I’ve been most fortunate to have been involved with co-hosting an EARCOS 2-day weekend workshop called TechTrain 2010 – masterminded by two fabulous ISB staff members, Kim Cofino and Tara Etheridge.
Along with these two ladies, Dennis Harter, Dana Watts and myself have very successfully (I feel) inspired and helped the technology learning journey of a great bunch of educators from around the Asia Region who willingly gave up their entire weekend to join us.
The planning of each of our sessions offered has been going on behind the scenes for quite some time. Kim and I combined our group as we felt that we both wanted to offer similar things to the workshop participants. I LOVE brainstorming and planning with Kim as she is an expert on using the Understanding by Design planning cycle. We both were fairly confident that we’d come up with two “jam-packed” useful days for our participants.
As a co-host, I want to reflect on what I think went well, what didn’t go so well and what I’d do differently next time. But first I want to “debrief” with my fellow co-hosters! Keep an eye out for that post! Judging by the oral feedback we’ve received so far …… we may well offer TechTrain2011! Watch this space!
Usually I just use the advanced search on flickr but I’ve been feeling the need for something more …….
Today, just by happy accident, I stumbled across this delicious bookmark I’d made a while back but hadn’t had a chance to read properly. (I tag anything with that I haven’t had a chance to really explore or read if I’m in the middle of looking for something else, or working on something, with lookatlater – very handy!)
Q: I know Flickr offers a search engine but it won’t display more than 24 pictures at a time. Is there a better alternative ?
A: Switch to either Compfight or PictureSandbox – these are some of best Flickr search tools on the web, even better than Flickr’s built-in search engine.
PictureSandbox
Don’t you love how easy Picturesandbox makes image searching?
Compfight
It really doesn’t get much better than this does it? What I’d like to find next, is a simple add-on that will get the attribution for me automatically (less clicks for me). So I’m off to find that now.
How do you search for your CreativeCommons images?
I’ve written about Animoto before. It’s very intuitive, quick and easy as well as free to use when you want to create a 30 second video. For just US$3 per video or US$30 per year, you can make longer videos.
Some ways to use Animoto in the classroom:
Teaser (introducing students to a new topic)
Assessment (students put together the most important images about their learning)
Highlights (highlight the best parts of learning)
Discussion Starter (poignant images that would spark a discussion on a topic)
It took about 5 minutes to upload chosen photos, type some text, add music and render the video. This video is the highlights of the fireworks set off at midnight on January 1st 2010, on Marine Parade, Napier, New Zealand. The photos were taken from my balcony using the 55mm – 200mm lens.
The idea is simple. Take one photograph a day for the next 365 days.
I will be using my Nikon D40x and new Kodak Zi8 or whatever else I can lay my hands on. All photos will be uploaded to my Flickr 2010 365 set and then embeded in this blog. I began the 2009 365 Flickr Challenge but did not get past day 263. My photography definitely improved and this time my goal is to complete the whole 365 photo a day challenge.
January 1, 2010- December 2010.
Last year I joined the Flickr group 2009/365photos It was started in 2008 and has rolled over each year ever since. Thanks to D’Arcy Norman and Alan Levine for getting this one started and keeping it going! It will be renamed to 2010/365photos for the 2010 photo challenge.
There’s also a Flickr group for those in Education and/or Technology, EdTech 365/2010.
For all those in Education and/or Technology who are looking for a 365 group. Please tag all your images ‘edtech365/2010′ and please consider using Creative Commons licensing so that we may all benefit from these images.
Want to participate or have your own challenge? Perhaps 365 photos is too much of a commitment. How about a 52 Challenge? It’s only one photo a week.
Here are some great hints and tips for doing so:
Thanks to Silvia for starting this brilliant list of fellow Edubloggers taking part in the 2010 challenge!! Let’s support and help each other make right through to the finish!
A while back, I submitted our VoiceThread as a Digital Portfolio for consideration for the VoiceThread Digital Library. The Digital Library is a database of articles about successful VoiceThread projects. It is VoiceThread’s hope to create a resource that offers guidance and inspiration for people undertaking new projects.
I’m honoured to say that it was been accepted and is now part of a growing number of resources from inspirational Educators all over the world. I’m so very proud of my 5th Graders from Room 202, 08/09 – they did such a fantastic job with their portfolios using VoiceThread.
If you’ve not used VoiceThread before or you are looking for ideas to help you integrate VoiceThread into your classroom – then look no further: the VoiceThread Digital Library is brimming with clever ideas and resources – check it out!
And to the developers of VoiceThread – you offer such an amazing service and product to Educators – thank you for your continued generosity.
Today is the last day of the 2009/365 flickr photo challenge. I’m disappointed in myself because I made it to 263 and didn’t finish the challenge. Since October, 2009 I haven’t been as disciplined as taking a photo a day. Below is a sample of the 263 photos I did take.
Instead of lamenting failure, I’m once again challenging myself to complete the 2010/365 photo challenge.
I discovered (albeit a little late into the challenge) Daily Shoot on twitter. That’s one piece of inspiration that I’ll be relying on for the 2010/365 challenge. If you’re thinking about joining the challenge for 2010 – do it! Click on the links some more tips from some veterans of the challenge to take a photo-a-day for a whole year! Digital Photography School has become one of my favourite photography blogs. It’s site boasts a tonne of skills, tips and techniques from photographers around the world.
My other favourite photography blog, Photojojo suggest the following tips:
# Bring Your Camera Everywhere
Yes, everywhere. Get in the habit. Grocery stores, restaurants, parties, work, and school. Going to a movie theatre? Snap a pic of the flick with your phone–there are photo-ops everywhere. If you have one of those tiny tiny cameras, you have no excuse not to have it in your pocket all the time. And if you don’t? Camera phones are a great substitute.
# Make Posting Easy
You can install blog software like Movable Type or Wordpress on your own site and create an entry for each photo, but for true ease of use, try a photo sharing site. Flickr will let you post a week’s worth of photos in 2 minutes flat, and fotolog and Photoblog.com are geared toward a photo-a-day workflow. Making it fast and easy means you’re much more likely to do it.
# Vary Your Themes
Try to capture the day’s events in a single photo. Perform photographic experiments. Take a photo of someone new you meet, something you ate for the first time, or something you just learned how to do. Take a photo of something that made you smile. And don’t forget to take a photo of yourself at least once a month so you can remember how you’ve changed, too.
# Tell a Story
Use your blog entry, or your photo description, to explain what’s going on in each day’s photograph. How good did that dinner taste? What made you want to take a photo of that stranger? It’ll help you remember down the road, and it gives friends following along a better appreciation of why you took the photo you did. You don’t need to write a lot, just enough to add some color.
# Don’t Stop, No Matter What
This is perhaps the most important tip of all. You will get tired of taking a photo every single day. Some days, you will consider giving up. Don’t. The end result is worth the effort. Remind yourself why you wanted to do it in first place.
There will be times you’ll think there’s nothing interesting left to take a photo of, and times you’ll think you didn’t do anything exciting enough to take a photo of. There’s always a great photo to be made.
Get out of the house and take a walk. Or stay inside and look around. Take a photo of something important to you. Take a photo of the inside of your house so you can see how your taste has changed over the years. Take a photo of anything, just don’t stop.
N.b. It helps if you’ve told your friends about the project and asked them to follow along. Their encouragement will keep you going!
# Post early, post often
Plan on going through and posting your photos at least once a week so you don’t get backlogged and feel overwhelmed. Ideally, post every day or two. Again, spend the time up front to make sure it’s quick and easy to post. It’ll make all the difference.
Today is the first day of the last week of Semester. It was a particularly hard day – I’m not sure why but it was. The students were lethargic, unenthusiastic and as flat as pancakes. (And that was at 9.30am!!). The day didn’t get much better either.
We manage all of them the same way we manage anything: with procedures, clear expectations and with care.
Together, we drive our classroom, our SMARTBoard and our Document Camera. All three, revolve around our learning – together. That means for the most part, I’m not the only one using the technology peripherals in the classroom, we all are.
They use the SMARTBoard to show their thinking, their working out, their knowledge and their understandings to their fellow classmates and of course to me. I get to use it to highlight a teaching point, show a tutorial or video, or use with a small group that needs hands on, visual, auditory grammar practise!
They use the Document Camera to share their work and to show off things that can’t be seen clearly by 20 students crowded around it or to show their mathematical working out process or their writing that they want feedback from their peers. And then I get to use it to model what I’d like them to see, like the read aloud we’re doing in class, or the writing in my writer’s notebook or the form that needs to be filled in, or the object we want to see up close.
I want students up and out of their seats talking, laughing, sharing, showing, demonstrating, and actively learning. The technology peripherals help me do just that. I quickly realised that I was only limited by my own imagination and theirs! But it didn’t happen just like that. I needed to model, support, guide, explicitly teach and encourage students to take control of the peripherals.
It takes time but believe me, every year it’s worth it. Most of all, me, the teacher, needs to take a giant step backwards and let the students do the work.
A wise mentor teacher of mine once asked me ……..
Who’s the hardest working person in the classroom?
Then she said:
If the answer is you, then something’s not right! It should be the students that are working the hardest!
So what are the things I’ve learnt from CoETaIL Course 4 and hope to implement?
I have a much better understanding of the Backwards by design planner and I’m hoping to embed that kind of learning in the classroom with the 3-5 TAILS . I want to experiment more with project-based learning and try to keep fairly up-to-date with web2.0 tools and resources that work well in classroom and of course I’m looking forward to the final project and it’s implementation in our 5th Grade classrooms!
The spammers are getting more sneaky. The top comment sounds almost human! Now that’s a worry. Is there that much money to be made online that companies are “paying” people to read people’s blogs and post a realistic comment??
The phones, were of course, a huge hit and they enjoyed a very successful integration into our Writer’s Workshop routine.
Here’s our reflection on using the Writer’s Phones for Writing:
“They worked really well because I could hear my voice and I knew where I had to change punctuation. It even helped me see spelling mistakes.”
“It made me pay more attention to what I had written.”
“While I was reading, using the telephone, I heard extra words that I really didn’t need.”
“Even though everyone was reading, I could still hear myself because the phone makes my voice echo in my ear. Usually everyone else reading puts me off.”
Learning got messy in Room 231 today. Thanks for sharing this fabulous idea Brian!
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