Sure enough – at 7.15am Bangkok, Thailand [...]]]> My fabulous colleagues back home in New Zealand have been enjoying the Learning@Schools09 Conference held in Rotorua.  When my good friend AllanahK tweeted that she was organising a “Matt-style” dance at the start of Wes Fryer‘s Keynote presentation, I couldn’t resist the urge to tweet back “Can I skype in?”

Sure enough – at 7.15am Bangkok, Thailand time, and 1.15pm, New Zealand time, she did just that- skyped me in so that I could join in the dance too.  It was brilliant – almost like being there.  I was able listen to Wes’s Keynote until Allanah’s battery finally died.  I wish I could have been there in personal to reconnect with old friends, make new friends, and learn new things from incredibly talented people.  Watch the video!

I originally used jing to capture the screen on my laptop (‘cos that’s all I had), then discovered that it saves as .swf. Drat – not editable (without the Pro version – funny that?).  So here’s the master genius work around I used:

Step 1:  Grab Jeff Utecht on his way out the door – (‘cos he has ScreenFlow)
Step 2:  Replay .swf on his laptop and re-capture using ScreenFlow – saves as a .mov, edit as you go
Step 3:  Import into iMovie – add titles and credits
Step 4:  Play real “Dancing with Matt” video on YouTube to capture the soundtrack using Audio Hijack Pro
Step 5:  Import audio into iMovie – adjust sound levels
Step 6:  Upload to teachingsagittarian’s YouTube channel

Did I mention that I love my mac laptop?

Like AllanahK, I couldn’t resist having a [...]]]> My good friend AllanahK just posted about an excellent find called Virtual Highway.  It’s a Google mash-up of a Google map of New Zealand and video of what the drive actually looks like. As the video plays a little car moves along the highway keeping in synch with the video.

Like AllanahK, I couldn’t resist having a tinker especially since I thought it would be a great way to share a little bit of my home country with my Grade 5 class tomorrow.  (Love the little car that drives along the map as the video runs!)

At the moment my class is exploring classroom blogs from all over the world (with a bit of a bias towards New Zealand blogs ……) because we’ve started our own class blog.  We’re looking at what other classes have on their blog to decide what we would like on ours.  If you and your class currently blog, we would love you to leave a comment and a URL on our class blog so that we can visit your classroom blog to take a look around.

We’re especially interested in any “must-haves” you think we should include on our blog.