If you need new and exciting ideas to present new ideas in the classroom, CuePrompter can be a handy tool to use. This tool is a free teleprompter which runs through your computer screen as it is used for television news with text scrolling up from the bottom of the screen. You simply copy and paste a text, set the font and screen size to large or small. You can change the color of the text and the background. When you are ready, click "start prompter" button and your screen will be a teleprompter. You can control the speed of your text and you can play it reverse or forward.  Some ideas to use this tool in class: While giving presentations, student can paste their notes on the cueprompter and read it or they can highlight the main points with this tool. Paste your reading text on the cueprompter, students can try to answer the questions as they read the text from the cueprompter. Student can read a text from the cueprompter and try to get the gist of it. You can make the screen go very fast for kids. Copy and paste a dialogue and have students dramatize it. The tool can be used to build reading fluency as students read the text aloud. This tool can be used for silent or choral reading. Students can create a commercial or a newscast.  No doubt that we will come up with more uses of this tool once we use it in class. 

We have been using Blip.tv to host quite a few CORE videos recently. We went with Blip as it allows you to embed private videos which we needed - especially with Google Video disappearing (and the quality of Google Video was pretty dire too!). CORE did need to pay to have a Pro account but it was a very reasonable price. At first I was frustrated with what I perceived to be limited options for the players that would contain the videos when they were embedded on another site. I used an older version of the player as I thought it was the only option where people wouldn’t be given a link to go back to Blip or the option of embedding the video themselves. It was only when I sent a message off to the help desk about removing the ‘More’ button at the end of the video that I found out just how customisable the newer player can be. I am able to choose which buttons to place underneath the video, what site I want to have the video link to in the bottom corner and a host of other things about how the video plays. I can also set the colour scheme for the player and can upload a thumbnail image of my choice that is visible before playing the video. They have a list of all the different ways the player can be customised on a wiki (need to log in to access it so I won’t link to it here). I certainly found this very handy and thought others using Blip might want to know where to go to do the same. To make your own customised player in Blip which you can then save as a preset and use for future videos, get to the settings by going to your Dashboard and then clicking on ‘Manage Show Players’ under the Quick Tasks heading on the right. Here is an example of a modified player - I just uploaded a brief clip of how the sliders in the EPS2.0 tool work. Note the branding on the player and the link back to the EPS website. The video quality isn’t that high as I cut it down in size to upload quickly but you can get the idea. This could be an option for schools wanting to have videos hosted cheaply but without worrying about advertising or people being directed towards other sites or inappropriate videos after viewing any embedded video.

iText Express Website iText Express is a refined text editor with support for header/footer, footnotes/endnotes, page layout and numbers, multiple columns, hyperlinks, lists, bullets, tables, bookmarks, customizable guidelines, background color, and vertical writing. Embed pictures, movies, spreadsheets, pdf etc. Open .epub files in RTFD. What do you think of iText Express?

Grammar is the one of the most important aspect of teaching and learning a language. It is also one of the more difficult aspects to teach well and motivate students to learn. Today, I would like to share some technology enhanced tools for practicing grammar. Grammar Ninja is a cool and a fun game that helps you practice parts of the speech. You can choose among three different levels to work. In the game, you choose the correct parts of the speech as you read each sentence. Road to Grammar is a site that offers quizzes, games and extra practice for grammar with instant feedback and explanations. Free Rice is a game where you need to find the right definitions of the given words. For each right answer, the site donated 10 grains of rice through the World Food Programme to help end hunger. NoRedInk  offers help with apostrophes, subject-verb agreement, comma issues, sentence fragments, run-on sentences, and commonly confused words. The Adjective Detective is another game that teaches you what the adjectives are. You can take the quiz and play the game. Grammaropolis is a tool to learn different parts of the speech. There are different characters that stand for an adverb, pronoun, preposition, noun, action verb etc. Those parts of the speech characters interact with each other just as they are interacting in a real sentence. You can watch videos of each character, take quizzes listen to the songs, read books that feature the characters and play games. You can play word sort or colour the characters. The Grammar Practice Park offers different games on different parts of the grammar to play and practice your grammar skills. Fun English Games provides a range of free interactive exercises and practice activities that are perfect for helping students learn English Daily Grammar offers grammar teaching tools that are about punctuation, parts of speech and the common mistakes in grammar. It consists of 440 lessons and 88 quizzes. British Council has many grammar games that provide fun activities to practice English with word order games, gap fill games. Hope you and your students enjoy playing those games.

I seem to be having a bit of a run on interesting behaviour on my wikis. I was on my educational software wiki today and discovered a YouTube video had been added to the front page with the title ‘Latest resource’. Not wanting to be too territorial, I checked out what it was about. It was a short promo video for a new book on Web 2.0 that is available for purchase.  I don’t appreciate people using the front page of my wiki as an advertisement space so I have deleted the video. I guess what is really rude is the way it was posted in a way to look as if it was me adding a new resource to page and no message to me first to check it was OK. At least whoever posted it (the history showed that the person wasn’t logged in when they edited so I can’t trace it back) thinks that my wiki is popular enough to warrant the effort!

I am super excited and proud to say that our applications have been shortlisted for ELTons Award 2013 in the "digital innovation" category. Thank you very much to everyone who has made more than 200 children a nominee for this award! A little bit about the project … Our children in kindergarten have been drawing and coloring pictures for their own iPhone/iPad/Android applications. They are also recording their voices for the characters. These applications are the first and the only ones in the world that are created by children.  Fingers crossed and good luck to everyone! I also would like to congratulate "The Round" online publishing for being nominated! I am proud to be a part of it too! 

Flash Page Flip Website Flash Page Flip lets you make and publish your own publications (Online Catalog, Digital Brochure, Flipping Book, Interactive Flyer, Virtual Magazine, Flip Album etc.) by writing JPEG or SWF formatted pages names on XML file. What do you think of Flash Page Flip?

I have to admit that recently I have not been ‘playing’ with as many new tools as I have done previously. I think that this is partially because the tools I do use on a regular basis meet most of my online needs.  I don’t often see things that either surpass what I am using already or excite me from an eduational standpoint. There is also the fact that I have been having a bit of a break from my online life of late. Still, every now and then, I have a spate of looking around to see what I’ve been missing and today has been one of those days. Here are some of the things I’ve been trying out. ShareTabs This is a service where you can enter the URL addresses of a number of websites and it will turn them into a set of tabs (these will apear as sub-tabs within one of your tabs/windows) which can be accessed from a single hyperlink. There is a visual preview of these sites on the landing page when people follow the link. I tried it out by making all of my website links into a single ShareTab link. I think this will certainly reduce the cluster in my email signatures!! Postrank This is an RSS tool that prioritises the top posts in any feed based on the number of comments, saves to Delicious and links to the post among other measures. This means that you can identify the most popular posts on the site very quickly and can get a widget that shows this. When I put in my blog feed, this is what it came up with: I’m not sure if I would have called these my favourite posts but I found this a very interesting exercise. Thanks to the guys at the Tek blog for the following: Shape Collage A simple application that will turn photos that you drag into the interface into a collage - you can choose from a variety of shapes. It is a simple programme that does exactly what it is supposed to. I did wonder if the excellent Google’s Picasa software (now available for Mac and PC) might be better to use to do this on many occassions as you can do things like reposition images within the collage and resize individual photos. Still, it won’t do some of the shapes easily that Shape Collage does so I guess it is just personal choice. Picasa also does a lot more than just collages and maybe it is useful to have a dedicated piece of software for this purpose. You let me know your thoughts. Enough for this evening. I will keep playing and see if I can find anything else of interest!

FontStruct Website FontStruct is an online font-building tool using basic geometric shapes in a grid. Fonts can be downloaded as TrueType fonts and used in Mac or Windows applications. FontStruct is also a source of fresh fonts available under flexible, liberal CreativeCommons licenses. An ideal environment to teach the basics of type design. What do you think of FontStruct?

Hello all!  Yes - I know - there has been a great deal of nothing happening on this blog as of late Hopefully, I will be able to get back into regular updates! Nelson ICT conference I thought I would blog this time around about interesting discussions that I had at the Nelson ICT cluster day I attended on Friday. The great thing about these events is that I get to catch up with people from all over the place that get flown in to be part of the programme on the day. I had great chats with Derek Wenmoth (Christchurch), Dorothy Burt (Auckland), Allanah King (Nelson), and Rachel Boyd (Nelson). Data collection and league tables One of the biggest topics of conversation was around the National government’s implementation of national standards that they will then be collecting data against and the issue of whether the media will be able to get hold of this to create league tables. I have already expressed my views around league tables in my comment on Artichoke’s blog. Having seen them in action in the UK, I think they can be a very destructive force in education. What came out of our conversation was that data is not something that schools should be scared of. Dorothy pointed out that she wants to know the outcomes for students in each class within her school and if one teacher is producing better results that another teacher, she wants to analyse the methods that teacher is employing to see what it is that makes them successful. I agree that the teaching profession can react negatively against collecting data; especially when asked to use that data to reflect on their teaching practice. I can see that there is a place for authentic and formative data collection (though there may need to be more time allocated for busy teachers to get these completed - I remember trying to tidy off my running records!) My concern is the publishing of data to the public when not viewed within the context of that school. Just as I think comparing students against each other can be very counter-productive, I think schools shouldn’t be compared without knowing all the facts. We try to look at the gains a student has made rather than simply ranking them and I think that is how schools should also be judged. A school with low results nationally may have made huge gains but that would not be reflected in a league table. Other things that Dorothy touched on, both in her keynote address and during our later conversation intrigued me and got me thinking. I’ll just put a summary of some of them here and invite you to comment. Thoughts about place of e-learning We are always being asked to show that using e-learning is improving outcomes for students. Why do we always have to show that it is better than the methods we are using now? Surely if we are getting the same levels of attainment while providing students with a 21st century learning environment then the value added has been that students will be equipped to work in a modern world. Expanding our thinking in relation to cyber safety Schools feel that they are meeting their requirements in relation to cyber safety if they have internet use agreements and get parent’s permission to put content online. What about what happens to that content when a teacher leaves a school and takes the passwords with them or the site just gets abandoned but left up online? How long should images and work of children remain up? Who is monitoring this? Imagine a scenario where a vindictive secondary student finds work of another student from when they were seven on an old blog or wiki and uses this to humiliate them in a networking site such as Bibo. We tend to focus on paedophile dangers but that is a very minor risk. We need to be thinking to the future about what will happen to all this stuff we are posting. You can see Dorothy’s blog post to explore this further. I think this is an area that should be considered when putting together policies. You only have to see the number of blogs and wikis that have been left up but are no longer active to realise that this is an issue! To moderate or not to moderate blog comments Dorothy does not moderate blog comments on any of their school blogs. This goes against the advice that I normally give to people getting started with blogging. I was interested to hear her reasoning. The children comment a lot on each other’s blog posts as well as having community comment. Dorothy believes that it creates a barrier for people to leave a comment if they don’t see the comment appear when they submit it. I have to say that I find it irritating as an adult when I leave a comment somewhere only to see that it will appear after being moderated (particularly on adult teacher blogs!). They have only had three problems with comments. One was because it used text language which the school has decided is not acceptable within school blogs. The other two were negative comments - in one a teacher sucked and in the other someone in one of the photos looked funny. They have been blogging for a long time and consider the risk of problems to be low enough that the need to encourage comments through showing them instantly is more important. That isn’t to say that they don’t have systems in place to make sure that anything negative is picked up very quickly. The teacher has to subscribe to the RSS for the comments and Dorothy is also subscribed. In this way, the comments are closely monitored and are taken down very quickly if necessary. This is a very interesting approach and I can see why they would do it that way. They are lucky to have a supportive community that accepts this. I know that for some schools, explaining that comments will be moderated is the only way to ’sell’ the use of blogs to the BOT and community. What are your thoughts? Etoys - free educational download I also dropped into an Etoys workshop during the day. When I heard the title I thought it sounded familiar and sure enough I had the application installed on my Mac already (free download for all platforms). I must have downloaded it, had a play and then instantly forgotten about it again Etoys allows you to build objects and programme them to behave in certain ways. Along the way you have to learn about maths and other subject areas. This programme reminds me of similar tools such as Alice and Scratch that also involve programming characters. It certainly got my grey matter buzzing trying to work my way through challenges and I think this could be great in the classroom. My own resources Suzielinks.com gets moved and updated On a completely different topic, I have been working on changing my suzieslink.com site over to a free hosting provider while maintaining my domain name. I think this is going really well and I am tidying things up and improving as I go. While only half finished so far, you can see my efforts at http://www.suzieslinks.com  There are a huge number of useful links and resources for teachers. Check it out and be aware that the parts not yet hyperlinked will be updated in the very near future. Well that turned into a bit of a long post!! Must be making up for over a month of silence.