I realised the other day that I put the wrong Firefox Add-on in my earlier post on how to get YouTube videos. I should have been Download Helper and not Video Downloader.I used to use Video Downloader but it stopped working - sorry about the confusion. I will edit my earlier post to fix the error there as well. Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

This is my first attempt to use UStream along with a free application for adding effects to your videos called CamTwist. In the video, I talk about two other applications Spanning Sync (to sync between iCal and Google Calender) and GooSync (to sync between mobile and Google Calendar). What do you think of this attempt? Am I really an angel?? Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

Here I am comfortably housed in my new home at Edublogs and I thought that my first post here would be to explain the reasons for my move. No ‘Next Blog’ - This has always been an issue in Blogger. If anyone clicks on Next Blog at the top of your blog, they could end up somewhere less than desirable within a couple of clicks. Edublogs is designed for education and there is no danger or possibility of this happening and no ‘Next Blog!’ Attractive templates -  Edublogs is built on WordPress technology and has a large number of templates (over 50) to choose from for your blog. It also allows you to make certain modifications to themes such as changing the image header. It was great to be given the exact dimensions of this header as well so I didn’t have to guess the desired size the way I did in Blogger. Great technical support - I have already posted a couple of questions to the forum and have had lightning fast replies. There is also a great blog that shows you how to do almost anything that you would need. Ability to embed all types of code - this was the one that stopped me from making this change earlier. Edublogs did not let you embed certain types of code such as iFrame used by a lot of web 2.0 tools due to security worries. They have recently changed this policy and I can now embed almost anything that I want to. I need to be able to do this on a blog that writes about Web 2.0 technologies. Designed for teachers - this is a blog tool specifically designed for teachers and the tools and the help are specifically molded to this purpose. Ease of moving - I was able to migrate all of my blog posts from Blogger with a few clicks. It was a very simple process to bring my content with me. There are a few drawbacks to using Edublogs that I feel I should point out as well if you are considering the move: You are unable to edit the html of the templates which means that you are unable to put code from Google Analytics or other monitoring services into your template. UPDATE: Thanks to people who left comments and pointed out that you can use a built-in plugin to add Google Analytics. I still would like to be able to use other tools from sites such as MyBlogLog which do need access to the code so I’ll look forward to the addition of this feature to Edublogs. Edublogs is seldom listed as a blogger platform when trying to set up links between your blog and other web 2.0 services. I am still trying to set up a link to my Google Docs account - I’ll let you know how that goes (and how to do it if I manage it ) Otherwise, I am very happy with my new home. The back end of the blog looks a little different to Blogger but doesn’t take too long to get the hang of. Instead of the ‘Layout’ tab in Blogger, you go to ‘Presentation’ in Edublogs. Posts are handled in two different tabs called ‘Write’ and ‘Manage’ rather than being under the one ‘Posts’ in Blogger. Basically, there are no major issues and I’d recommend the change. Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

Today I put the finishing touches on my resource page on Flickr for teachers on my wiki.  I have included a number of ways that you can use Flickr in an educational context as well as links to tutorials and other tools that can work with Flickr. I am going to put a very brief summary here of some of the types of examples so it would pay to check out the wiki page to see an in-depth coverage of this topic. Flickr to Share what is happening in the classroom This is the most basic use for Flickr. Upload pictures of activities, displays or examples of work for others to view and to share ideas. Use the Note Feature in Flickr for Interactivity Flickr has the ability to add notes to parts of your image that will open in a pop-up window when you mouse over the area where you have placed the note. This can be used to ‘embed’ writing and information into your images. The only disadvantage is that the pop-up note feature only functions within Flickr itself and you can’t embed the images into a wiki or blog and maintain the notes. It is easy enough to have a link to the Flickr page however. The example to the left shows using this to create an online and interactive mihi (information about your background and heritage for non-New Zealanders). It can also be used for labeling, instructional writing or having information about each child within a group picture. It would be great if you could leave a comment on this blog post with other ways you might use this.   Using Flickr for Digital Storytelling There are groups on Flickr where people submit photos that tell stories in 5 photographic frames. A New Zealand teacher with the Flickr username Hey Milly has created a group specifically for children to post their photo stories to and the example below was on this Flickr group.  Using Flickr to Learn About Other Places There is a map tool on Flickr that allows you to save images from your Flickr photostream into locations on a world map. This is not only handy for when you travel but can be great if you want to find images from other parts of the world if you are learning about them in class. You can ask to see the results on the map from everyone’s images and can then use pictures from these places. Using Flickr as a Storage Site that Works with Other Tools Flickr released to the public what is called its API. Other online tool developers where then able to use this to allow you to build connections between your account with them and your Flickr account. This saves you uploading the same pictures into all the different tools. An example of this is Big Huge Labs where you can make your Flickr photos into all kinds of things such as the motivational poster on the right. Searching Flickr Many people who upload their photos to Flickr make them public and apply a Creative Commons license to them meaning that you are legally able to use them as long as you cite your source. There are tools to search for these type of pictures in Flickr with search engines such as CompFight, Flickr Storm and FlickRiver.  You can also use the advanced search options within Flickr to do a Creative Commons search. See the wiki page for more detailed information on Flickr searches. There are tutorials and more examples within each category on the wiki page. Enjoy using Flickr! Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

OK - it is now 2:30am in the morning and I am still sitting here like an idiot (school holidays at least) and I have become quite excited about a tool that I have just been messing about with called Brickabox to the point that I feel I need to blog about it. Basically, it allows you create your very own YouTube or other resource site by helping you to build a similar interface and then start populating it with content (there are six ready made templates such as video sites or map sites) or you can completely design your own using their building blocks. I thought it could be handy to have my very own collection of videos that I think are good for education. At the moment, I have been embedding these into a wiki page but I think the interface much better when I create a brickabox to store them in. I signed up for a Brickabox account and then selected the option to make a ‘Video Collection Site’ which I then called  http://edvid.bricabox.com From there I just used the ‘Add Video’ button to start putting in the content. I simply needed to give the video a name and then use the embed code from the site it was stored in to add it to my own site. I have only put in two so far but can say that the process couldn’t be simpler. There is also an Admin area (like the back end of a blog) where you can change the theme of the template (I chose the blue colour) as well as other aspects of the site. I REALLY like this tool and think it would be great in a school where you could bank great resources without anyone having to go to the sites where they were originally hosted. Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

I have spent the last few days putting together this presentation on ICT in education. Basically there are around 60 slides with two examples of ICT use linked to from each slide so that’s a lot of content! Let me know what you think. Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

This is nothing new - just a post to say that I have also added my ICT Roundup presentation to SlideShare as it has not messed up some of the slides the way that SlideBoom did in places (they are upgrading their site today so maybe they are improving it). | View | Upload your own Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

Click here to get your own player. Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

I put this presentation on strategic planning together for an inter-cluster meeting. I loaded it up to Slideshare for a meeting I had today and thought other people might find it useful. | View | Upload your own Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

I just wanted to give a big ‘ups’ to the teachers that I have worked with over this year who have now started to do their own blogs. Today I worked with the staff of one school (in groups of three) to get new edublogs up and running for their classes. Everyone was so enthusiastic and really enjoyed the tools at their finger tips when making their blogs. I must say that I am getting more and more impressed with Edublogs - particularly the Pages function which basically means that you have the benefits of a wiki and blog combined. I do find a couple of things mildly frustrating such as that when I send an image up to the editor when posting and try to resize by dragging the corners, it does not stay resized when I publish. I know that I can go and change the dimensions in the insert/ edit image area but it would be handy to resize without using this. The other very small thing that I think could be improved is having a widget named Html rather than having to know that you use a Text widget. It might also be handy to have something written in the template thumbnails to let you know which you can customise the image of and which ones you can’t. However, these are very minor things and they don’t interfere with me being able to use the blog. The page feature more than makes up for any small irritations and I plan to add some to this blog in the very near future. It would be great if some of you out there could go and leave comments for my fledgling teacher bloggers. Nothing is more motivating than knowing that someone is out there and values what you do. Below is the link to a page in our cluster wiki with all the blogs linked to: http://teacherportal.wikispaces.com/Blogs  I have also spent time working on Teacher Portal to make it easier to navigate and to simplify the interface. I am quite happy with it now. While some of the content is specific to our cluster, I think this could be a useful resource for other people as well and it would be great if anyone wants to add some of their own content into it. Let me know if you think it could be improved and what you’d like to see added Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

There has been a real surge of interest in Second Life through Twitter recently. I have had an account for about a year now but only occasionally go in. I can see that there is a real potential in Second Life for education but I have not really found enough of interest to keep me going back in that regularly. Still, the other day I decided to hop on and ended up teleporting to an island on Second Life that is a Spanish speaking area. As I am learning Spanish, I thought I would head in there and see if I could try and talk to people in Spanish. I bumped into a nice guy called Angel (in real life - I can’t quite remember his SL name) who was based in Spain. We chatted for a while and he was very patient with my exceptionally broken Spanish! It wasn’t until the end of the conversation that we realised that we were both ICT advisors and were able to share ideas around that topic. I took a snap shot of us having a talk. For anyone trying to learn another language, I think Second Life has HUGE potential. I certainly found it very motivating Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

In my last week in my job as ICT advisor, I had some time free and so offered to do anything in classes that teachers wanted. Stu put his hand up and asked if I could spend a session with his class while he worked with podcasters as part of his action research project. I was quite keen to get into a classroom again and, of course, I couldn’t help but try an ICT tool that I have been mucking around with for awhile - VoiceThread. It turned out that the session time was during maths and I could get the laptop pod so I decided to put together a problem solving VoiceThread and give it a go. Generally, it went really well but there were some issues as well so I would adjust the activity if doing it again. Here is a summary of my thinking after the session: What went well The problems were aimed at the right level and I think it was definitely worth the effort of popping them into Comic Life to ‘jazz them up’ before exporting them as images and uploading to VoiceThread. I had previously set up 10 identities called ‘Group One’ etc on my account and this meant I could have the children working in groups of three using one of the identities. I was able to be logged on to 10 different laptops on my one account and we could even all add to the same VoiceThread slide at the same time using the different identities (I was trying to stretch VoiceThread to the max and it coped well). I had embedded the same VoiceThread on 10 different pages of a wiki so that everyone could work off their own copy in their groups. This worked extremely well. The children were extremely motivated to use VoiceThread and many even asked if they would be able to set up their own accounts at home. Some children persevered with working out problems for almost a full half hour and showed higher level thinking skills. What could be improved The children were told they needed to work out the answers to problems before being able to record but many were so keen to get onto VoiceThread they rushed the problem solving just so they could record. This meant that many of the answers were not well thought out. Next time, I think I would have a paper version of the problems and the children would have to show me they had worked to figure out an answer before being able to get a laptop to record their strategies. Some children recorded silly comments just to listen to them back and have a laugh. Even though they deleted them, this wasted time. By having the paper version as I said above, I think this would go some way to resolving this issue. I would also lay down some ground rules at the start and point out that anyone not following these rules would be working all the problems out on paper and not using the laptops at all. There was too much background noise in the recordings. I might try to control the noise levels more or have the recording area somewhere a little quieter. I didn’t know how to make the doodle tool stay solid so it kept fading out making it hard for the kids to show all their working in time. I know now that you click on the big white circle in the middle of the Doodle tool circles so this would make things much easier next time! I couldn’t seem to upload any images for identities or otherwise when I was at the school. I think this is something to do with the school firewall so it is a good thing I got it all set up the night before. I did try bringing a picture across from my Flickr account and this worked fine so I would advise teachers to have all their images banked there for the kids to use as a workaround. I did really enjoy working with the kids and still think it was a very worthwhile activity. Anyone can use this VoiceThread and add their own working out strategies so feel free to do so! Many of the problems still have not been solved correctly. Stu has also blogged about the session in his class blog which you can also go and read. Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

This is just a quick post to let everyone know that the Time4Innovation online conference is happening at the moment with a focus on ICT leadership, building learning communities, and implementation of ICT in education. I am the keynote for the second session on building learning communities and would love feedback from the blogosphere Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

Well, people might be forgiven for thinking that I had dropped off the face of the earth with me putting very little out into the cyberverse recently. Basically, I started working for CORE education full time at the beginning of June and I had to hit the ground running with Milestones from clusters to read and respond to. I have now finished working my way through those and am now doing some work on building up resources in the ICT PD Online area. There is a section in ICT PD Online to collect and organise cluster and school internet spaces and links. If you are a New Zealand school or cluster and have any that you would like me to add in, either leave me a comment with the address or send an email to me at suzievesper@gmail.com. If you want to give me any feedback on how the section of links could be better organised or what you think is missing, I’d also like to hear from you. As part of my work on ICT PD Online, I have been brushing off my GIMP skills considerably and trying my hand at some aspects of design. I needed some textures to add to some of my images and I have found some really useful sites that gave some to me for free that I thought I would share with you. These are: ImageAfter Texture King CG Textures (where I got these lovely bones from). Another thing to report on is my recent visit to schools in Auckland with my old cluster. This was an excellent trip and I got heaps out of it! There is a page on Teacher Portal where I have uploaded my notes and the schools that went are all supposed to add to (hmm…..haven’t seen evidence of this just yet!). Thanks to Lenva for showing me http://glogster.com and http://www.circavie.com/ which I plan to have a good play with when I have a spare minute. Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

OK - so I decided to take out a bit of time and play with Glogster right now :-)  I have made an online poster of sites that I have made over the last year or so. You can click on a site image to take you to that site. I had a lot of fun with this though the results are not that stunning and I learned a few lessons along the way. 1) The page is a set to A4 portrait size which would seem to make it impossible to play around with some layouts. However, if you embed the page into a wiki and play around with the width and height settings in the embed code, you can change the size of the area you are working on. Instead of shrinking the page while keeping the same dimensions, playing with the embed size settings will actually cut off areas of the page. This is how I got my page to look the way it does in the picture. I heard about this site when visiting Lenva at Bucklands Beach Intermediate School. The kids there use Glogster to make the front navigation page of their online portfolios. Some of the children have moved into using Wikispaces for their portfolios and you can see an example of a student called Jess by clicking here. I have embedded my Glogster page into my educational software wiki and you can go and check it out by clicking here (the picture above is just a screenshot) Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

Twitter always sends me to interesting places and one of the last sites it sent me to was one called Tutput. On this site, you can sign up for a teacher account and then set up a registration for children to sign up with that will make them part of your online class. Then the children can play games against children all over the world who are logged in at the same time. I pretended to be a kid so that I could test it out and felt bad as I was teamed up against what were probably real kids somewhere else. Still, I soundly lost the first match. Of course, I selected the hardest level of multiplication just to see what this looked like and my first question was 49×27. I was busy trying to work this out in my head rather than on paper and in the meantime my component had solved three questions! I then tried a couple of easier level activities and soundly walloped the poor children I was against (sorry kids but you’re got to learn to toughen up in life!) I think this would be VERY popular in the classroom and each time you win, a summary of the game gets put onto your win wall. There is also a graduation board which shows you which game levels you have completed. As per usual, all of this makes me wish I had a class to try this with! Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

I was revisiting the wonderful ‘50 web 2.0 ways to tell a story‘ by CogDog while trying to find a way to record video directly into a web 2.0 tool to blog (which I am still looking for if you can help - leave a comment) and was looking at the Cutting Room Floor section at the bottom where he mentioned tools that didn’t work so well for him. I noticed that Smilebox was listed because it didn’t have Mac and PC options. I clicked on the link with idol curiosity and found that it now supports Mac as well so downloaded the free software to have a play with it. I think this is a BRILLIANT tool. It works really well with iPhoto and I imagine the PC version opens up your ‘My Pictures’ folder. There are a large number of templates to play with and each one has a number variations within it. You can simply drag and drop your pictures into the templates and change all the text to suit your purposes. I played with the newspaper template. You can then choose to blog it at the push of a button and it will upload it to your online Smilebox account and gives you the embed code. See my efforts below. Make a Smilebox free ecard Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

I have been trying to get hold of a SlideRocket beta invite for ages after seeing and reading a lot of hype about it. Finally, one arrived by email a few weeks ago and I’ve been mucking around with it ever since. This is the first online presentation app I have got excited over because it is actually very attractive and full of functionality. The interface is gorgeous and it generally works exceptionally well. If you can get hold of an invite then do so but hopefully they make it available for everyone soon. I have embedded my first effort below. Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

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.