Terribly Delicious

I am an avid delicious user. I stalk people online, steal their best stuff and then forget it.

Hence my title. I am a terrible delicious user. I am close to 400 beautifully tagged bookmarks. Great, but I wouldn't have a clue what each one was unless I actually saw the page.

The big thing is the notes field. It would let me know exactly what I was looking at before I clicked - that great French listening about weather, the amazing presentation about right angles. The problem is it is a free text field, and I tend to wibble...

I really don't want to add yet more tags (they seem to grow 2-3 a week) so I need to think about how to fill in the notes field. Any ideas? Perhaps Year, Term, Topic? Input appreciated.

Foxford Meteo

I think I am on to a winner with Foxford Meteo.

Not only have I been included on a blog, but i get twitter updates from other teachers! My advice is set up another twitter ID to protect privacy, message me (jjpadvis) then add foxford_meteo.

The kids are loving it and replies would be great. Look at the updates and you'll see they are trying to out-do each other in terms of complexity. My bet is on next week someone will add an opinion and an activity (Il fait beau - j'adore jouer au foot etc). Any replies will go down a storm!

My First Animoto!

I've seen and read a lot about animoto, so I thought I'd give it a try. I love the interface, adding images and choosing music was a breeze. It certainly beats boring death by 30 powerpoints for a writing task!

From a teaching point of view, it will be a case of getting commonly used images together in a folder (in my case: hotel, camp site, caravan, villa, holiday locations, friends, family, transport, places to visit, activities to do), teaching my learners how to export powerpoint slides as images, then letting them go and be creative!

The rendering queue does seem a little slow so a filler activity will be needed while they wait, and the need for an e-mail address to sign up begs privacy issues - there is no try out without signing up, and I'm sure most of my learners haven't a clue what their school e-mail address is! I am also wondering if our filtering system will need tweaking to allow it - if so I'd better get my request in now!

I should be doing this activity towards the end of the Summer term with Year 7, so I'll let you know how I get on.

This is my first attempt below, not bad for 5 minutes work I thought!

Why use Blogs?

If you are looking for reasons to blog, take a look at Adam Sutcliffe's recent presentation on the power of blogging for techers and learners. I am particularily impressed with the inclusion of blogs in the Excellent Literacy outcomes!



Click to play

Ajaxdaddy.com

Bonus points for the first to incorporate a widget from http://ajaxdaddy.com/ - how very web 2.0!

Thanks to http://lifehacker.com/ for the heads up!

Twitterfeed Post

Just a test for twitterfeed.com , please ignore me.

Your very own PA!

I feel very special as I have a personal assistant. She keeps track of things for me: reminders, bookmarks, contacts. She is but a twitter,
email or instant message away.

Best thing of all she is available 24 hours a day and completely free!
I've been using iwantsandy.com for 6 months now and love it! I can even subscribe to the calendar "she" creates for me by rss or iCal.

Reminders are set up in (semi) plain English - remind me in 3 days to update my blog. Sandy works her magic and figures it all out.

Have a look at www.iwantsandy.com

Sent from my iPhone

My Setup

I thought I'd share the ICT stuff I have, and how I use it!

At home: iMac G5 - last of the old non isight G5's. Wonderful software but showing its age.
. Great software for podcast creation! 

Asus EEE PC - used as my main laptop, running windows XP
iPhone - reminds me of what I need to do. Going to buy AV cable for school to show youtube on projector - does that make me bad?

School: Acer laptop - runs windows XP and loads of RM stuff. It is both a godsend and infuriating! I often have to shove my EEE PC into my bag to do anything adventurous! It works fine as a register taker, does a great job of word and powerpoint, but really gets me annoyed for file sync (my desktop looks a mess even if I clear it up). RM Tutor software is the bees knees though with control over the web and chance to do surveys!

Finally I have lots of USB drives and DVDs of backups just in case!

iCal to Rss - ouch

I create my lesson plans in iCal. Well I say that, but Bento is the engine behind it on my mac.

I am desperate to find an easy iCal to RSS tool to share learning objectives with my learners. The best I have found is netvibes, but this is not embedded. Any ideas?

My First Podcast

I bit the bullet and created my first podcast. Am I happy with the result? 50-50...

The actual process was simple - I booted up my old G5 iMac, loaded garageband and just recorded the bits of dialogue. The problem is the inbuilt iMac mic picks up all the background noise of the computer... time to invest in a microphone or perhaps use my iphone to record. Even better, I could save some pennies and by a brand new iMac:)

Uploading wasn't as obvious as a mac should be... I found it best to save the podcast to my itunes library as an mp3 then upload it.

I'll feed back if my learners find it useful.,

Blogging Toolkit

As I start to put my blog together, I thought it might be a good idea to keep a log of the tools I'm using.

A blog

I use Blogger, but other services are available. I chose Blogger as it is connected to my googlemail account I already use for work.

Somewhere to store pictures

Still undecided, picassa links to my google account but is a bit limited in terms of storage. I also use Wikimedia Commons to link to royalty free pics and save on blog storage space.

Somewhere to store video

Currently YouTube, but alas blocked in school. Looking for alternatives. [update] Going to try teachertube.net from behind the evil firewall from hell. If it doesn't work I will ask why!

Somewhere to store podcasts

Podomatic looks excellent and I look forward to playing with it over the Bank Holiday weekend.

Somewhere to store slideshows

Slideshare has nifty features, but I must remember to save my files in old-skool powerpoint format!

Sites to grab widgets, quizzes, and other pretty things from!

Widgetbox - loads of pretty widgets

Feedjit - so I know who is looking at my blog!

Mystudiyo - very pretty quiz generator

BBC - borrow the headlines, weather, tv schedule!

I'm sure this list will grow! Suggestions greatly appreciated.

Thanks to Joe Dale for his reviews of some of the above sites!