Sharing the Addiction

I was playing through Twitter and took a second to check out the Flickr blog. Interestingly, there was a post about National Library of New Zealand becoming the 16th institution to become part of The Commons of Flickr. Historic images are now available from the National Library of NZ on Flickr. The title of the blog post, Sweet Suxteen, takes a gentle poke at the kiwi accent. Here is a video from the blog post that introduces exactly what this means:

I had a look at some of the images and was struck by how rugged New Zealand once looked. There are some beautiful photos here. These would be an interesting resource when comparing changes to the New Zealand countryside from the past to today. I was also interested in the photos of some of the ships that sailed around New Zealand in the 1880s. It would have been amazing to see a harbour filled with boats such as these.

I was looking at one wide angled image and noticed that there was a link to where the image was stored on the Timeframes website. The image there was zoomable so you could really investigate the finer details within the image. I think it is great to see more of New Zealand’s heritage being made available through the web.

Tags: flickr, History

I was visiting this blog by Michelle Morley and enjoyed her post on making visual representations of class rules and publishing them on Slideshare. I have done a similar thing around values in a school where children explored different images I had collected to see how messages can be conveyed in pictures and then planned and photographed their own scene to depict a value. This is the class rules example that Michelle had on her blog:

Only geeks that are interested in CSS and hex codes read below
Yesterday, I spent some time working on the design of the Learning@School conference site – I changed the header to stretch right across the page and I changed the navigation menu colours and design. I couldn’t figure out which elements of design the different hex codes in the code were referring to. I first of all used a handy Firefox extension called Firebug to help me ‘inspect’ different sections of the page to tell me the code that was behind them. Then I needed to be able to do a search by the hex code so that I could find out what colour it was referring to. Once again, I turned to the wonderful Colour Lover site for a solution. You can do a palette search by hex code and you can even add a Colour Lover hex code search to your Firefox browser search options. Color Schemer Online Version 2 is also another good option when searching by hex code.  Then I sampled the colour codes from the header image by running it through the Image Palette Generator and changed the template to hex codes that matched with this image. The whole process would have been a LOT quicker if I knew all about CSS!!

Tags: colour, visual_language

I know that I am supposed to be hunkering down to read all the milestones and variations coming my way and I am mostly doing that but having a bit of fun helps keep a person sane! That is why I have been enjoying playing with Elf Yourself – a tool designed by the Jib Jab site where you can add up to five people’s heads to elf characters in a variety of dancers. Here is a band of Twitters dancing up a storm. See if you can spot @klandmiles, @teachernz, @allanhk, @heymilly and myself @suzievesper.

While speaking of Xmas (and yes I know that we haven’t even reached December yet), I have been working on updating my Christmas Links wiki from last year in time for the festive season in schools.

You can find a large range of sites, games and activities related to Xmas on this site.

As you would probably have guessed from all of this, I am quite a Christmas freak. I could play Xmas music all the time if it didn’t drive my husband to absolute distraction

Finally, moving away from the whole Xmas theme and getting back to colour tools there is Idee Labs.  You can use this to find images based on colours of your own choice or from particular images. I think this would be great when exploring the moods of colours or just wanting to create a display around key colours. Here is a screenshot of the images that I generated by choosing the red and green colours you can see on the far right.

Tags: Christmas, colour

I am running a session during a full day workshop on Monday on the role of the lead teacher. Being my obsessive compulsive self, I decided that this would be best supported by creating content on a wiki. At first I was going to add content to an existing wiki but then I decided there was enough content to make a dedicated wiki so here it is – http://leadingict.wikispaces.com

I made the front page graphic in Wix. This is an excellent tool and I see myself using this more and more.

I also have become completely attached to ColourLovers when setting up colour schemes for my wikis. It is so much easier than having to come up with this by trial and error. When you have found a palette of colours that you like in Colour Lovers, you copy the hex code for each colour and then go into ‘Manage space’ and then ‘Look and Feel’ and paste the code into the box for each option in the template. The screenshot on the left shows what each option from Look and Feel (screen shot on the right) changes.Note that I have also created a logo using one of the avatars I have created online. I am now branding this on all my wikis.

I have also been playing with my Twitter background picture which you can see all of on http://twitter.com/suzievesper I’m not completely happy with the colour combinations against some of the Twitter colours so will probably rework this again and I need to make the side panel shorter so all of it shows. To make this, I went back to Colour Lovers and selected a pattern I liked and downloaded it. From there I opened up GIMP (would also work in Photoshop etc) and copied the pattern which meant I was able to use it with the fill bucket to fill the entire space. All patterns from Colour Lovers will appear as one seemless pattern when tiled. Then I created a layer with the rectangle where I added my details and avatar. I saved the whole thing as a PNG and then uploaded it as my design to Twitter.

In other words, I spent ages mucking around in the evening doing something pretty inconsequential but diverting.

Tags: design lead_teacher

Here is the first in a series of posts about the tools I have included in my learning web 2.0 wiki.

I have mentioned Pixton a few times recently. Pixton is a tool for making 2D comics that is incredibly customisable. You can change almost every aspect of a character including clothing, colours, facial expressions and postures. You can even change the position and angle of each limb and appendage. You are also able to add a variety of objects and backgrounds to your comic and these are also customisable. You can sign up for a single account or there is an option for schools (but this is rather pricey). Be aware that you can not log into a single account from multiple computers – it does not like this at all (see reality check post for what happens if you try). Some of the characters in the normal account are also a little borderline – I forgot about the fact there was a cartoon Jesus complete with halo when working at a Catholic school but then this could also be a good thing for retelling bible stories!

I have a page on my learning web 2.0 wiki which includes examples and a video I made showing step by step how to use it.

This is an introductory video that shows you quickly what some of the key features are:

Here is a thumbnail of one comic strip I’ve made while trialing Pixton (clicking on it will take you into Pixton to see a full size version):

I have also written a lesson plan designed to work with Pixton as well as other technology tools you can use for making comics on my new ict lessons wiki. This lesson is based around the topic of conserving energy and includes website resources for this topic.

I think this is a great tool and I’d love to hear stories of how other people use it.

Tags: comics