Presentations

Ok, I started off with looking at Pinterest then got completely distracted and spent quite a while looking for ancient India pictures to pin on a board. That went ok and I repinned someone else's picture and shared one of mine in a tweet.

PREZI and SLIDEROCKET are pretty powerful software and I think I'd use both of them. I found sliderocket more straightforward and easier to manipulate but I was a bit frustrated in not being able to work out how to change layout and fonts for the whole slides. Prezi provided a lot of options for movement and pathways and I found it a bit tricky to set it up. You have to think in 3d while looking at a 2d screen. I would also encourage my students to use these for presenting their own work and collaborating with others. My year 8s have just started a film study and I think these tools will motivate them-------more fun than just writing a straight text.

Rather than starting from scratch, I imported some old presentations and fiddled around with them a bit. I did import an image and youtube into Sliderocket....hope this doesn't breach copyright, which seems pretty complex these days.

http://prezi.com/b9iioh4221hm/scaffolding-how-to-learn-chinese-script/

http://portal.sliderocket.com/BXGEP/Engaging-learners-in-the-classroom

Diigo

Well.........I had some trouble getting beond the first page but eventually managed to save a website into the library- not quite sure how. After thsi i quite enjoyed fiddling around and creating a list and a group. There is an amazing amount of stuff you can look for and tap into if you want. I even tweeted something i liked. I would like to spend a bit more time with this but it might have to wait till next week when things at work settle down. Social media, web 2.0 are fun and there are so many connections but our work lives are so linear at school and so are our work environments: they are more like the C19 the C21. What we need is time and this would mean that the nature of ou.r work would have to be reconceptualised outside the current formula of x.teachers: y.students @ z.contact time. Yes yes I know that the budget controls all but these are just choices. teachers need time and space to really engage new technologies and embed them in practice. I guess incremental change is best: one thing at a time.

Social networking: tweeting

Hmmm...not sure if I'm keen on this yet but let's see what happens over the week. I have picked a range of things/people to follow and tried a few tweets including links using bit.ly.
Its a diffferent idea, just launching what you think into the internet or responding to people you don't know and I'm not quite comfortable with it: mostly i just ring/email or talk to people I know about what i think. I found the idea of tracking and analyzing tweets and bit.ly links as a sort of adjunct to marketing yourself quite remarkable and I can see its usefulness to public figures and companies to gauge penetration and response. Next thing, we'll find that its going to be part of performance appraisal!!
I am waiting for Pinterest to send me the link to register and I'll try to have a play with that.
I have added another gadget and I find that I lack finesse in editing the layout to get things to fit neatly so practice is needed.

Gadgets

Google news was pretty straight forward and I liked being able to adjust sources of content. Google reader irked me a abit because when yopu search you get a lot of stuff you don't want i.e. blogs that actually don't have much to do with what you are after but have one word e.g. 'Byzantine' meant ended up with heaps of uninteresting stuff but I did learn how to unsubscribe as a result!! I created an iGoogle page and added some content such as humour, news and weather. I have started to organise my documents into Google docs and have shared a couple of docs as a test of how it happens. Next week. I'll have a go at adding a picasa or flickr gadget. I couldnt set up a flickr account with the google sign in and i seem to remember a picasa account somewhere but the sign in details are probably history. Its anmazing how the time passes. I got going at about 8am and now its nearly 11! Its personally stimulating but I can wonder if using some gadgets at school will be blocked by the Education Department e.g can't access youtube online.

What I love.

Tried the Google What Do You Love search for British Archaeology and came up with 21 different things! What I love is that there's just so much, I can get it and I am not waiting for something to come on ABC or SBS tv.