I am a self-confessed Christmas freak. There is nothing I like more than putting up a tree and getting out the tinsel. That love of the festive season has spilled over into my online life through a Christmas links wiki I set up a few years back that has links to all things Christmas. Every year, I pull it up and dust it off and see what needs updating etc. It always gets a huge number of hits around this time of year so I thought I’d bring it to your attention.

Christmas wiki

PBWorks

It is also the time that I catch up with PBWorks given that pretty much all of my other wikis are with Wikispaces. While I generally prefer Wikispaces, I have to say that PBWorks is still a pretty good tool with some features that Wikispaces lacks.

One of these features is the ability to create folders and nest pages within them. While my Christmas wiki isn’t big enough to need this function, I could see that this would be very useful for one of my bigger wikis such as educational software where I have created index pages for different sections – the folders would then help to keep my pages organised and easy to navigate with people able to use the navigation panel on the wiki to move around the folders and access the pages within them.

I also like the formatting options for tables in PBWorks. The ability to set the width of tables being the biggest advantage over Wikispaces.

There are other very useful features such as  page level access and easily backing up the wiki but these are subscriber only options and at $99US per classroom wiki, that is not a cheap option. Still, overall this is still an excellent wiki alternative for teachers.

Mrs Pancake

I’m also reminded of the Mrs Pancake website as I have linked to her Christmas resources. She has really created a wonderful site with very high quality printable downloads for all kinds of topics. Go check it out.

Baby is calling so back to being a Mum!

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.

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.

OK – here is a list of things that may or may not be useful to you.

List of links for different year groups.
http://zerototwo.wikispaces.com/Great+links+for+Juniors
http://threetofour.wikispaces.com/Yr+3and4+Links
http://fivetosix.wikispaces.com/Yr+5and6+Links (still being worked on)
http://seventoeight.wikispaces.com/Yr+7and8+Links

When you on each year group space, you will notice in the left hand navigation menu that there are also pages for great use of ICT under different currciulum headings. I have started to add to these but this will be an ongoing project.

Here are the links to some of my latest software wiki resources

• A huge bank of sites to find film resources and short films that you could use in the classroom.
• A restructuring of my large wikis page into smaller pages with two new downloadable tutorials added to the Wikispaces page.
• Two new downloadable tutorials on my Powerpoint page about adding audio and about customising backgrounds of slides.
• Much prettier and easier to use index pages such as this one for online tools.

I have also found a really great resource on the Google Educators page with this unit on using Google Docs for revision of writing. There are a number of downloadable worksheets to support the unit. There are a number of other resources on the Google Educators page so it is worth checking out.

The booking wiki makes heavy use of the excellent Zoho Creator. Each school has a form embedded on their own page on the wiki that asks them to identify what they would like to work on in sessions with the facilitator and a few other details. This online form feeds into a spreadsheet that can be downloaded from the Zoho site. It is so easy to set up these forms – if anyone would like help with this, I could make an instructional video to show you how (using the great tool iShowU for Mac). I have asked that these are completed at least four days before school booking sessions. I can then download the results and clear the results off the online area ready for the next set of data to be entered. I have also asked that teachers complete an evaluation using a SurveyMonkey survey so that I can easily analyse the results.

I have also set up a series of year group wikis (see left links off teacher portal wiki) where each teacher in the cluster will have their own wiki page. With two full day year group meetings across the cluster this year, hopefully this will help build this online community.

The tools are proving to be just that – useful tools! It is great when you start to feel as if you are really finding effective uses for things after spending so many hours dabbling.

Just a quick note about PBWiki. Recently, I have decided that it is a really good option amongst the wikis due to the ease with which you can format the pages and the extra features you can add to your pages compared to some of the other wikis. I get their newsletter and one interesting thing that was included was a link to a page of free video tutorials by Atomic Learning about pbwiki. I found out a couple of things I didn’t know about the wiki such as the fact that when you add a calendar, other people are able to add events directly on the calendar which is something that I have been looking around for some time now.

Check out the tutorials here:
http://movies.atomiclearning.com/k12/pbwiki

I have also got a few schools that are interested in learning more about the Spike LMS. It seems quite a good option and schools that are using it already seem pretty happy with it. If anyone has stories to tell about Spike, let me know.

Finally, I have just re-discovered the Google Page Maker tool that I played with a long time ago. With its attractive templates and ease of use, it could be a better option that a wiki for those teachers that don’t want the collaborative aspects of a wiki though as long as you log in to your page, it can be edited anywhere.

Here is a link to my test page that I created a long time ago.
http://suzievesper.googlepages.com/
This image shows some of the features available on the page.

Uploaded with Skitch!

I ran a couple of workshops at a teacher only day for the Wellington College cluster and I was impressed with the presentations by the students at the school. They were not only incredilby knowledgeable about ICT but they were also fantastic speakers. They commended individual teachers for the way they were using ICT in classes and spoke about what they would like to see in the future. A number of students brought up making greater use of text messaging by teachers to students. They also spoke about teachers making greater use of Web 2.0 tools and multimedia.

One student who really blew me away spoke about his classes decision to use a wiki as part of a study of “The Life of Pi”. None of the available wikis seemed exactly right for what they were looking for so the student decided to write his own. He didn’t have it up in time for the unit of study but he has now almost finished working on his Ed Wiki. He came to my wiki workshop in the name of ‘research’ and spent time asking all of the participant about what features they would like in a wiki. One feature he is currently working on is the ability for teachers to set assignments for specific individual or groups of students and the work students do on this assignment would not become visible to other students until after the completion date. The wiki has a greater number of editing features than most wikis and I think it looks very impressive. He hopes to launch the product in the next few weeks and is offering it for free to Wellington College staff so that they can give him feedback to improve the product. Then he is thinking of offering it to schools for a cost of around $2.50 a student (he has a company set up).

Did I mention that he still has three years of schooling left to go? (if his business doesn’t take him in other directions before then). I was actually really interesting seeing where things are going in a secondary school and the types of skills the kids have at this level. People there also didn’t really know what types of things we were up to at primary level so I had a number of interesting discussions.

I also found out the problems of trying to use web 2.0 tools on Internet Explorer. After getting used to working on Firefox, I forgot to check what internet browser was used by the College and I got caught out when a number of things didn’t work all that well in IE (such as picture resizing in Wikispaces). The workshop still worked OK but I am certainly going to check that Firefox is installed on the computers at ULearn!

Oh, and I seem to have got it wrong about Flash Player updates fixing problems with TeacherTube – it crashed on me again the other day! I hope they sort out this problem as I think it is a great service.

I have started a new wiki (yes – yet another one with tips for different software packages and downloadable notes I have made for each piece of software. The site can be accessed from here.
I was meant to run a workshop on Kidpix in the afternoon but ended up looking at some of my favourite new discoveries instead when the networked version of Kidpix on the computers at the school failed to open correctly – ahh the joys of technology. One of the things I talked about is an online application where you can easily make online diagrams. The site is Gliffy and you register for free to use it. It is such an easy to use format – again I think it could be really useful. This is a rather lighthearted practice diagram I made when I was testing it out: