I have been putting together a wiki for my upcoming pre-conference workshop and have been revisiting some tools that I have played with in the past as well as brushing up on the tools that I use reguarly. What I am finding is that I have become a little confused at the amount of choice that has opened up. This is nothing new in the internet world of infowhelm but I am now beginning to question things I’ve always just taken for granted.
For instance, I am a big Flickr fan. I have been advocating the use of Flickr for a long time now. Flickr has its groups, map, add note feature and direct relationship with Picnik for editing. I am still a fan but its supremacy is being erroded by some of the other tools I have played with in the last couple of days. PhotoBucket, for instance, has really grown since I last checked it out. The interface is easier to get around and you can now upload videos and it has a direct link to Scrapblog meaning you can make these from within PhotoBucket itself. Then there is DotPhoto which I hadn’t heard of before but found on the Top 10 Reviews website where it had been given gold with specific mention of the great photoshows that you can make with it.
This is just one example of the kind of exploring that I have been doing recently. All of which means that I am now getting a little bamboozled. So many options and they all have features that set them apart from each other while still having the same key functions. I don’t want to be uploading images to multiple places on the web but I don’t want to miss out on great features either. How are the rest of you out there finding the range of web 2.0 tools on offer? Are you coping?
In the meantime, here are the tools that I have documented for the workshop so far. I plan to add an extra couple in the next week or so to the wiki page.
I would love any feedback or suggestions on where to source further examples of tools. Have I missed any that should definitely be there? I am planning to add Photobucket, Bubbleshare and Scrapblog.
I have been playing a lot on the computer in the last week experimenting with different bits and pieces. I was looking for instructional videos on the excellent Fotoflexor for my upcoming workshop wiki when I noticed that the man who made videos for this also made videos for something called GoAnimate which I had not heard of before. Always keen to check things out, I signed up on the website and had a go. Below you can see my efforts. I love the ease of use of this tool. However, there are some backgrounds that aren’t that appropriate (eg bars) and some props that aren’t that great either (eg guns) so I am not sure that it could be used with younger children. I don’t think it would be that big a problem with older kids though. The demonstration animation that you can watch on signing up has some rather uncomfortable moments in terms of appropriateness so I wouldn’t use it as a model at any time. Anyway, I had a good time making this animation and I didn’t make use of half the possible features!
Update: It appears that this embed code gets stripped of its link to the video when in this blogging platform so to see what I have done, go to my wiki page: http://educationalsoftware.wikispaces.com/Animation
I was asked to give feedback to one of my Green Party colleagues on their new wiki and I suggested they add a movie trailer from YouTube for a movie fundraiser that is happening in their electorate. This lead me to start putting together instructions on how to do this that then turned into a rather comprehensive guide to adding YouTube videos to a range of online spaces including Wikispaces, PBWiki, Blogger (in post), Blogger (in html gadget in sidebar), Blogger (in video bar gadget in the sidebar), Edublogs (in post), and Edublogs (in Text widget in the sidebar). Also included is how to play with the width and height settings when you embed it. I incorrectly said Blogspot instead of Blogger throughout and will fix this up at some point. In the meantime, enjoy!
I have been playing with a number of presentation tools in the last few days. It all started with a message from Jon Johnson asking why the links in my ‘ICT Examples in Education’ presentation that I have uploaded to SlideShare don’t work. This has been a bug bear for me recently as hyperlinks used to work in SlideShare but don’t seem to anymore. I left a message on their online forum and had a response to say that this is a known issue and that they are working on it. I decided to explore other options again and this was the beginning of many hours on the net over the weekend. I still like SlideRocket but as this is in invite only beta at the moment, I decided to not focus my efforts there. I also revisited CogDog’s presentation on story telling tools as I was playing around SO…here are some of the tools I tried and presentations I either created within them or found by others who had used the tool.
A virtual buddy first alerted me to this on Twitter and I have to say that it is a lovely little application. It is built to look like Keynote (Mac application) but is online and open to anyone. It doesn’t have some of the bells and whistles at this point with no animations, audio or transitions but the interface is super easy to use and it really feels like you are using sofware from your own computer. One thing to be a wary of is changing the theme after you have already created a number of slides. It seemed to then shift some of the content around on the slide and some of the pictures seemed to disappear and had to be added again. Also, there is no hyperlinking options at the moment which is the main thing I was looking for but having emailed feedback to the team, they promised that hyperlinking is on its way (maybe as soon as next week!). I love the fact that I can embed a web video from places such as YouTube and that I can download my presentation as a Powerpoint. I set up this presentation below for a session I did on RSS and I used this online in full screen mode with no problems at all.
I had played with this quite a long time ago but revisited it as I experimented. Again, I was impressed with this tool. It allows for animations on the slides and hyperlinks work perfectly. I will be uploading my ICT Examples in Education presentation to this site. Note: uploading is proving a little problematic – where is the perfect tool! I have embedded an example from their site instead.
I have not yet tried making one of these myself but I am quite impressed at how easy it appears to be to combine and sync slides with audio using this tool. I have embedded an example I found on the site.
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