Module 8

RSS Feeds Demystified and Feedly.

I did take a long time to work through this as I seem to find myself playing with things all the time and discovering interesting looking sites that I felt compelled to go and look at!

I always did wonder what an RSS feed was...

I am not sure that I would use Feedly with my year 4 class that much - if at all. To try and make it relevant to my class, I did add educational sites that were both child and Feedly friendly. One was from National Geographic and one was nrich - a great maths site. They are both sites I have regularly used and book marked through traditional book marking - although I added them both to Diigo after the last module!

The bulk of the other sites I added were all for me. Some I found using the Feedly search engine, others I transferred from my Scoop-it page and my computer book marks. I still think I would be more inclined to simply go and check a site/blog when I required information or had the time. I am not that desperate to keep up with all the latest on a daily basis and as a primary school teacher with two little boys, time is not something I have available in bucket loads. That either makes me very honest or seem incredibly unworldly and I can imagine quite a few people now dismissing me as tragic. But at least I am honest....

I captured a picture of my newly created Feedly account. The page I have open is in 'magazine format' with the newest content from nrich being displayed. This would be attractive and user friendly to children.They would still need to be directed to a particular page if I wanted them to be learning something specific though.

Feedly for Children

http://nrich.maths.org/frontpage

Feedly for me!

                       Great Back to School Ed Tech Rubrics ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning

I just had to get some pictures in. At least it proves I am doing everything! And so on to Module 9....

By the way,  am also pretty excited that I worked out how to embed 'click on URL's'. Okay, obvious to some and it wasn't that hard, but I thought it would be!!! I think the maths site is really worth a look at!

Module 7

Social Book Marking

delicious and diigo

Two more brand new discoveries. 

I read the blurbs on each and did a little research and decided to go with diigo. It seems a lot of teachers do use this one in the classroom. I didn't explore delicious too fully, but was attracted to a lot of the features that diigo has. Delicious may also have them.    

What I liked: 

The ability to high light and add sticky notes to texts. This could be great for directing research in the classroom and allowing for collaboration on texts. 

Being able to sign up and create class groups.

Children can be directed straight to a group of sites, saving time.

Ability to capture pictures straight from the internet and save them with tags or URLs. I didn't have any luck with the capture and annotate - but  from what I read I think this feature may not be available on google chrome at the moment.

This captured screen shot shows some text I high lighted in different colours and the two little yellow boxes are 'sticky notes'. I did have more of both, but could only screen shot what was on the screen... 

You click on the sticky notes when you are on the site and they open up so you can read the content. I like the fact that sticky notes can be added to by each person who views them. Comments by the students would be an excellent way to check for understanding and get opinions. A variation on handing the paper around the classroom. 

Still learning:

I am still trying to work out how to organise everything into a neat library as I saw on 

Sherryn Moore's diigo site. I have managed to group everything into lists for different subjects.

Until I work it out, every site I visit is showing up in diigo, regardless of whether I book mark it or not. This could very soon become unmanageable and I have done a lot of deleting. Any advice on how to avoid this would be great! It is like it is saving it all to history, but the history is there regardless of whether I want to view it or not.

I would love to become better at using and understanding the features available on diigo.

As this screen shot shows, things could become overwhelming if I don't work out how to stop saving every page I visit! Down the left are the lists I have created.

Pinterest and scoop.it 

I have been using Pinterest for a while and only recently discovered and joined scoop.it , so it was interesting to see how these alternative book marking sites worked in comparison. They all offer different things, but the ability to add straight from the site you are on is not always an option for either pinterest or scoop.it and requires copying and pasting URLs. 

            pinterest with pretty pictures....

and scoop.it

https://diigo.com/023sfm

I love picture picture books, so I guess I can't help but add pictures to make it all a bit more fun... I must admit though, you do sometimes feel like you are talking to yourself when you blog!

Module 6

Picasa

I have mixed feelings about Picasa. Perhaps we got off to a bad start when I suddenly realised that fourteen years worth of down loaded photos were suddenly being transferred onto the programme. Not only photos, but scans, album cover images and just about anything that was vaguely picture related!

I tried pressing escape, stop, delete.... nothing could stop the rapidly down loading images. In desperation, I switched off the computer, uninstalled Picasa and then tried again... 

Second time around, I was more careful about selecting specific folders....

It is quite a handy programme with a lot of useful editing features and is certainly pretty good considering it is free. The collage maker is lovely, but the inability to slide or re-size photos if someone has had their head chopped off is annoying. Photos can easily be moved around when using 'scatter', but not in the mosaic or grid modes. This collage was easy to create and there are a variety of templates. It was also easy to insert into this blog - when I finally worked out how to transfer it from Picasa onto Picasa Web....

The editing tools are all very user friendly and offer a variety of tools that you would require several apps or more expensive programmes to have access to. The special effect tools are fun and the editing tools like red eye and crop are very useful.

The ability to share and save on line is handy. Being able to download from your camera onto any computer with internet access is great too.

The video creation part was easy and it would be good for sharing. It isn't too packed with features though and I much preferred Animoto. Sometimes a programme that tries to do so much only seems to manage all the jobs just adequately, while dedicated programmes like Animoto can really refine things a little more. The video is VERY basic and not nearly as engaging as the one I created with Animoto (See Blog 4) - and Animoto was easier too... 

Inserting it into this Blog has also been an ordeal. Maybe I am missing things, but I ended up down loading it onto my hard drive and up loading it from there. I did manage to get it from Picasa onto my Picasa Web Albums, but when I installed it onto my Blog from there, I only got a picture with an arrow that did nothing. 

Using Picasa by itself is probably straight forward enough, I think my confusion ended up being compounded by the fact that I was constantly trying to transfer from one Picasa to the other Picasa and remember which was which and which did what. 

And so the learning curve continues....

Module 5

I survived!!!!

It might just be me - but this was a challenging module...

Twenty hours for the course?! I think Glogster and Prezi took nearly that amount - each....

BUT!!!

I really did like it (eventually....) and learned so much - like real life seminars with real people can make life so much easier.... Okay, but.... 

Seriously...

I can't wait to have a go at introducing these forms of media and expression to my class - but I would have a few more practice goes at home first. My sons were quite in awe of Prezi and couldn't wait to give that a go. They are Power Point junkies...There are so many little bits of assumed information that is omitted from all the You Tube type tutorials and Webinars that I went searching desperately. I felt I was always 90% there, but never got the last piece of information to get me over the line easily. That did become frustrating. 

So here comes my blow by blow account and evidence of what I have spent MANY days doing!!!

Bubbl.us for brainstorming.

Vibrant and bright and colourful. Would be great to have up on an interactive board to record the results of a brainstorm and encourage children to add thoughts and ideas. As I teach primary, I suspect I would use this more in a teacher directed situation. For children - well the ones I currently teach, I suspect that good old butcher's paper and colourful Texas would yield the same results - only much more quickly...  But it was fun, engaging and actually quite easy - once I worked out the You Tube clip talking about siblings, cousins, direct descendants and loved ones.... Mind Map meets Family Tree....

Now let's see how we go about inserting it in to this blog.

Okay. That was simple. For a change. Wasn't at all sure how to add that to my blog and it was easy!!! So, for your viewing pleasure, here is an easy to create Bubbl.us (I just can't get the image of footballers 'bubbling' out of my mind at the moment - but that is my problem.) 

Glogster - for great posters

This was a HUGE learning curve. I decided to create a Glogster on Explanation texts as we are about to start them in Year 4. I loved the result, but this took a lot of searching for information before I could get anywhere. Perhaps I was trying to create too much too soon and should have kept it simpler to start with. It took days to complete this task. Again, I think the writers of tutorials assume too much background knowledge.

 It took many searches to finally work out that PDF's had to be converted to jpegs to insert (unless you wanted a paper clip in the back ground - I have Year 4 so I wanted it ALL on screen visually).

I hated the tiny pictures on my poster as they couldn't be seen, so I changed all my recently converted tiny jpegs into huge files on Photo Shop. At this point, I also didn't know that those tiny pictures blew up quite large when you held a mouse over them. See what I mean about too many assumptions? Assume we all know nothing would be a good place to start. I thought I was dead clever blowing everything up. Out smarted that lot I thought... Only the files were too big to be uploaded. So I had to convert them all back again...

I worked through all of that and had a dummy go at inserting it into my Blog. That was another couple of hours. I followed all the instructions from You Tube and many other sources. My screen kept filling with lovely, huge long codes of letters and numbers... I wanted my Glogster, not numbers. My husband sent me away while he promised to resolve the issue. About two hours later  was solved... WHY DIDN'T ONE WEB SITE MENTION THAT TO SEE YOUR GLOGSTER YOU NEEDED TO VIEW IT ON THE WEB AND NOT IN DRAFT!!!!! Getting my drift about only 90% of the information!?

Anyway, here is my Glogster... I know I will view it as no more than a HTML code (wow, that makes me sound like I know what I'm talking about) but if anyone else in the world happens to read all this work, then you will see it as an interactive Glog. Click on the things that say click. It is quite fun actually!  Is anyone else really reading this or am I just talking to myself?! 

This Glogster is way too big, but I am having technical issues. It wasn't that big when I did my practice go...It is either this, or only half a Glog in my Blog.... It also wasn't this big when I was looking at in on the Glogster site. If it was then I would never have bothered trying to blow all the little jpegs up!

Prezi - Power Point is seriously left behind.

I should have used the pre-made templates earlier. I didn't realise I could add extra frames to what I wanted. I finally worked out how to change my back ground, change fade ins and re-size etc. It wasn't too bad and I think it does leave Power Point sadly languishing. Although it took me a while as a newbie, I think after a few goes it is definitely something that both the class and myself would use. I would love to try adding voice overs to the content too. What's a few more hours...

I did start this off several times, so this is probably version 365. This particular version was started off on the iPad and was completed on my PC, so the fact that it is multi - platform is really handy. You Tube content was easily added, although I had originally tried to upload clips from ABC Splash. This didn't work, nor did trying to change the files to FLV's (as suggested by Prezi). Both my sons want to learn how to use this, so it is clearly appealing to children.

In the classroom, I would suggest the template to use etc, so as to avoid wasting too much time, but as with Glogster, I think it would be very engaging for children to use and certainly would encourage them to explore their ideas more fully and visually. They are fun programmes. We just need to be mindful that not too much time is spent playing around with things and trying to problem solve. That is where I came unstuck.