It has been a great year and I just wanted to wish all subscribers and regular readers a very Merry Xmas and Happy New Year.
My husband and I are off on our honeymoon to Vietnam for five and a half weeks so there won’t be any updates on this blog until February next year.
By the way, I made the above picture in Kidpix by dropping in my photo, using the fill bucket to get rid of all of the background, and then putting stamps around the outside. A great activity to do with kids to make individualised Christmas cards!
I also have found a website called Google Guide which you might want to check out if you want to know how to improve your Google searches. It tells you everything about how to use all of the Google functions.
Even at the end of the year I can’t resist slipping in a few bits and pieces! Happy holidays all!
I was trying to go through all the Mashable posts in my reader (it has to be one of the most prolific blog out there!) and so far tonight I have found a few really interesting tools as a result.
This software is for free language learning. Lessons are structures on slides. I am learning Spanish at the moment so I checked out those lesons. There were just over 100 lessons with each lesson having around 70 slides. That’s a lot of content! The only thing I found slightly frustrating was that there was no way to skip the instructions on each slide when they weren’t necessary at times. You can to beat the clock to give your answers and the time you have can be adjusted. They are offering lessons for Spanish, Russian, French, Italian, Mandarin, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Greek, English for Spanish speakers, and English for Polish Speakers.
This is an interesting search tool that lets you look for content from Amazon, eBay, Flickr and YouTube. It then gives you a visual display of the results which you can say how you’d like them displayed such as in a stack or pile. If you want to keep one of the results, you can drag it into your folder for safekeeping. Quite interesting but I think it needs a few new places to get results such as Google Images and I think it would be handy if it let you do a search for Creative Commons work.
TalkShoe This service allows for up to 250 people to join into a TalkCast. Each person can use phone or Skype to access this. They provide free unlimited recording, free storage, free bandwidth, and uploading of existing podcast episodes. People can listen to, download or subscribe to the TalkCast afterwards from your stored recording. You can put widgets for your TalkCast on your blog or wiki. This could be a great tool and I’d like to have a play with this at some point so let me know if you want to join me for a TalkCast.
This tool allows you to record 30 seconds into four separate areas in a split screen so that you can be your own band or pretend to be the Partridge family with your friends. I thought this would be fun for a music lesson where you were doing rounds. Kids could each record a different part to play together at the end. You could have recorder parts or make up actions for a song with each action being slightly different. I could see that this would be a lot of fun!
I have had an evening of playing around on the computer and I have picked up a few more interesting sites.
Searching Mahalo is a search engine that is written by human beings rather than machine compiled. Each returned entry is guaranteed to be of a high quality and spam free. There is stuff on education but most of it is written at a higher level than primary. What I did see looked really good and I have signed up to ge a writer on Mahalo where I get money for each entry I add. I will let you know if I get accepted! You can install a Firefox add-on that will display Mahalo search results next to your goodle results.
Search Radar is a search engine that helps you refine your searches. When you enter a search term, it gives you a tag cloud of related search terms to help you narrow your search. Under the tag cloud there is a list of sites for the search terms you used. Again you can install a Firefox extension that will show you a list of related search terms next to any Google search results (replacing the Google Ads!)
Powerpoint Type Applications - Slide Rocket While SlideRocket is not yet launched (I have sent a request in to have an account), this looks very exciting. Many of the online office applications do not seem to prioritise good looking presentation applications and most seem pretty basic. SlideRocket promises to make great use of the potential that being a web based application affords it. It is planning to have links with services such as Flickr so that you can bring in images to you slides. The interface looks great - can’t wait to try this one out.
News From the Cluster I haven’t really used this blog to share what is happening in our cluster the way that I envisioned I would when I set it up! That is something that I need to change. There is a webquest that a teacher called Hayley has set up at Wilford School that is well worth sharing. She has used a wiki to set up the webquest that is about Hauora (the Maori word for well-being) and looks at Food and Nutrition, Emotional Health, Environmental Issues and Physical Heath (exercise). This is a great resouce that anyone can tap into. The address of the webquest is http://hauora.pbwiki.com
1. Search ’shortcuts’ If you are using Firefox, you can set up a search shortcut for sites that you visit often that have a search window. Go to the site, right click on the search window and choose ‘Add a Keyword for this Search’. Once you have assigned a keyword, you can type it into the address box of the browser and then type your search terms afterwards. For instance, I have assigned a shortcut to my search box on my website. I now don’t have to visit the site, I just type me (my search keyword) and then my search terms such as fractions into the address window and I get the search results when I push enter.
2. Webslides As the video below shows, this service lets you select a group of webpages to turn into a slideshow giving people a chance to look at each page. You have to email them to get an invite to test this and I am still waiting for one but I think it looks pretty interesting.
3. l8r This service allows you to set a date into the future for an email to be delivered (up to five years). Wouldn’t this be an interesting writing exercise for kids. Write a letter to yourself five years into the future! I found out about this service on this Mashable blog post about 75 different email services available.
4. Fuser While I couldn’t get this working properly for me, I have still put it here because I think the idea behind it is great. It takes all of your email accounts and Facebook, and brings all of that mail into one place. I have emailed them telling them the problems I have having so watch this space (while I was writing this blog entry, I got an email from their customer service - lightning fast reply! It may be to do with some settings I changed in Firefox so you should check this out)
I’m also revisiting the online office applications that I am already signed up to such as Zoho and ThinkFree as well as trying out new ones like Contact Office and will let you know in my next post what I think of them.
I have just been to Hastings this week for a two day meeting with other key staff in clusters. I enjoy these meetings as it is a great time to be around like minded people with a real passion for the use of ICT in education. There is so much expertise in the room at these meetings and it is wonderful to be able to swap ideas and information.
For instance, Sara is a facilitator for another cluster and she gave me a handy tip about a piece of software called Umajin that is great for layering images and video (some with the use of blue screening). This is so easy to use and much more affordable than Photoshop and easier than GIMP. They offer discounts for bulk buying and that includes buying through clusters of schools.
Tessa highlighted her great collection of resources on her area in Centre 4 - the managing change section is excellent.
Other than that, I have found a few new things on my own. I have now managed to sign up for Imbee (a safe social network for teachers, parents and children) as they now support New Zealand. I think it looks like a very interesting platform and may use some people in my cluster as ‘children’ guinea pigs (or anyone else that indicates being interested). It would be great if I could get a test group of children involved in a project around this tool. Watch this space… I am also enjoying looking through the blog and wiki of Wes Fryer. He has a lot of interesting things to say and has fantastic collections of resources including a page on Digital Storytelling.
I also like the layout of Soople which shows you all of the advanced Google search options in a really user friendly format.
Well, that’s about enough from me for the moment To bed!
I have just seen something else that makes me happy
There is a Google tool that looks incredibly useful. It allows you to create Custom Searches which will only search sites that you have indexed for that search. This makes setting up ‘Kid safe’ searches a breeze!
I have just stumbled over the Creative Commons (CC) Licensing website and I am excited by two things I found there.
The first is the search engine that will search for just CC materials using Google, Yahoo, Flickr, Blip TV and other sites. This is great news! I had known how to do a CC search in Flickr but didn’t know how to search outside of Flickr.
The second thing is a great video that clearly explains copyright and the ideology behind CC.
Now we really can encourage children to work legally.
Today I have been working at Muritai School. I have been working with all the teachers from one syndicate at a time which has meant that all of the teachers in the syndicate get a chance to have the time and space to discuss how to best use ICT and they all come away with the same message which I think is a really good way to do things. This obviously requires a lot of relievers so has its drawbacks but is a really useful way to work.
We focused on using ICT to support both the Yr 3/4 syndicate and the Yr5/6 syndicate. The year 3/4 group are planning to focus on dinosaurs looking at how the changing environment effected them. I suggested one great website could be ‘The Earth Floor‘ which has a great section on how why we no longer have dinosaurs. There are also other dinosaur links on my website. The syndicate are planning to use Kidpix to illustrate dinosaur poems. As the focus is on oral not written English, the children will illustrate poems by other people and record their voices onto the slides.
The Yr 5/6 syndicate looked at how ICT can be used to support their upcoming ‘Take Action for Air’ topic. The syndicate decided that they wanted to use mindmapping tools for the children to collect and organise their information onto during the course of the unit and then use video to film the ‘Take action’ part to make into a movie. We explored using an online mindmapping application that is extremely easy to use and can be accessed from anywhere called ‘Mindomo‘.I think this application has a LOT of potential and is something I have just discovered recently.
The teachers felt that they really needed to teach the kids how to search the web so have decided to teach structured lessons in the suite on this. Stu Devenport had some excellent posters for working with kids on search tips and evaluating websites (which he has offered to let me have a copy of and I’m sure he’d let others have them as well).
Other good places to get tips on searching are: the Google help centre, Berkeley University (not very kid friendly but very detailed) and Fact Monster (designed for kids) Want a list of great search engines to try? Check out this exhaustive list. Other interesting search engines other than Google to try are Clusty which organises your search results into topic areas, Librarian’s Internet Index with reliable and safe links, or Ask for Kids for searches guaranteed to be safe for kids. Dogpile says it takes the best search results from a number of search engines.
Sites that give advice on evaluating websites include the Berkeley university site.
To bed!
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