Sharing the Addiction

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