I am just back from a weeks holiday. While I was away I had just about no connectivity. I had packed my laptop and iphone, but there was not internet access I could find and I had to walk about a mile to a nearby cliff top to get a mobile signal!
I gave up on following RSS, twitter and getting email and left the laptop shut. I did do a bit of photo blogging from my phone to my posterous account, and this worked very well.
The new iphone software allows you to mail up to 5 photos instead of just one, posterous makes pretty galleries of sets of photos. The mail app on the iphone allows you to create mails and then will send them later whenever you get a signal, this turns out to be a great feature in comparison with other iphone blogging applications.
I've set up yet another blog, I know I don't really write enough on this one to justify all the others, but I was looking for an easy way to tweet quotes. I was also looking for a way to use one of my favourite quotations:
“Talking about it isn't good enough But quoting from it at least demonstrates The virtue of an art that knows its mind. Seamus Heaney : Squarings
Setting up a second posterous blog took about 30 seconds, most of which was finding the quote for the subtitle.
Back in the day, I enjoyed getting children to create pop art style pictures with Flash a 2004 example:
The children brought in photos as guide layers and traced them. Flash is rather a complex app for children, but we managed to have a fair bit of fun with it over the years. I've a set of instructions Cartoon your face with flash in pdf format for flash 5 (or maybe mx?) produced a while back.
Recently I've discovered an easier way to achieve the same thing, I've been out in a couple of classrooms team teaching using the smartboard, and this is a nice way to get children drawing on the board:
1. Get a photo onto the board This can be done pretty quickly with Photo Booth on a mac, just drag a picture onto smart notebook:
Or you could take photos with a digital camera and import them, or use a webcam or get a photo of someone famous from the web etc.
2. Trace the photo
3. Hide/remove the photo
4 Copy the image and paste into another application for editing.
This is quite a lot of fun and an easy way to get pupils using the pens.
Yet another Mapped Walk. New this time: exiftool commandline tool which can geotag photos from the terminal or in my case SuperCard
I can link to open a particular marker, for example this one with video or this one with sound.
And I've started to document this on a wikp page: Mapping Walks,
Last week I was lucky to be involved with an interesting project. LTS had organised a GlowMeet where Oscar Stringer would teach stop motion animation to primary classrooms around Scotland.
Oscar worked with a group of children at Newmains Primary the lesson was video conferenced via Marratech. The conference was watched by classes from around Scotland some of whom joined in with the lesson.
I was working with Oscar's groups classmates next door. I was also nice to see Stuart Oliphant, the lts video conferencing expert, who helped Sandaig out many times.
There were a few North Lanarkshire schools watching the show and taking part. It is an interesting way to learn from an expert and one worth doing again. The children in several classes made successful animations which have been posted on the North Lanarkshire ICT & Technical Services website.
Oscar did an excellent job of explaining the basics of animation, he has a wealth of experience and tons of practical tips. I noticed that the children I was working with, once they had started found it difficult to stop and watch the screen and I sometimes was too busy 'helping' to stop the children to listen. If this style of learning practical tasks via video conferencing becomes more common we may have to experiment with different ways of timing and delivering instruction. I'll be interested to see video of the second animation workshop on Friday June 5th, unfortunately I'll be busy as will the Newmains p6 but I hope to be able to revisit them when they view the recording of the 2nd animation GlowMeet which is aiming to improve their skills.
I am also looking forward to seeing animations from around Scotland on the glow site and being able to replay Oscar's class.
This is my personal blog, opinions are my own and not those of my employer (the blog is produced in my own time). My opinions are not set in stone, I frequently change my mind, make mistakes and contradict myself.
John: Hi Janice,
My first comment from a North Lan teacher, thanks. It was great to get into such a nice c… Janice Tracy: Hi John,
Just thought I’d post you a wee comment here. The animations were a great success and you… Carl: I love the FlickrCC search and attribution generator – will save me lots of time.
Lifestream looks… Moira: Hi John, came across this while browsing. Just wanted tosay hi and to be in touch. It would be gre… Conrad Taylor: Not so much Google versus Twitter, maybe more a case of: asking a distributed group of sympathetic h… John: Tom,
You are up t =o 30 now, pretty impressive!
Sinclair the webcams one looks good to some very i… Tom Barrett: Thankyou John for writing about the presentation – great to see it evolve over the weekend – I had n… lynne lewis: John I totally agree with your thoughts on the flip camera. I bought one 4 months ago for my 8year o…
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