I have been trying to get hold of a SlideRocket beta invite for ages after seeing and reading a lot of hype about it. Finally, one arrived by email a few weeks ago and I’ve been mucking around with it ever since. This is the first online presentation app I have got excited over because it is actually very attractive and full of functionality. The interface is gorgeous and it generally works exceptionally well. If you can get hold of an invite then do so but hopefully they make it available for everyone soon. I have embedded my first effort below.
I was revisiting the wonderful ‘50 web 2.0 ways to tell a story‘ by CogDog while trying to find a way to record video directly into a web 2.0 tool to blog (which I am still looking for if you can help – leave a comment) and was looking at the Cutting Room Floor section at the bottom where he mentioned tools that didn’t work so well for him. I noticed that Smilebox was listed because it didn’t have Mac and PC options. I clicked on the link with idol curiosity and found that it now supports Mac as well so downloaded the free software to have a play with it. I think this is a BRILLIANT tool. It works really well with iPhoto and I imagine the PC version opens up your ‘My Pictures’ folder. There are a large number of templates to play with and each one has a number variations within it. You can simply drag and drop your pictures into the templates and change all the text to suit your purposes. I played with the newspaper template. You can then choose to blog it at the push of a button and it will upload it to your online Smilebox account and gives you the embed code. See my efforts below.
Twitter always sends me to interesting places and one of the last sites it sent me to was one called Tutput. On this site, you can sign up for a teacher account and then set up a registration for children to sign up with that will make them part of your online class. Then the children can play games against children all over the world who are logged in at the same time. I pretended to be a kid so that I could test it out and felt bad as I was teamed up against what were probably real kids somewhere else. Still, I soundly lost the first match. Of course, I selected the hardest level of multiplication just to see what this looked like and my first question was 49×27. I was busy trying to work this out in my head rather than on paper and in the meantime my component had solved three questions!
I then tried a couple of easier level activities and soundly walloped the poor children I was against (sorry kids but you’re got to learn to toughen up in life!) I think this would be VERY popular in the classroom and each time you win, a summary of the game gets put onto your win wall. There is also a graduation board which shows you which game levels you have completed. As per usual, all of this makes me wish I had a class to try this with!
OK – so I decided to take out a bit of time and play with Glogster right now I have made an online poster of sites that I have made over the last year or so. You can click on a site image to take you to that site. I had a lot of fun with this though the results are not that stunning and I learned a few lessons along the way.
1) The page is a set to A4 portrait size which would seem to make it impossible to play around with some layouts. However, if you embed the page into a wiki and play around with the width and height settings in the embed code, you can change the size of the area you are working on. Instead of shrinking the page while keeping the same dimensions, playing with the embed size settings will actually cut off areas of the page. This is how I got my page to look the way it does in the picture. I heard about this site when visiting Lenva at Bucklands Beach Intermediate School. The kids there use Glogster to make the front navigation page of their online portfolios. Some of the children have moved into using Wikispaces for their portfolios and you can see an example of a student called Jess by clicking here.
I have embedded my Glogster page into my educational software wiki and you can go and check it out by clicking here (the picture above is just a screenshot)
Well, people might be forgiven for thinking that I had dropped off the face of the earth with me putting very little out into the cyberverse recently. Basically, I started working for CORE education full time at the beginning of June and I had to hit the ground running with Milestones from clusters to read and respond to. I have now finished working my way through those and am now doing some work on building up resources in the ICT PD Online area. There is a section in ICT PD Online to collect and organise cluster and school internet spaces and links. If you are a New Zealand school or cluster and have any that you would like me to add in, either leave me a comment with the address or send an email to me at suzievesper@gmail.com. If you want to give me any feedback on how the section of links could be better organised or what you think is missing, I’d also like to hear from you.
As part of my work on ICT PD Online, I have been brushing off my GIMP skills considerably and trying my hand at some aspects of design. I needed some textures to add to some of my images and I have found some really useful sites that gave some to me for free that I thought I would share with you. These are: ImageAfter Texture King CG Textures (where I got these lovely bones from).
Another thing to report on is my recent visit to schools in Auckland with my old cluster. This was an excellent trip and I got heaps out of it! There is a page on Teacher Portal where I have uploaded my notes and the schools that went are all supposed to add to (hmm…..haven’t seen evidence of this just yet!). Thanks to Lenva for showing me http://glogster.com and http://www.circavie.com/ which I plan to have a good play with when I have a spare minute.
This is just a quick post to let everyone know that the Time4Innovation online conference is happening at the moment with a focus on ICT leadership, building learning communities, and implementation of ICT in education. I am the keynote for the second session on building learning communities and would love feedback from the blogosphere
I have made an online poster of sites that I have made over the last year or so. You can click on a site image to take you to that site. I had a lot of fun with this though the results are not that stunning and I learned a few lessons along the way.
Flickr/suzievesper
Facebook/Suzie Vesper
Twitter/suziea
YouTube/suziea
Del.icio.us/vespers1
GMail/Suzie Vesper
Blog/Suzie Vesper
Diigo/suzievesper
