YSGOL ABERCONWY: Please slow down and speak a little more clearly.
Carmen Street: Well done! It was great to hear your lovely accents sharing your knowledge about this poem. I will...
Disclaimer: The opinions presented here are those of the author alone. They in no way represent the opinions of Wolverhampton CLC, Wolverhampton Local Authority or Wolverhampton City Council.
Wikipedia is a great (OK, unbelievably incredible) resource, but as anyone who uses it regularly knows, not all of the content is entirely suitable for educational use, either because it is more adult in nature, or too complex or expansive to unpick for school use.
Now we have the 2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection, a collection of Wikipedia articles that would amount to a 15-volume encyclopedia, handpicked for their relevance to the UK National Curriculum.
One of my favourite applications for Mac OS X, Comic Life, has just been released for Windows XP / Vista. Comic Life allows students to create comics, how-tos or picture albums by combining together digital photos with speech and thought bubbles, text, and authentic comic-style layouts and fonts. It’s great fun and almost impossibly easy to use.
During the pre-conference workshops for Handheld Learning 2007 on Wednesday, I attended the session by Dan Sutch and Lyndsay Grant from FutureLab on their innovative pilot projects with handheld devices. One project they discussed, called MobiMissions, was based around students creating mini-games on their mobile phones, which they then shared via a website with other students in the same geographical area. Students played the games created by their peers when they arrived in the area for a given challenge (as detected by GPS), or when they socialised with other students involved in the project.
In reviewing their own pilot project, FutureLab acknowledged that the project had been too small (only 15 students) and too short (only 5 weeks) for students to publish truly absorbing, geographically-specific challenges with a good chance that other students would engage at a more than superficial level.
Last weekend I attended the NAACE Conference in London, and attended Doug Dickinson’s “RUWeb2” presentation. He played a snippet from the following video, which challenges educators to rethink their views on education in a world of Web 2.0, mobile technologies, and rapid content creation and sharing:
I’ve written before on the blog about the power of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) in allowing us to automatically receive new content from our favourite websites:
Some great links I’ve collected over the last couple of months:
Picnik - online image editing
Picnik is a fantastic online image-editing application. You can upload images from your computer, or pull images into Picnik from Flickr, Facebook or Picasa. It even allows you to search Flickr for photos from inside the web application, narrowing your search down to Creative Commons images if you wish (so that you can legally modify and redistribute derivative works). Once you’ve opened up an image, you can perform basic image manipulation on it from inside your browser - crop, rotate, resize, brightness, contrast - and more sophisticated changes like removing red-eye, or sharpening the image. There are even some nice effects - black and white, sepia, vignette, frames and so on - that you can apply to your image, and text and diagram tools to annotate your pictures. Once you’re done you can reexport back up to Flickr or download to your computer.
Over the last few weeks, gadget-lovers in the US have been going crazy for Apple’s entry into the mobile phone market, the iPhone. Estimates indicate that about 700,000 of the devices were sold in the first weekend of sales in the States at up to $599 each. Expect the hype around the iPhone in this country to build dramatically prior to its launch in Europe before Christmas. The iPhone will be the “must have” gadget for Christmas 2007. Parents of teenagers need to either prepare their wallets, or their resolve, for the direct hit that the iPhone is likely to make upon their lives.
For those who haven’t seen details of the iPhone, here are some links you might find useful:
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is the most powerful, versatile and efficient way to browse new content on your favourite websites. However, it’s not very easy to explain exactly how it works!
The SmartBoard Lessons podcast is more than its name may suggest. Originating from Canada, the podcast is not just a set of tutorials in using the board. It also focuses on how to integrate the SmartBoard and the latest web services into everyday teaching practice. Joan Badger and Ben Hazzard, the presenters of the podcast, have an uncanny knack of finding great web-links and working out how they can be used effectively on a whiteboard with students:
The goal of this podcast to share lesson ideas that use technology to engage students in learning with a focus on SMARTBoard Interactive Whiteboards.
Blackpool City Learning Centre’s “Video of the Moment” is a great parody of Tony Christie / Peter Kaye’s “Amarillo” with a very topical message: Read the rest of this entry »
Over the last few weeks, gadget-lovers in the US have been going crazy for Apple’s entry into the mobile phone market, the iPhone. Estimates indicate that