If you’ve seen sixth sense before – there’s more here, as well as an unusual use for a regular sheet of paper.  If you can’t wait, the real fun starts at about 8:00 minutes in.

Where does this guy get his ideas?

Looking over the history of my evolving Gravatar avatars-

I remembered that between

and

@rakt had asked…

and the simple answer is… I don’t use an avatar creator.  I make them from photographs in a variety of ways.

I usually start with a full face colour portrait.  Then I’ll change the colour/contrast/fill settings using Picasa.  After that I open the photo in an older version of Paint Shop Pro, Paint.net or GIMPshop, copy half of my face and play with the effects until I create something I like.  Sometimes I’ll flip the tablet screen and use ArtRage to draw or trace over a photo.  When I’m semi-satisfied I copy and mirror my half face, tidy things up and finish off in Picasa or whatever suits me.  Mostly it’s just playing and experimenting until I’m happy with what I see.

Here’s a few samples to demonstrate a little of what I do.

Of course it doesn’t always work…

Thanks George.

@catspyjamasnz asked for people to contribute to her project What My PLN Means to Me and to add a video to the wiki.

So here’s my contribution.  Like I’ve said before, we have to put ourselves out there and get over our dislikes, fears and phobias.  How can we expect children to do this if we don’t?

A new law coming into force later this month will require students to check in their pencils and crayons at the office and collect them after school.  Any children caught with pencils or crayons in their possession will have then confiscated and parents will be informed.

“We’ve had enough,” said one teacher, “kids are writing notes to each other in class. It’s distracting for us all.  Besides that, they spend too much time sharpening them when they could be working.”

There have been many reports of children using their pencils to “poke” each other and there have even been arguments about who owns which pencil.

“They’ll have someone’s eye out one day.  It’s only a matter of time before something serious happens,” commented a parent who favours the all out ban.  “Better to ban them all rather than risk an accident – they can be really sharp.”

In some cases pencils have been used by pupils to record their ideas and learning, but they’ve also created problems with their inappropriate use in class.  The introduction of new “coloured” pencils means that children are being tempted to create ever more creative work and the notes passed around now include garish illustrations.

One parent explained his opinion. “Chalk and slate was good enough for us, black and white and easy to read, not a confusing multicoloured mess.  You couldn’t pass notes around without the teacher noticing and the chalk couldn’t be sharpened into a dangerous point.  The greatest danger was that you’d drop it on your foot.  I’d like chalk to remain the teachers’ main tool (along with talk). Let’s keep it at the centre of learning.”

A few teachers are not convinced that the ban is the best policy.  They worry about the effect it might have on student engagement and motivation.

“As soon as they get out of school kids are writing, drawing and passing notes around.  I think by banning the pencil and crayon we risk alienating students and making their time at school seem irrelevant to their lives.”

“Used in the correct way they are powerful learning tools, students (and teachers) need to be trained in their proper classroom use.”

“It seems ridiculous to exclude something that is so readily available outside school and widely integrated into all aspects of our modern society.  They are exposed to these modern implements from an early age and most children use them on a daily basis.  To take them away is erasing educational opportunities.”

No one can argue with the fact that a sharpened pencil can cause injury and that something must be done.  It’s too soon to determine the outcome of the ban.  We’ll just have to wait and see.

P.S. There is a rumour that something called a “ballpoint pen” is beginning to gain popularity among teens.  How will schools cope with this new permanent menace?  At least pencils can be erased with the right equipment.

image by orangeacid at Flickr

I viewed the email with a little dismay, even though our wiki has been underused so far this year and my new role out of the classroom means it’ll probably continue that way for a little while.

I responded to the notification, letting PBWorks know that US$99 was out of my reach and that I’d manage without the upgrade.  My response was interpreted as a PBWorks support request and I was automatically assigned a number/ticket and informed that I’d hear from them soon.  I sent a message back saying it was only a pecuniary problem  and that everything was OK.

Later that day there arrived another message from PBWorks – with a smiley =).

Free PBWorks

Kristine and the PBWorks team had given me two free upgrade vouchers.  Each lasts a year and can be applied to one or two wikis.  Effectively I’d just been given a free two year upgrade.

I’ve redeemed one of the vouchers, but I’d like to share my good fortune and pay it forward.  So, if you’d like me to apply the other one to your class PBWorks wiki, just leave your wiki’s address in the comments.  First in – first served.  Of course, if it’s you, please PayIt Forward in some way.

And again, thanks Kristine and PBWorks!

A Saturday morning tweet by @betchaboy-

prompted me to refresh my memory…

I’ve blogged about this Oblong interface before, but I’d forgotten how slick it really was (apart from the naff gloves).

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

Here it is being used to edit video/movie elements together.

oblong’s tamper system 1801011309 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

Breed it selectively with this…

a handful of these….

and don’t forget the “glass” wall at the beginning of the Microsoft Future Vision 2019 video. That’s not a glass wall, its a touch screen offering real time translation of voice and text.  The children could be separated by half a world.

Is the combined DNA of these products a likely future tool of interactive education? Or will schools, as we know them, have ceased to exist by then?

I promised that I’d photoshop* this photo and add effects to the plastic lightsabres we were holding.  It took me a couple of months to get around to it and about an hour to complete.  Once I’d finished I pushed it out on to twitter as a bit of a joke.

I got a tweet back from @SharonHarper

and followed the link.  It led to a TED video of Gever Tulley (@gever).  You can watch it below.

I did all these things as a kid (and more-see number 2 of my 7 Things), though my copyright infringments were limited by the technology of the time; the cassette recorder and the transistor radio.

How many of you did the things that Gever Tulley talks about?  What about your children? What about your class?  I know I was shocked to find that my son had been using a power drill and handsaw to make a “video camera” while he was in kindergarten.  Are we too protective of our children and students?  If so… what changed and when?

Another Gever Tulley TED Talk including a rollercoaster created by 7 year olds.

*I don’t actually have photoshop, but “paint.netted” doesn’t roll of the tongue in quite the same way.

Go, read his post and watch the video… how many students in your school are using these technologies?  How many of your colleagues even know these things are possible?  What about your Board of Trustees?

Steve Wheeler will be in Auckland, NZ in September 2010, does anyone in Auckland want to organise an opportunity for him to speak with interested educators?

Lars Rasmussen and Google Wave

Imagine all (and I mean all) the web tools we now use in education.  Blogs, wiki, googledocs, photosharing, IM, twitter, etherpad, maps, games, polls, forums and video etc.

Now imagine them all integrated into one web application… cross platform and cross device. Where a tweet shows up instantaneously as a blog entry, a blog comment appears as a tweet, photos appear and disappear on different blogs as they are uploaded or deleted.  Collaborative work on documents, images and maps is live and instant. Intelligent spellchecking (using context, symantics and syntax) fixes most errors on the fly.

Google wave is all this and more.  Have a look at the developer preview video (1hr 20mins) and see if it moves you to tears like it did me.

Unbelievable.

… and, oh yeah, it’s opensource.

BlogDesk

Update: Takes its proxy settings from internet explorer, but has no way to work with proxy servers that require authentication like schoolzone.  :-(

posted using

The link http://is.gd/nBFI goes to an article at Computerworld.com that includes a video that is amazing.  It looks a bit clunky at the moment, (I compared it to this polished MicroSoft promo) but imagine what it could be like! I’d intended to blog about it, but other things came up and it slipped my mind/fell to the bottom of my to do list.

Today I found a video on TED that explains more about “Sixth Sense”.  Watch it below.

Remember that this is a prototype.  What if it was integrated onto our clothing or mobile devices?  The possibilities are almost endless.

Click to play*

Our class blog is provided by Wordpress.com and it’s been about three years since I’ve done any real work on a Blogger based blog.  Before writing and recording my audio-post I needed to find out how to embed an mp3 audio player in Blogger.  Blogger (Google) doesn’t make this easy, which is a strange omission in a blogging platform that is otherwise so media friendly.  I thought I recalled doing it previously, but wasn’t sure.

In response to a question from @jlamshed I sent this tweet-

Which was met with a couple of responses.  One from @wmchamberlain suggesting I use Vocaroo (an online recording service) and another from @winetimejs saying I should find somewhere to host the audio file and link it in the blog.

Neither of these matched exactly what I wanted.  They’d both work perfectly well, but I wanted to edit the audio in Audacity to remove any “umms” and hiccoughs I might make.  I also wanted to embed a little player into the blog rather than have a link like this- listen here.  Don’t bother clicking – it’s not a real link!

After following several pomising leads from Google I eventually found this page.  It documents several ways of adding an audio player to Blogger. I used number 1 on the page to produce this player below.

You’ll need somewhere to host your audio file (I actually uploaded mine to Wordpress).  After that you need to follow the instuctions, copy and paste the player code and then paste in your mp3 file location. I’m not going to reproduce all the steps here in any detail because they’re all included here.  Just make sure you paste the code into the html view in Blogger.

The page offers other options for embedding mp3 audio in blogger, none of which I’ve tried.  I like the sound of number three, which adds code to the Blogger template so that a player appears automatically whenever you paste in an mp3 link.

One final note.  This only works with mp3 audio files.  If you have any problems you can leave questions and suggestions in the comments.  Happy recording and listening!

We’ve had a class blog since 2005 and I originally saw it as a way to share children’s work with their families. When I added a counter and then a Clustrmap it became an even greater motivator. With a few exceptions we haven’t moved into real collaboration yet, though I know we will.

My own blogs have been half-hearted personal stories, a few tech and “how to” posts and some attempts at humour. I have reflected very little and collaborated even less. How right you are. We must “walk the talk” for our students in self-reflection, collaboration, creation and co-creation.

I don’t like the sound of my recorded voice and appreciate my video-self even less, but I have to get past this. How can I realistically ask students to do what I do not? I’ve done the flying fox, abseil, kayak and BMX as modeling and encouragement. Now it’s time to strap on my helmet, get over my nervousness and do some audio and video.

Thanks for the collaborative kick up the proverbial to @wmchamberlain and @jlamshed.

Today a photo from a parent arrived in my email to confirm this.

I spent a good deal of time this year moving cupboards, shuffling desks and recabling computers in their new positions.  What a difference it makes having the computers away from the door.

Then this morning I noticed a tweet on Twitter from @techieicebreaker to @dwarlick.  It was a link to a wiki called Inspired Classrooms.  The wiki contains links to five short videos (7 – 19 mins) describing effective ways to set up your classroom, paying particular attention to the positioning of computers.  The videos were made in 2006, before netbooks were widely available, but the same layout could be used with netbooks or laptops.  For the cost of a desktop you could probably add 2 netbooks, possibly adapting the layout to suit.

A final note… if this cheap Indian “device” turns out to be a reality everything will change.

I got a new follower on Twitter today and, as usual, checked out their profile to see if I wanted to follow them back.  That led me to a blog post about Twitter and how effective it has been as a PLN and PD tool for @kgustin.

I’ve been meaning to write about Twitter for a while now, but there doesn’t seem to be anything left for me to say that hasn’t already been said by other Tweeters.  Twitter has brought me out of my hole and into the light, connecting me with a network of like minded educators and people that I would otherwise never have “met”.  Thank you Twitter and thank you my Tweeting Twitter friends.

If you haven’t checked out Twitter for yourself yet, I recommend you do.  Give it a little time and you won’t regret it.

Here are a few blog posts that describe the Twitter experience and the benefits of being “connected” much better than I could.
Common Sense Classroom

Durff’s Blog

Steedy’s Blog

Sharing the Addiction

I mentioned to some one the other day that I don’t use my own voice for talking.  I still have an accent and it’ll never go away, but the edges are softened, my glottal stops have all but disappeared and I dont say “tha noz” at all anymore.  It made me think about those that came before me, my grand-parent and their ancestors, where they came from and how they would have spoken.  I know my mum and dad had some novels written entirely in Tyke dialect, but dad gave them away (to a girl from New Zealand they met in Australia).  After a brief foray into dialect sites, Tyke poetry and Ilkla Moor Baht ‘At, I found this gem on Wikipedia.  Yan, tan, tethera is something my great grandad used to say when he was counting.  It’s a fives based counting system and (from what I can remember) my great-grandad’s version went something like this.

Yan, tan, tethera, methera, pip.  Sethera, leathera, overa, dovera, dick.  Yanadick, tanadick, tetheradick, metheradick, bumfit.  Yanabum, tanabum, tetherabum, metherabum, jiggit.  It doesn’t quite match up with any of the charts on Wikipedia.

What a fascinating way of counting, though who knows what comes after jigget?  I’m pretty sure this has all but died out, so I’m going to teach it to my daughters and son to try and keep it alive.  I’ll also share it with my class at school, although if they can get past ten and fifteen without giggling I’ll be very surprised!

1.  I wanted to be a spaceman
When I was a kid I wanted to be an astronaut.  I followed the Apollo missions obsessively, collecting anything I could from magazines, newspapers and the free gifts in cereal or tea packets.  If only I had them now!  I remember my dad calling me downstairs to watch Neil Armstrong step onto the moon’s surface on a blurry black and white TV.  This stellar ambition was later replaced with a desire to be a marine biologist/illustrator.  I took up scuba diving and completed the training, but it sort of petered out when I discovered girls, pubs and beer. I was fifteen.

2.  I was shot in the head when I was ten
I had a best friend at school called John.  We used to “borrow” his older bother’s air rifle and go shooting rats by the river or canal.  One day John’s brother got a new toy- a wooden bow and metal tipped arrows, so we spent the afternoon “target” shooting.  This mainly involved taking turns to stand, legs akimbo, while the other shot an arrow through the leggy arch and made it stick into the ground.  We both got pretty good at it and neither of us flinched as the whirling, spinning shafts whizzed near or between our legs. Our nerves of steel had been tempered by years of playing “chicken” another leg spreading game played face to face and involving big, sharp knives.  Eventually we got bored and John thought of a question that we just had to find the answer to.  “I wonder which will go furthest?  The bow and arrow or the airgun?”

I can’t remember how, but I ended up with the bow and John with the gun.  He primed and loaded it as I pulled back the string and let fly.  The arrow soared through the air, over his garden fence, over the allotment of cabbages and cauliflowers, over the hedge and half way across the school rugby field.  We were very impressed.  Following John’s instruction I walked to where the arrow had landed and turned to…

BANG! Not the noise of the gun, but the noise of the pellet hitting my forehead, about 3cm above my right eye.  To this day I don’t know what he was aiming at.  Nor do I know how we were to find and measure where the pellet had landed if my head hadn’t stopped it.  I do know that the next few minutes were very, very bloody and I was cleaned up and calmed down by John’s mum.  She bribed me with a “99” not to tell my mum what had happened.  I was cheap even back then and I told my mum I’d banged my head on a nail.  I kept the truth a secret until my mid-thirties when John was safely living in Spain.  I still got the standard motherly refrain.  “Did what! He could have taken your eye out!”  Let it go mum, let it go.

3.  I went to a single sex “public” school
At thirteen my parents decided I should attend an all boys public school and get a “better” education.  The school was given its charter by Queen Elizabeth I, was nearly 500 years old and had a long tradition of academic excellence- if you could pay the fees.  Luckily for me there was a Socialist Labour government in power at the time and they decreed that these schools could only continue to exist if they guaranteed free places to the more able children in the state sector.  I’d been assessed as one of these students.

Greatly upset at the thought of losing all my school friends I determined not to go.  I came up with a plan so cunning that it was sure to put a stop to it. I would commit a crime to ensure that I was awarded a criminal record. Surely no posh school would want a notorious criminal in their snobby midst?  My cleverly devised plan went awry when I discovered that my crime was not as heinous as I thought.  Reaching in through an open classroom window at the weekend and taking your own clay thumb-pot wasn’t up there with armed robbery or terrorism. Someone grassed me up and in the end I only got a stern telling off from the Chief Constable.  I was to have another, potentially more serious, encounter with the long arm of the law while at university.

4.  I studied art for six years
I went art school for 3 years and then spent the next 3 years at university getting a fine arts degree (the same degree that enabled me to undertake the postgraduate teacher training course at Waikato).  I studied art history, video production, photography and film.  My majors were in painting and printmaking (etching).  By The time I’d finished I’d had enough of the art world’s b.s. and haven’t put pencil to paper or paint to canvas seriously for more than 20 years.

5. I was arrested for attempting to break into a nunnery
It’s not as bad as at sounds.  Really.  During a heavy day/night out with a friend (Colin, if you’re out there, I’m looking at you) we spent all our food money for the week on beer.  After a particularly scary encounter with a sawn-off shotgun in a local pub, we decided to call it a night and stagger home.  We got lost on the way and, spying a tall, forbidding wall, we decided to climb it to get our bearings.  Colin climbed on my shoulders and managed to scramble to the top, only to cry “Can’t see anything from up here”.

It was then the security van drove past.  They must have notified the police because minutes later we were arrested by one of Northumberland’s finest.  “You were seen climbing over the nunnery wall lad,” and we were bundled into the back of his police car.  After a night in the cells, several cups of sugary tea and a few visits to a “stainless” steel toilet that was infinitely scarier than the shotgun, we eventually convinced the cops that we were just drunken, stupid art students and not nefarious nun botherers.  We dined and drank out on the story for weeks.

6.  I was a skinhead (boots, braces and all)
I entered art school with long, hippy hair and left as a skinhead.  I was very politically active and, unlike most racist, fascist skinheads, I joined the Anti Nazi League, The Socialist Workers Party and supported the Rock Against Racism movement that evolved as a response to Eric Clapton’s anti-immigration views and David Bowie’s professed admiration for Adolf Hitler.  A small group of “Red Skins”, we were sure that we had the proletarian answer to Thatcher’s downtrodden Britain of the nineteen-eighties.  We didn’t.

7. I didn’t learn to drive until I was 41 years old
I’d never needed to.  There were buses at the end of every street, running every fifteen minutes, 5am to 11pm, seven days a week.  Five minutes walk away was a railway station that gave access to anywhere in the country (and later Europe).  When I first started teaching I got a taxi to school and home again every day.  It was costing me over $300 a month – even with bumming a ride with any colleague going my way.  Reluctantly I decided the time had come and spent most of the summer holidays reading the road code and taking driving lessons.  I passed my test the day after the beginning of Term 1, 2001.  The thing is, I’ve come to really like driving (by myself).  I like being cocooned in a little world of my own where I’m in control and all the decisions are mine.  Plus I like to play my music LOUD!  I still only have a restricted license.

It wasn’t at all.  I have Opera Mini on my phone and most of the web, e-mails, social networking and news that I access on my laptop were there on my phone.  Yippee!  So I could check my gmail/hotmail, read my rss feeds, browse my favourite sites, tweet on twitter and check in with Facebook.  Great!

I’ve noticed more and more that people are using their phones and mobile devices for some of their internet browsing.  Companies like Vodafone or Telecom want you to use their portal to do this.  It’s easy to see why.  To get anywhere you have to pass their “homepage” complete with ads and downloads, which must be a real revenue earner for them.  Coupled with the fact that you pay them for any data you use (basically if you’re connected to the internet via your phone you’re paying for data) they have little interest in optimising your phone web browsing for minimum data use.  You don’t have to use their browser.  Don’t click that Vodafone Live! button or little blue globe.  Download and install Opera Mini on your phone instead!

First choose your download method.  The recommended way is to got to mini.opera.com using your phone’s built in browser.  Opera will detect your phone’s make and model and ensure you download the correct version.  When it’s on your phone just install it.  Different phones and operating system will vary in how you do this, you may get a series of permissions dialogues, but just go with the flow and follow it through.

Once installed Opera Mini will be sitting in your applications folder or similar location. Click/open it and you’re off.  It’ll ask you to mash the phone keys a few time and accept a user agreement before it opens the startpage.  The startpage is preloaded with bookmarks, you’ll soon replace these with your own.  Here’s my startpage.

The default setting has most webpages opening as minimized images of the full page with an area that zooms in to view your selection. I apologise now for the news story, but that’s life.

If this works for you then you don’t need to make any changes.  Personally I find the tiny page version too difficult to see.  I changed my default view to mobile view like the image below.

It’s easy to do.  Just follow these screenshots below, tick mobile view and press the left softkey to save.

That’s it.  You’re all set to go. Like anything else you’ll learn by doing, so get to it.  Visit your favourite sites, login to your webmail, check your rss feeds. Post any questions you have in the comments and I’ll help if I can or there’s the opera mini faqs page.

TWITTER and SLANDR
To tweet from your phone I recommend m.slandr.net. Just enter it into the address bar at the top of Opera Mini or google it.  Log in with your twitter details and then save the page as a bookmark when you’re logged in.  It’s pretty easy to use, though the icons can be difficult to see.

Have a play. Have fun and remember it’s cheaper than texting to twitter! $$$!

I can’t embed this video so you’ll have to click the link below.  Imagine this in the classroom (sans gloves) with 10 of these tables or even these.  Imagine being able to drag/transfer content from a main board to childrens tabletops.  How can we know what the classroom of the future will be like?

I started of by publishing all children’s work myself.  Usually I would say, "When you’ve finished that piece of writing I’ll publish it on the blog".

For an item brought to share with the class I’d photograph it with my phone, bluetooth the photo to my laptop and upload it to the blog (about 2 minutes work).  I’d add "story coming…" under the photo and ask children to download/print out a blog template and write their story/information into it for adding to the photo.  Then I’d type it up.  Occasionally I’d log in to wordpress and guide children through blogging(publishing) their own writing. Finally I settled on using Windows Live Writer.

Coming soon-setting up & using Live Writer.