Rosny College March 30 2009

Some resources you may find useful, depending on what you want to do.

Note that if you are looking at spending serious time on image or video tasks for professional purposes, you probably need to look at professional-grade software and also gain some professional skills in image design or film-making. These tools are aimed at the sort of things students and teachers typically do as part of another subject area.

SumoPaint http://www.sumopaint.com/app/ – a very nice Web2.0 tool, very similar to Photoshop. It’s free and as its entirely online you don’t need to install anything on your computer. You can set up an “account” if you want to save things online, or just save to your computer. Has inbuilt help at http://www.sumopaint.com/help/

Irfanview http://www.irfanview.com/ – Free simple image editor – needs to be installed but should be available to all students as a simple resize/resample/convert type tool.

Image Resizer PowerToy http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/Downloads/powertoys/Xppowertoys.mspxresize one or many image files with a right-click – avoids the inevitable “5Megabyte image in a Word document” problem ….

Microsoft MovieMaker free download at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/updates/moviemaker2.mspx , help at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/moviemaker/default.mspx

How-tos at http://www.ecentre.education.tas.gov.au/C5/Movie%20Maker/default.aspx (need DoE username and pwd offsite)

Simple video editing based on the standard timeline model

Audacity http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ – free audio editing tool, has to be installed. Also need to download the LAME MP3 encoder if you want to export to MP3

Google Lit Trips – using Google Earth Tours to support literacy/

A number of people have asked about Google Lit Trips, possibly after one of our PD sessions. These take books that involve a journey, presenting that journey as an annotated tour in Google Earth.

A brief tutorial on adding placemarks to Google Earth is available at http://www.googletouring.com/create.php

Students might not initially see the ways in which placemark symbols can be changed This is useful as you can use one sort of placemark to mark say chapters and others to mark plot locations etc. When editing a placemark, click on the picture next to the Name , and a range of other icons will appear. You can also change colour etc of placemarks – this is reasonably obvious.

A single page to answer “will ICT help kids learn?”

Well, almost. These pages from CARET probably answer most of the questions:

How can technology influence student academic performance?
How can technology develop higher order thinking and problem solving?
How can technology improve student motivation, attitude, and interest in learning?
How can technology help to prepare students for the workforce?
How can technology address the needs of low performing, at-risk, and learning handicapped students?

The future of digital repositories?

An article by D’Arcy Norman on the dismantling of CAREO, U Calgary’s digital repository.

CAREO was important, back in 2001-2004, as a prototype. As a sandbox for trying out some of these concepts. As a place to easily host metadata and content and try the repository model. From that perspective, I think it was a huge success. Without CAREO, I would likely still be saying that we need centralized institutional repositories to tightly manage resources.

But, because of CAREO, I now know that we don’t need repositories at the institutional level. Personal repositories are much more powerful, effective, and manageable. They’re called blogs, maybe you’ve heard of them? And small pieces, loosely joined. Want to manage photos online? Use Flickr. Videos? Use YouTube/GoogleVideo/etc… We don’t need a monolithic institutional repository.

Sure, we were naive, but we meant well. And now, hopefully, people will learn from our successes, failures, and mistakes, and not be doomed to repeat them.

ECAWA Conference Mandurah WA 23-24 August 2007

OK, here are some materials

Firstly, the links we will be using are listed below:

Pageflakes

www.pageflakes.com/
http://kenprice.pageflakes.com/Default.aspx 

Del.icio.us

http://del.icio.us/practicalclassroomstuff http://del.icio.us/svshslib
http://del.icio.us/tasite07  (username  pwd available)

Library-specific examples:

http://del.icio.us/chelmsfordlibraryhttp://del.icio.us/kkerns  

Google Earth

www.googlelittrips.com/
London timeline (kmz file –needs to be locally held in Google Earth)

www.youtube.com
www.teachertube.com

Example of YouTube in classroom www.thecorner.org/hist/video/v_ww2.htm  

Webtop applications 

http://www.thinkfree.com/ 
http://docs.google.com 

Flickr

Art – www.flickr.com/photos/ha112/414146234/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/learningandteachingscotland/241343007 

Recipes –www.flickr.com/photos/ldandersen/2573806/

Mind- and concept mapping

www.mindomo.com  –  username and password available
http://bubbl.us/

Notes

http://notemesh.com/

Diagramming

http://www.gliffy.com/ –  username and password available    

Video

http://www.jumpcut.com/
http://www.uthtv.com/
http://www.uthtv.com/wiki/index.php/Teacher_Resources

Curriki

www.curriki.org

Edu 2.o

www.edu20.org 

Rate My Teachers Aust

http://au.ratemyteachers.com/

Finally, the presentation (PPT, big file of about 6M so pleae be considerate if using a shared network connection – maybe do it at the end of the day at school…) – Presentation for ECAWA conference 23-24 August 2007