Sharing the Addiction

This is my first attempt to use UStream along with a free application for adding effects to your videos called CamTwist. In the video, I talk about two other applications Spanning Sync (to sync between iCal and Google Calender) and GooSync (to sync between mobile and Google Calendar).

What do you think of this attempt? Am I really an angel??

Tags: Calendars, ustream, video effects

After a wonderfully regenerating holiday in South East Asia, I’m back at the computer. OK - I didn’t totally get away from screen time as I had a travel blog that I kept updated while we were away but it was really good to have some ‘real life’ experiences rather than all cyber. Should you want to check out some pics, they can be found on http://flickr.com/photos/suziea

Now it is back into work and there are a number of projects this year to keep me busy. It is also really exciting that a number of the schools that I work in are trying out some of the Web 2.0 tools that I found last year. Muritai School are having a go with 21classes for two of the classrooms. This is a blogging tool that allows a central blog page for the class with individual blogs for each child behind this. The great features of this tool are that there are monitoring tools for the teacher to check the appropriateness of the content and you can do things like have post a message that appears on all the blogs or specify which blog it appears on. The blogs also interconnected in some ways which is more like a social network. Finally, I think the fact that some of the writing on an individual blog can be made private would be great so that parents can share in it but not necessarily the entire class. If I had a class, I’d like to have a go with this tool so I am living through them vicariously.

Another school is looking into using Airset, a calendaring and organisation website that I had a little play with last year. Again, I think this is a great tool so I will be looking on with interest as to how well it works for them. We have also set up blogs for each class in a couple of the schools. One thing that will hopefully help this work really well in one of the schools is that we have used just one school gmail address (using the admin email address to sign up) and created 10 blogs from the same account. This means that if a teacher leaves, the blogs and the blog URLs will stay with the school rather than littering cyberspace when that teacher leaves and never uses that blog account again. It also means that there is only one username and password to remember for all 10 blogs. I’ll let you know how this works over the course of the year.

Anyway - glad to be back and I feel that we have a lot to cover this year. I look forward to the discussions in the blogsphere. To celebrate the New Year, I have even given my blog a spruce up and a new title. Hopefully, I’ll see a lot of you again at the Blogger’s Cafe at Learning@School.