I love your websiite, it's funny

While I love that comment (it shows they are coming), how to I get them to interact?

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!

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!

Tagging the Real World

http://semapedia.org/

This is a really interesting idea for linking the online and offline world. Basically create bar codes than can be read from digital photos that include a link to a wikipedia article. I have the software for my iphone and it works great, and apparently most new nokias have it built in.

However, it has taken me ages to find software for windows... and due to my scatty multicomputer setup I can't find the link (it is freeware though).

Here is the code for this site