Thunder

Following several negatives comments about Twitter on the NAACE forum I decided it would be worth revisited Twitter (twitter.com).

Over the last couple of days I have picked up some great tips via people I am following, for example

• Monolingual - MAC OS X application, this app removes all unnecessary languages from your Mac freeing up hard drive space, I gained 3G of space :)  Thanks Doug (twitter.com/dajbelshaw) for pointing this app out to me.

The problem I found with twitter was that I really only keep up to date with the people I follow, and they are generally people I know so I wouldn’t stumble upon other interesting tweets from people I don’t know.  Then I found Summize (summize.com/), Summize allows you to follow ‘keywords’ in tweets, for example with Apple’s WWDC later today I can follow all tweets that contain ‘.WWDC’ (summize.com/search?q=WWDC) this search has an RSS feed that you can then subscribe to.  To me this really adds value to twitter, it certainly answers a question posed by Trina last week about searching Twitter.

If you would like to follow me on twitter my username is tarannau20.

Has Google Docs had an impact on teaching and learning inside or outside of your classroom?  If so, Google would like to know how you use it and what changes you would like in the future?

Further details can be found on the Google Docs blog.

Today I was down in Norwich giving a talk on the use of web 2.0 applications for learning. On arrival at the John Innes Centre I sparked up firefox to check what sites I would be able to use, and what sites I would have to use screen shots for.

To my surprise my own blog was blocked, see image, it looks like my excessive use of the word ‘game’ lead to a high DDR score Why do educationalists still treat games as ‘bad things’?

After getting over this shock, it wasn’t a surprise to find that You Tube, Flickr and Second Life were also blocked. I was at the time sitting next to the Securus stand and I noticed an article about proxy bypass websites and it gave me an idea…. I typed ’school unblocker’ into Google and tried the first website - it didn’t work, not to be put off I tried the next site and it worked. I was now able to view the sites previously blocked. I did inform Paul from Norfolk CC about this and he said he would have that site blocked at the end of the day.

Anyway, I wonder how many other people can not see my blog at the moment due to its high DDR score. Leave me a comment if your filter now blocks my blog

Following on from this post on the Official Linden blog I decided to check out Veodia, Veodia allows you to broadcast high quality live video to sites, blogs and mobile phones (and to Second Life).

I set up a tv on wmnet island ready for my broadcast and popped back to Veodia to start it up, once the broadcast was rolling I copied the url onto the television and I was away..

There you have it Tarannau Wollongong watching me.

This has tremendous potential for running cpd for staff and students, as far as the Shropshire Teen Island and the diploma I see huge potential for using this technology to get high quality speakers from industry to talk to our students.  I will certainly try to deliver part of my next ICT subject leader course using this technology within Second Life.  I am also thinking that I will broadcast our Create IT awards (April 14th 2008) via Veodia in Second Life.

As I mentioned in my previous email the guys at Animoto respond rapidly to any feedback, one of my questions to them was how I could publish the video in a wordpress blog as it didn’t appear to be supported by the site.  Within 30mins I received an email from Nate:

As for word press, they don’t trust us as a media provider just yet.  Vodpod has created a embed tool that has helped our users post to their blogs ( vodpod.com/wordpress <http://vodpod.com/wordpress>).  That should help you get this posted.

As you have probably guessed he was right, the firefox extension did the trick - cheers Nate.

Half term is great, it allows me some time to play. The latest web based application I have played with is Animoto, animoto allows you to create a 30sec video for FREE, if you want it longer than 30secs then you have to part with some cash. Animoto allows you to upload photos to the site, or it will grab them from common web based picture sites i.e. flickr, once you have your photos you can put them into the order you require and select which you want to spotlight. The next stage of the process is to add your music, again you can upload your own music (bear in mind copyright etc etc) or use a track from the site itself. Animoto then renders and produces your music video.

You can then email your friends of post it online, it looks like there will be the ability to download it and export to ipods etc in the near future. As with most applications like this it is in ‘beta’ but the guys respond really quickly to any feedback.

Here is my first example.

Terry Freedman is carrying out a survey of pupil use of Social Networks, if you have some time can you try and get your pupils to complete his survey.

I have just read this interesting article on the MacWorld website, it appears that…

The TUC is advising companies that the outright banning of such sites in the workplace may be something of an “overreaction.” Instead, the group said, it’s much better to focus on setting up formal policies for acceptable use of such sites in the workplace.

“Simply cracking down on use of new Web tools like Facebook is not a sensible solution to a problem [that] is only going to get bigger,” warned TUC general secretary Brendan Barber in a statement.

This is the message that many like minded individuals have being saying in education. We should stop banning and blocking these social websites and educate the students in their use of these sites. If schools have workable acceptable use policies (AUPs) that they actually enforce then there should be no reason to block/ban these sites.

The article on the TUC website can be found here.

Since getting an ipod last Christmas I have started to listen to podcasts more often, but I still only subscribe to a small amount. At present I listen to the following podcasts on a regular basis:

• Booruch - David, a Chartered Teacher from Scotland, shares his experience of using social software and the latest Web tools in class. David publishes his feed about twice a month.
• Digital Planet, the weekly BBC World Service programme that reports on technology stories from around the globe.  This podcast is published on a weekly basis.
• T4 Tips - Jordan School District, Transforming Teaching Through Technology.  A variety of educational ICT podcasts, I came across this podcast after watching ‘Pay Attention‘.  This podcast is published on a weekly basis.

If you know of any other decent educational technology podcasts can you leave me a comment.

Notely is a collection of online tools designed to support students organisation. The website is free to use, but unfortunately contains adverts from Google!

At present there are 10 tools you can use:

• Calender - add simple events, doesn’t support recurrences or have the ability to invite other users, but you can download your calendar to iCal.
• Courses - allows you to give a course a title, associate a teacher to it and then the start and end dates - this course doesn’t seem to appear in the calendar.
• Notes - create a note and associate it with a course, notes can contain html code, graphics and emoticons. Once created you can download this note as a pdf, word or text file or you can have it emailed to yourself, notes can be searched but I couldn’t get it to work!
• To-Do - create calendar entries for jobs you need to do, once created the appear in your main calendar.
• Tasks - can’t work out the difference between this and ‘to-do’
• Friends - search for your friends using writely, or add friends from Facebook.
• Notebook - allows you to enter simple notes, these notes are not associated with a course.
• Links - compile lists of your links, I think if I was to use these I would link to tags on my del.icio.us account
• Contacts - unlike ‘friends’ you can type in your contact details
• Upload - upload files to the site, I can’t find the maximum file size or the size of your upload area.

All of the tools contain an RSS feed and can have the data backed up.  The dashboard gives you an overview or your nearest events to-do’s and recent activity:

For further details check out one of the many videos on YouTube.