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.

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

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 was an example of what Steve Wheeler called legitimate peripheral participation (lurking). Whatever the reason I spent the next 30 to 40 minutes watching a Skyped presentation in Bremen, Germany.

I was introduced to Edupunk, a term that’s probably familiar to many, but new to me. I watched with burgeoning interest as Mr Wheeler explained some of the ideas behind Edupunk, interacting with the class, answering questions and adding insights. You can view the Mogulus archive of it here (skip to 3:30) and read Mr Wheeler’s subsequent blogpost.

I think I’m beginning to understand Edupunk’s far reaching philosophy. It’s about teacher’s (and students) participating on their own terms. It’s cutting out the educational profiteers, directing financial resources elsewhere. Like using a Wii remote hack costing less than NZ$250 to create a multitouch digital whiteboard instead of paying NZ$3295 and lining the corporate coffers. It’s about finding ways to overcome barriers to learning by using, mashing and melding the available (usually free) tools. It’s dealing with lack of hardware by dragging things out of the bin and re-jigging them until they do what’s needed. Teachers have always done this in the classroom with the resources they’ve been supplied with, supplementing them with their own money, time and ingenuity. Edupunk brings this into the 21st century teaching and learning environment.

Steve Wheeler suggests taking it further-

“I would even go as far as to claim that Edupunk teachers should be challenging the curricula they are required to teach, and especially the assessment methods that are imposed from on high. These are the structures that constrain education and stop learners from achieving their full potential.”* Read more here.

Lurking
Digressing slightly, Mr Wheeler’s response to a question, describing lurking as “legitimate peripheral participation” rang so true for me. For many it is a prerequisite to contributing. In my case lurking has led to commenting, connecting, collaborating and creating… participating and learning.

A year ago I wouldn’t have dreamed of writing this, but now I feel part of a global community, connected enough to comment and feeling that I have found my voice.

So what do you think? Does Edupunk encompass any of your teaching/learning? Were you or are you a longtime lurker?

More Edupunk below-

http://www.slideshare.net/timbuckteeth/edupunk-presentation
http://ubernoggin.com/archives/434 3 videos to watch

*from http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2009/04/can-anybody-hear-me.html

This post originally posted at http://attheteachersdesk.blogspot.com/2009/04/lurking-anarchists.html

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!

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?