Sharing the Addiction

I have to admit that recently I have not been ‘playing’ with as many new tools as I have done previously. I think that this is partially because the tools I do use on a regular basis meet most of my online needs.  I don’t often see things that either surpass what I am using already or excite me from an eduational standpoint. There is also the fact that I have been having a bit of a break from my online life of late. Still, every now and then, I have a spate of looking around to see what I’ve been missing and today has been one of those days. Here are some of the things I’ve been trying out.

ShareTabs

This is a service where you can enter the URL addresses of a number of websites and it will turn them into a set of tabs (these will apear as sub-tabs within one of your tabs/windows) which can be accessed from a single hyperlink. There is a visual preview of these sites on the landing page when people follow the link. I tried it out by making all of my website links into a single ShareTab link. I think this will certainly reduce the cluster in my email signatures!!

Postrank

This is an RSS tool that prioritises the top posts in any feed based on the number of comments, saves to Delicious and links to the post among other measures. This means that you can identify the most popular posts on the site very quickly and can get a widget that shows this. When I put in my blog feed, this is what it came up with:

I’m not sure if I would have called these my favourite posts but I found this a very interesting exercise.

Thanks to the guys at the Tek blog for the following:

Shape Collage

A simple application that will turn photos that you drag into the interface into a collage – you can choose from a variety of shapes. It is a simple programme that does exactly what it is supposed to. I did wonder if the excellent Google’s Picasa software (now available for Mac and PC) might be better to use to do this on many occassions as you can do things like reposition images within the collage and resize individual photos. Still, it won’t do some of the shapes easily that Shape Collage does so I guess it is just personal choice. Picasa also does a lot more than just collages and maybe it is useful to have a dedicated piece of software for this purpose. You let me know your thoughts.

Enough for this evening. I will keep playing and see if I can find anything else of interest!

Tags: web 2.0

Cameroid is just a little fun tool to use in conjunction with a webcam. For those of us in the Mac world, we have had PhotoBooth to play with for quite some time. This online tool gives the same power to anyone with a webcam. I enjoyed playing with the effects, filters, distorts, scenes and frames. You can then download your efforts and save to your computer. One possible use in the classroom is that kids could put themselves into a scene and then write a story based on it (such as me as a monkey). Below are a couple of my pics (and no I am not scared of making a fool of myself in the name of blogging!)

Tags: webcam

I have posted a couple of times about using Flickr and associated tools. I am running a workshop on this topic tomorrow so have created a handout with a summary of all aspects of Flickr and some educational examples. some of this content is replicated on my wiki page but it goes into far more detail. I have embedded a Scribd copy of the document on my Flickr wiki page as well as uploading the PDF file for you to download from there. I am reasonably happy with it! If you can find any errors, let me know so I can fix them up As it says at the bottom of each page, I am happy for it to be used by anyone else as long as the footer is kept in place.

Enjoy!   http://educationalsoftware.wikispaces.com/Flickr

Tags: flickr, tutorials

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.

Make a Smilebox free ecard

Tags: smilebox

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)

Tags: glogster, posters

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.

Tags: cluster links, School Visits, textures

Today I put the finishing touches on my resource page on Flickr for teachers on my wiki.  I have included a number of ways that you can use Flickr in an educational context as well as links to tutorials and other tools that can work with Flickr. I am going to put a very brief summary here of some of the types of examples so it would pay to check out the wiki page to see an in-depth coverage of this topic.

Flickr to Share what is happening in the classroom

This is the most basic use for Flickr. Upload pictures of activities, displays or examples of work for others to view and to share ideas.

Use the Note Feature in Flickr for Interactivity

Flickr has the ability to add notes to parts of your image that will open in a pop-up window when you mouse over the area where you have placed the note. This can be used to ‘embed’ writing and information into your images. The only disadvantage is that the pop-up note feature only functions within Flickr itself and you can’t embed the images into a wiki or blog and maintain the notes. It is easy enough to have a link to the Flickr page however. The example to the left shows using this to create an online and interactive mihi (information about your background and heritage for non-New Zealanders). It can also be used for labeling, instructional writing or having information about each child within a group picture. It would be great if you could leave a comment on this blog post with other ways you might use this.

Using Flickr for Digital Storytelling

There are groups on Flickr where people submit photos that tell stories in 5 photographic frames. A New Zealand teacher with the Flickr username Hey Milly has created a group specifically for children to post their photo stories to and the example below was on this Flickr group.

 Using Flickr to Learn About Other Places

There is a map tool on Flickr that allows you to save images from your Flickr photostream into locations on a world map. This is not only handy for when you travel but can be great if you want to find images from other parts of the world if you are learning about them in class. You can ask to see the results on the map from everyone’s images and can then use pictures from these places.

Using Flickr as a Storage Site that Works with Other Tools

Flickr released to the public what is called its API. Other online tool developers where then able to use this to allow you to build connections between your account with them and your Flickr account. This saves you uploading the same pictures into all the different tools. An example of this is Big Huge Labs where you can make your Flickr photos into all kinds of things such as the motivational poster on the right.

Searching Flickr

Many people who upload their photos to Flickr make them public and apply a Creative Commons license to them meaning that you are legally able to use them as long as you cite your source. There are tools to search for these type of pictures in Flickr with search engines such as CompFight, Flickr Storm and FlickRiver.  You can also use the advanced search options within Flickr to do a Creative Commons search. See the wiki page for more detailed information on Flickr searches.

There are tutorials and more examples within each category on the wiki page. Enjoy using Flickr!

Tags: flickr, photos

I know that most people already know about Big Huge Labs but I thought I’d remind people about it again. I had fun this morning making a motivational poster out of one of my photos from Vietnam. I really must get to using this with kids!

Yes – this is a kid friendly site despite the name sounding as if it might not be!

It is great fun and would be a great way to encourage writing for children. You can make pictures and cards by choosing a background and dragging on characters which you can resize, rotate and add speech bubbles to.

You can also put backgrounds with scenes on them together in a sequence and make a storybook in this way. When making a movie, each character you add has a number of actions that you can programme them to do. You take one of the available actions and drag it up into the timeline. You can continue building up a sequence of these actions with a range of characters. You can also add special effects. This is great fun and takes perseverance as well. It could be considered a kids way to program (it reminds me of Alice but at a lower level). Like the storybook option, you can add more scenes to your movie to create a longer story.

To get the content off the site, you can print but you can only view the video online.

This is a great tool. You could use it to create the beginning of a story and print it and then children write the middle and ending. This is just one idea – I’m sure you could think of many other uses.

I have just spent most of the morning putting together a handout on the basics of how to use VoiceThread such as getting an account, uploading pictures, adding comments, creating extra identities and how to embed in a wiki or blog. This four page PDF handout is now available on my educationalsoftware wiki at http://educationalsoftware.wikispaces.com/Picture+Sharing

Here is an embedded example of a VoiceThread.