I just found a great page of resources on how to present well - especially with Powerpoint or a similar slideshow tools. Here is the link to the wiki page. This video was on the page and was made by students - I think it is really well done. more about "informationfluency » Digital Storytel…", posted with vodpod Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

I have posted a couple of times about using Flickr and associated tools. I am running a workshop on this topic tomorrow so have created a handout with a summary of all aspects of Flickr and some educational examples. some of this content is replicated on my wiki page but it goes into far more detail. I have embedded a Scribd copy of the document on my Flickr wiki page as well as uploading the PDF file for you to download from there. I am reasonably happy with it! If you can find any errors, let me know so I can fix them up As it says at the bottom of each page, I am happy for it to be used by anyone else as long as the footer is kept in place. Enjoy!   http://educationalsoftware.wikispaces.com/Flickr Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

Cameroid is just a little fun tool to use in conjunction with a webcam. For those of us in the Mac world, we have had PhotoBooth to play with for quite some time. This online tool gives the same power to anyone with a webcam. I enjoyed playing with the effects, filters, distorts, scenes and frames. You can then download your efforts and save to your computer. One possible use in the classroom is that kids could put themselves into a scene and then write a story based on it (such as me as a monkey). Below are a couple of my pics (and no I am not scared of making a fool of myself in the name of blogging!) Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

I have been feeling rather sad this morning as I have watched a few videos about Randy Pausch and I just wanted to comment on his powerful messages the day after he finally lost his battle with pancreatic cancer. I watched the movie of his last lecture not long after it was posted last year in September and you can see it here: http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=the+last+lecture&hl=en&sitesearch=# I ended up watching the entire 108 minutes of the video without being bored. He was a really remarkable guy! This video was watched 1000000 times in the first month of being online. It is now a best selling book titled ‘The Last Lecture’. There is a Wikipedia page devoted to Randy which you can go and have a look at here. It has a few of the better known quotes from the video including: "The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They are there to stop the OTHER people!" — from The Last Lecture Hear hear! One of Art Costa’s ‘Habits of the Mind’ is perseverance and we need to be helping children to develop this attribute.  When in a classroom, I used the ‘Learning pit’ idea to help children understand that frustration at points in the learning process is perfectly normal. Recently, on a school visit to Viscount School in Auckland, I saw a classroom teacher that asks students to hold up the number of fingers that represent where students are in terms of new learning (1 to 4 on the diagram). Clinton Golding also talks about building up resilience with kids which I blogged about at http://sharetheaddiction.edublogs.org/2007/12/07/clinton-golding-on-developing-thinking-classrooms/. "If we only ask children to lift light ‘thinking weights’ we can’t expect them to develop their ‘thinking muscles’. We therefore need to make things just a little too hard for them at times where the children don’t know the answer AND don’t know how to solve the answer." Then children begin to develop strategies for dealing with those ‘brick walls’. I think another important aspect of making this happen is to accept and even value the failures that happen while working towards goals both as teachers and students. In the video, it shows that Randy had a special award for the students that failed in the most spectacular way during the year. His students often created the most amazing things due to the atmosphere he created through this acceptance of failure while still expecting students to continue working towards goals and setting high expectations. "…when you see yourself doing something badly and nobody’s bothering you to tell you anymore, that’s a very bad place to be. Your critics are the ones telling you they still love you and care." — from The Last Lecture I sometimes wonder how well we give constructive feedback in schools. Teachers often give their students pointers on how to improve their work but how often do we as teachers talk about our failures in the classroom in staff meetings and use that as the basis for discussion? Teachers are often intimidated and threatened by the idea of having another adult in the classroom while they teach but surely we should be embracing this kind of opportunity so that we can get honest feedback from peers. I think a lot of this stems from a lack of trust between teachers in a school which goes back to the importance of building great relationships between staff. We should all be open to the idea that we could be doing things better. Recently, I have worked on some bits and pieces and then sent my work out to others to critique which they did with many ideas on improvements. The changes that I made as a result meant a much higher quality output - I didn’t necessarily agree to every suggestion but I welcomed them all. At times, I felt myself responding defensively to some ideas but then I tried to take a step back and take my ego out of it. I didn’t always completely succeed but when I was willing to be flexible and try making changes, the result was always much better in the end.  I think school leaders are getting too bogged down in administration details to always be able to fulfill this mentoring role in classrooms or to be able to develop the level of trust with staff to the point they welcome this kind of input and I think this is a problem that needs to be addressed. Anyway - I spent the morning sniffling into tissues as I watched a series of videos about Randy. I have embedded a short and sweet video of him addressing a group of students in May of this year at their graduation ceremony: Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

I decided to come back to this post and add some text for those that might want to know what this audio comment is all about before listening. Basically, Utterz is a tool that allows you to use your mobile phone to post audio, texts, pictures and video to their website which you can then have linked to your blog so it will automatically cross post. You ring an NZ phone number to leave an audio comment and send texts, pics and videos to an email address from your phone. I tried out all the options and they all worked extremely well. I think this is an exciting tool to use when out of the classroom. Mobile post sent by suzievesper using Utterz.  Replies.  mp3 Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

I had this picture on my phone so thought I would continue my mobile to web experimentation. I have now programmed into my phone the email addresses that I can send pictures and video to so that they automatically get added to my Flickr account. There is another email address where it will then also be added to my blog as I did on this instance though I can’t seem to get the titles and descriptions to show up that I entered into my phone (I am adding all of that after the fact). Still, even if I can’t get those to work, this is very useful! I am beginning to look at my phone in a whole different light (and wishing even more that I could afford an iPhone!). 18-07-08_0928 Originally uploaded by suzievesper Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

Your kids have made a video and you want that perfect music track to add to the movie but you know that you shouldn’t use a commercially produced music track off of one of your CDs. What to do? There are plenty of ‘podsafe’ music resources on the web and I some listed on the Podcast page of my wiki. I have now just found another great source of music that it is legal to download and use (as long as you stay within the confines of the creative common licence). I found it while I was watching a video by Michael Wesch and my husband called out from the next room asking what music I was listening to. I jumped to the end of the video and, sure enough, the details of the song were in the credits and it came from a website called Jamendo. I went and checked it out and was pretty impressed with the way the site was organised and the quality of some of the music that it on it. You can embed a widget from an album that you like so I have one included below (I particularly like the first and third song). I will be using this site a lot I think when making multimedia productions. Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

Introduction BLENNZ ClusterOne of the clusters that I have become the national facilitator for is the BLENNZ cluster (Blind and Low Vision Education) which has facilitators across the country. I have so much to learn about this area of education having always worked in the mainstream and not having any children with vision needs in my classroom. Therefore, I consider myself lucky that I have been able to work with Chrissie Butler for a few hours this week who has just started as a Wellington based facilitator for the cluster. This also led to me joining in with a full day training session around an LMS called My Source Matrix which is designed with accessibilty in mind. While learning about the software was useful, it was the general information about basic web design principles for accessibility that I found particularly interesting. Demonstration of surfing with a Screen Reader We had Kylee join us for the session who is legally blind. She demonstrated what surfing the web is like using a screen reader application. She chose one site that was designed using My Source Matrix and is therefore great for accessibility and the new online Loto site which was not very accessible for her at all. It was amazing watching someone navigate this way - the sheer speed that she listened to the computer audio of the screen reader was gob smacking - I could barely make out the individual words at all at that speed. She had to slow this down so the sighted amongst us could make out what was being said. Kylie had a number of points about how sites can ensure that they are accessible when using these kinds of readers which I have outlined below. There is a downloadable newsletter from the MOE that includes information about screenreaders. Kylie was using the Jaws screenreader which is around $1500 NZ! There are freeware screenreader options: Thunder is a screenreader for PC and Mac OX has a screenreader built into the operating system itself called VoiceOver which I had a go with this evening (and failed rather miserably to really get the hang of it) Use heading styles One way is by having clear heading styles built into the page which also ‘flow’ logically. A reader can be used to browse through these headings so that the user can quickly find a section of the website that they want to explore in more detail. If you are creating a document in Word that you want to convert to html for the web, you should use the heading styles within word rather than simple enlarge a font and change the formatting to make it look like a heading. This means that it will retain this structure when converted so as to make it better for a reader. Many web design software (and wikis) have built in heading styles that you should use as well. Images as headings are therefore not recommended as they do not provide this structure. Hyperlinking correctly The thing that was really stressed was the importance of having hyperlinks that can make sense on their own and are very descriptive. The popular habit of having ‘Click here’ as a hyperlink is not useful for those using screen readers as you can list all the hyperlinks on a page in alphabetical order using the reader and ‘click here’ does not give any information about what you are going to click on. The information about where the hyperlink is going to take you should be in the hyperlink itself and not the surrounding text. I’ll give a copule of examples to link to my resource wiki to illustrate what I mean. How NOT to Hyperlink for accessibility To find resources on a range of web 2.0 tools from my wiki, click here.  (hyperlink itself gives no useful info on where it links to) Click here for my wiki containing links to web 2.0 resources. (while the link contains a little more info, it is still not enough and would not be easy to find in an alphabetical list - especially with a lot of other ‘Click here’ links on the same page. An appropriate way to hyperlink for accessibility You can find a range of web 2.0 resources on my Web 2.0 and Software wiki. (descriptive and easy to find in an alphabetical list) Alternative text for images and mulimedia Another thing to make sure of is that all images that you load to a website have alternative text sitting behind them. On many websites (including Interact) you can enter alternative text for an image when uploading it to the site. This is also good for people with slow internet connections that might have images turned off when browsing. It also means that when a reader is reading the contents , someone without sight can still get an understanding of what those images contain. This also applies for when using graphs on a page. You should also have text that explains the key findings of the graph. The also suggest that you have transcripts where possible for multimedia such as videos. Accessible PDFs We also talked about the fact that PDFs are not low vision friendly. Basically, PDF files are an image of a document so screen readers can find these very difficult to read. I felt guilt as I listened thinking of the number of PDF files I upload to my wikispaces! Still, you can make a PDF file more accessible by creating ‘tagged’ PDFs where the tag provides a structural, textual representation of the PDF. You can find information on the WebAIM website on how to make accessible PDFs. Making forms in Word Kylie also talked about trying to fill in forms that have been created using tables in Word. She said that these are pretty much unusable for her but if people use the form function to create the form, then it is accessible. You can learn about how to use the form funcion in Word on this site. Tidying up html when pasting from Word One interesting thing we were shown is that when you copy and paste text from a word document into a website, it has a lot of unnecessary html code regarding some of the formatting within the word document which can throw some screen readers. The software we were using on the day had a tool included to clean up this kind of code but this is something just to be aware of when doing it in general. You can paste it in and then choose to view the html source in order to see what I am talking about. Interestingly, I had Office 2008 so when I pasted in the text, the code was clean as they have improved this in the latest Office releases. Getting your website tested The BLENNZ cluster have set up a team of Tech Angels from some of their low vision students and Dave Merton and Chrissie Butler said that they are often willing to give sites a test drive for accessibility. I am already planning to send them the links to a couple of my online spaces to see how they go though I think they may not pass with flying colours! I may have to do a bit of rethinking!! Final thoughts I found access to this kind of information very interesting and a worthwhile exercise and it is something that those of us that are lucky enough to have sight and hearing need to be aware of. Resources we create should be available for everyone that wants to make use of them, not just the 80% of the population that have no issues with accessing sites. It was inspiring watching someone make use of the web using a screen reader. It was also really interesting to learn about hardware interfaces for those with vision needs such as refreshable braille readers and braille keyboards. It blew my pre-conceptions about braille reading out of the water watching someone read just as quickly as I do with braille. This has opened up a whole new area of learning for me and I look forward to finding out more. Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

I have come across two very interesting web 2.0 tools in the last couple of weeks that could make blogging more attractive to both teachers writing blogs and to the community who read blogs. Posterous - using email to write blogs This is an extremely simple concept. Anyone can get a blog going by sending an email to post@posterous.com. This email is converted into a blog post on a site that is automatically setup for your email address. Every time you send another email from the same email address it will be converted and added to this website as the latest post. Even better is the fact that if you send photo, mp3 or file attachments, these will be automatically added in a very web-friendly format for people to view or listen to online. I tried it out and the results of this can be seen at http://suzie_ogyqs.posterous.com/ You will notice that the name of my site is not that userfriendly. If I had set up an account BEFORE sending in my first email, I could have chosen the part of the URL that goes before posterous.com. As it is, the first time I logged into Posterous after sending my first email, it gave me the chance to choose my own URL so you will see when you click on the link above, it redirects to suzievesper.posterous.com. Nourish - subscribing to blogs via email Many of the parent communities we work with are not all that familiar with technologies such as RSS. However, most people have email and will check this regularly. Nourish allows you to turn a feed (or a combination of feeds) into something that people can subscribe to by email. You can add a button to your website where people can click on and add their email addresses into to subscribe. You can also add addresses in yourself so that those people will get the email newsletter. People will be able to unsubscribe by clicking a link in their email if they don’t want to receive these emails. This would also be great for someone who wants to keep check on the activity happening in online spaces such as a school ICT lead teacher or a principal. They could combine all the feeds from the teacher blogs/ wikis and have these being sent as a digest to their email. I am going to add a button for people to subscribe to this blog very shortly! Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

Introduction I have been playing with a number of presentation tools in the last few days. It all started with a message from Jon Johnson asking why the links in my ‘ICT Examples in Education’ presentation that I have uploaded to SlideShare don’t work. This has been a bug bear for me recently as hyperlinks used to work in SlideShare but don’t seem to anymore. I left a message on their online forum and had a response to say that this is a known issue and that they are working on it. I decided to explore other options again and this was the beginning of many hours on the net over the weekend. I still like SlideRocket but as this is in invite only beta at the moment, I decided to not focus my efforts there. I also revisited CogDog’s presentation on story telling tools as I was playing around SO…here are some of the tools I tried and presentations I either created within them or found by others who had used the tool. 280 Slides A virtual buddy first alerted me to this on Twitter and I have to say that it is a lovely little application. It is built to look like Keynote (Mac application) but is online and open to anyone. It doesn’t have some of the bells and whistles at this point with no animations, audio or transitions but the interface is super easy to use and it really feels like you are using sofware from your own computer. One thing to be a wary of is changing the theme after you have already created a number of slides. It seemed to then shift some of the content around on the slide and some of the pictures seemed to disappear and had to be added again. Also, there is no hyperlinking options at the moment which is the main thing I was looking for but having emailed feedback to the team, they promised that hyperlinking is on its way (maybe as soon as next week!). I love the fact that I can embed a web video from places such as YouTube and that I can download my presentation as a Powerpoint. I set up this presentation below for a session I did on RSS and I used this online in full screen mode with no problems at all. AuthorStream I had played with this quite a long time ago but revisited it as I experimented. Again, I was impressed with this tool. It allows for animations on the slides and hyperlinks work perfectly. I will be uploading my ICT Examples in Education presentation to this site. Note: uploading is proving a little problematic - where is the perfect tool! I have embedded an example from their site instead. Uploaded on authorSTREAM by bebeee MyPlick I have not yet tried making one of these myself but I am quite impressed at how easy it appears to be to combine and sync slides with audio using this tool. I have embedded an example I found on the site. Tips for Getting Others To Buy Into E-learning Tags: leadership "professional development" elearning "Roger’s Adoption of Innovation Curve" I have more tools to come but this will do for this post! Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.