Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

Gravatar & Avatars

I discovered Gravatar over a year ago and have used it to represent me visually on blog comments and to give my online identity some consistency in other online spaces.  A few weeks ago I changed my Twitter avatar and, after recently leaving a blog comment with an avatar that didn’t match, I decided it was [...]

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

Games and Future Learning

In this video from Edutopia, James Paul Gee talks collaboration, problem solving, knowledge creation and much more. Eleven minutes well spent.
Thanks George.

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Saturday, October 31st, 2009

Second Life

I’m on a couple of  learning curves at the moment.  The gentler one of them is Google Wave (more of that in a later post).  The other, steeper curve, is Second Life.  Both of them have reminded me of what it’s like to be a new learner, unsure of the next step, wary of making  [...]

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

Getting Over It

If you’ve read my earlier post Talking the Talk you’ll know how I feel about hearing my recorded voice.  Yesterday the chance arose to take another step up the ladder and produce a video.
@catspyjamasnz asked for people to contribute to her project What My PLN Means to Me and to add a video to the [...]

Saturday, September 5th, 2009

Pencils and Crayons to be Banned in Schools

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 [...]

Sunday, August 30th, 2009

Paying it Forward…

Last week my premium subscription to PBWorks (the new name for PBWiki) expired.  I’d won it in a PBWiki competition last year…I promoted PBWiki and completed wiki tasks that earned points and, eventually, a free wiki upgrade.
I viewed the email with a little dismay, even though our wiki has been underused so far this year [...]

Saturday, August 15th, 2009

Minority Report 2

Be warned- this is  very video heavy post
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 [...]

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

Empowering Lifeskills

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 [...]

Saturday, May 30th, 2009

Google Wave – Surf City Here We Come

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 [...]

Sunday, May 10th, 2009

BlogDesk

At an unconference in Auckland yesterday, Jill Hammonds showed me this little blogging client that she uses with her wordpress blog. I think I’ll try it in class instead of the SRWare option I have at the moment.
BlogDesk
Update: Takes its proxy settings from internet explorer, but has no way to work with proxy servers that [...]

Monday, April 27th, 2009

Anarchist Lurkers?

A couple of weeks ago I was happily twittering away when @timbuckteeth (Steve Wheeler) dropped the link below into the tweetstream.

I have no idea why I clicked on the link. Maybe it was to test the livestreaming because I’d been experimenting with basic streaming from my phone. Maybe it was simple curiosity or perhaps it [...]

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

A Glimpse into the Future?

A month ago I sent this tweet about a video at MIT.

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 [...]

Monday, April 20th, 2009

Talking the Talk

So here’s my audio-post.  I got over the fact that I don’t like to hear my recorded voice, wrote a script and read it out (most of it).  There were a few mistakes and err…umms along the way, but I just did what I tell the kids to do, “Keep going, we can edit the [...]

Saturday, April 18th, 2009

Sounds Good!

Earlier this week I left a comment (which I later turned into a blogpost) on this post by @wmchamberlain and was invited, via Twitter, to be a contributor at “At the Teacher’s Desk”   As I’d already identified audio and video of myself as a personal dislike I decided that the first step in “walking the [...]

Saturday, November 15th, 2008

Minority Report?

oblong