In just few short minutes Chris has just taught the entire room some very useful tips for searching “smarter” with Google, how to use basic search syntax and Google Advance Search.

Chris’s session was extremely interactive – he had us all searching and learning in a fun way.  The Google quiz was great – I like the fact that you needed to apply your search techniques – great for doing with our students – and the last question was excellent because it required a deeper level of thinking/synthesizing – kinda like Blooms Taxonomy thinking.

I especially enjoyed the Spaghetti growing on Trees Video and the link to the Tree Octopus website bought back memories of my entire Year 7 class a couple of years ago being completely fooled by this site when we were learning about the validity of websites and information on the internet and how do you know.

Even more informative was the discussion we had about Wikipedia.  In just a few minutes (again) Chris was able to explain the ins and outs of Wikipedia’s questionable validity and truthfulness in such a way that the majority of us could go back and explain the exact same thing to our students.

This session was fabulous practical session and I am so grateful to have been reminded about the Google for Educators website (bookmarked in my delicious account but certainly not looked at closely).  Even better are the resources we now have on our ISB Cert. Ed. Tech. & Informational Literacy wiki, (COETAIL.Asia) available at our fingertips (and we’ve experienced them) to help us teach ourselves and our students what’s real and how do you know and how can you find out and can you tell the difference?

Thanks Chris – great way to spend the afternoon and thanks so much for sharing your expertise with us.  Hope Kim and Jeff ask you back for another session!

The extremely wonderful Kim Cofino, graciously hosted ISB’s first K-12 Online Conference LAN party last Saturday morning, in downtown Bangkok. She’d already downloaded most of the videos, set up the TV and sound-system AND had breakfast on the table with helpful supplies from us all.  Of course I must mention that Kim has a presentation along with another fabulous educator, Jen Wagner in this years K-12 Online Conference.  “Connecting Classroom Across Continents: Planning and Implementing Globally Collaborative Projects” in the Kicking It Up a Notch strand.

The conversation was flowing, rich and authentic as we shared with our fellow colleagues what we thought might be of interest to them to watch.  The two presentations decided upon were Chris Betcher’s  and Alice Barr, Bob Sprankle and Cheryl Oak’s Keynote in the Getting Started strand.  This was to be the 3rd time I’d seen Chris Betcher‘s presentation “I Like Delicious Things: an introduction to tagging and folksonomies“ and STILL I learnt more tips from it.  The amazing Silvia Tolisano skyped in from Jacksonville, Florida and did a fabulous job of explaining the difference between delicious and tagging to one very keen teacher sitting in the room who really wanted to understandwhat she’d just witnessed in a presentation.

Our LAN party was so successful and so authentic that it was decided we just could leave it at one party.  This format is now set to become a regular occurrence, rotating between venues close to school and venues downtown.  It will always be open for everyone, anytime they feel they can make it. There’s a wealth of talent and knowledge and ideas out there just waiting for us to tap into. And the conversations that arise out of just watching a presentation for 12- 15 minutes is phenomenal! I really can’t think of a better way to receive personal Professional Development.  What’s even better is the  K-12 Online Conference is available anytime convenient to you.  Heck, there’s still K-12 Online Conference 2006 and 2007 presentations on my list to watch that I still have access to!

Here’s to the next LAN party in two weeks time – if you live in Bangkok – hope to  see you there – if not, and you think you might want to skype in and be part of the conversation, we’d love to hear from you!

I wonder which presentations we’ll watch this time?

This morning on twitter started by @Riptide_Furse …………………

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………….. and ended in a skype call between Fred and myself where he shared what Flickr tools he presented to his teachers at the workshop and their various ways of being used.

Here are just some of the things Fred so generously shared with me ………

1. fd’s Flickr Toys

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This site is full of great tools to use with flickr photos. You don’t need to sign up (athough you can if you’d like) and within a few minutes you can create the most professional looking motivational poster. Here’s my 2 minute effort:

Suggestions for use in the classroom:

• Have students take a photo that represents school motto
• Use Jigsaw / Mosaic Maker with photos from around the school/community representing maths concepts (ie Shapes, angles etc)
• Use Warholizer for Start of Year Activity with student photos
• Spice up class blog with Cartooniser, Framer, Billboard, Slideshow, Writer (list is almost endless possibilities with these gadgets!)

2. Befuddlr

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Use in the classroom?
We talked this over for a bit and decided that you could have some major conversations about which photos would be easy or hard to un-bedfuddlr.

• What would make a picture harder to organise back to its original state?
• Fun problem solving activity to do for fast finishers
• An activity on a rainy day
• A taskboard activity
  

3. Dumpr.net

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You don’t need to sign up (but you can if you’d like) and within 2 minutes I managed to create this …………
A museum-photo of our Class Mascot Kawekakea meeting Ewan McIntosh at ULearn07 earlier this year.

_{Created with dumpr.net – fun with your photos}

Most of the tools in Dumpr.net are similar to fd’s flickr toys but there are a couple of different ones. Don’t mix up the url with Dumpr.com like I did –

Use in the classroom?

• Use Photo in Art Museum, Jigsaw, Make photos look old, Stone Mosaic, for Presentations, blog posts etc
• Use Photo to Sketch, Alien Vision for creating online avatars, profile photos etc
• Use Photo inside a photo for problem solving puzzles

4. Other Possibilities for the Classroom

• If you’re looking for ways to work REAL LIFE editing into writing
  What’s wrong with these pictures Apostrophes Quote abuse
• Spell with Flickr
• Animated GIFs with Flickr

Got heaps of time on your hands? You could check out this long, long, long list of The Great Flickr Tools Collection!

And if that wasn’t enough, those great folks from Commoncraft have released this:

Online Photo Sharing in Plain English

Click here to view the embedded video.

So, what are your favourite things to do with flickr?