add-on that will display Mahalo search results next to your goodle results.
Search Radar is a search engine that helps you refine your searches. When you enter a search term, it gives you a tag cloud of related search terms to help you narrow your search. Under the tag cloud there is a list of sites for the search terms you used. Again you can install a Firefox extension that will show you a list of related search terms next to any Google search results (replacing the Google Ads!)
Powerpoint Type Applications - Slide Rocket While SlideRocket is not yet launched (I have sent a request in to have an account), this looks very exciting. Many of the online office applications do not seem to prioritise good looking presentation applications and most seem pretty basic. SlideRocket promises to make great use of the potential that being a web based application affords it. It is planning to have links with services such as Flickr so that you can bring in images to you slides. The interface looks great - can’t wait to try this one out.
News From the Cluster I haven’t really used this blog to share what is happening in our cluster the way that I envisioned I would when I set it up! That is something that I need to change. There is a webquest that a teacher called Hayley has set up at Wilford School that is well worth sharing. She has used a wiki to set up the webquest that is about Hauora (the Maori word for well-being) and looks at Food and Nutrition, Emotional Health, Environmental Issues and Physical Heath (exercise). This is a great resouce that anyone can tap into. The address of the webquest is http://hauora.pbwiki.com
1. Search ’shortcuts’ If you are using Firefox, you can set up a search shortcut for sites that you visit often that have a search window. Go to the site, right click on the search window and choose ‘Add a Keyword for this Search’. Once you have assigned a keyword, you can type it into the address box of the browser and then type your search terms afterwards. For instance, I have assigned a shortcut to my search box on my website. I now don’t have to visit the site, I just type me (my search keyword) and then my search terms such as fractions into the address window and I get the search results when I push enter.
2. Webslides As the video below shows, this service lets you select a group of webpages to turn into a slideshow giving people a chance to look at each page. You have to email them to get an invite to test this and I am still waiting for one but I think it looks pretty interesting.
3. l8r This service allows you to set a date into the future for an email to be delivered (up to five years). Wouldn’t this be an interesting writing exercise for kids. Write a letter to yourself five years into the future! I found out about this service on this Mashable blog post about 75 different email services available.
4. Fuser While I couldn’t get this working properly for me, I have still put it here because I think the idea behind it is great. It takes all of your email accounts and Facebook, and brings all of that mail into one place. I have emailed them telling them the problems I have having so watch this space (while I was writing this blog entry, I got an email from their customer service - lightning fast reply! It may be to do with some settings I changed in Firefox so you should check this out)
I’m also revisiting the online office applications that I am already signed up to such as Zoho and ThinkFree as well as trying out new ones like Contact Office and will let you know in my next post what I think of them.
I found a reference to this on another blog. I hadn’t heard of this video platform before. You have to have your request to be an educator (which means you can upload and moderate content) processed before you get login details. It is another safe site for schools to use in education. With the problems some people have been having with TeacherTube at the moment, this could be a good option. It has a very attractive interface and seems a little more geared to secondary school but there are no restrictions on what age groups can participate in the site.
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