DIGI[cation] - creating e-portfolios & online communities

DIGI[cation] is a web tool that has been created by teachers for teachers to create and manage "e-Portfolios or online learning communities.

DIGI[cation] is free for up to 1,000 users. You can also use this web based tool to setup online courses for you classroom. You can set privacy preferences and along with other communication authoring tools, such as a calendar.

The e-Portfolio function is quite easy to use. Whether you are an art student or preparing a graduation portfolio for work or for a final assessment....DIGI[cation] is easy to use and leaves you with a web-based Portfolio without having to be a web designer.

Moving virtual objects with your mind....yes your mind!

Back in 2004, BBC news wrote an article about MIT Media Lab Europe that had demonstrated a new wireless headset that could potentially control electronic devices from brain wave power. Seems like science fiction....but this will soon be on the market available for you and I to buy.

Two companies that I have read about presently have mind control game controllers in prototype are Emotiv Systems and NeuroSky .

Emotiv Systems started up in Australia and state on their website they should be ready for the consumer market sometime next year. "Their headset consists of 16 sensors that are hooked up to a wireless transmitter that can send signals to your PC or video games. The unit can detect facial expressions, record emotions or to use ideas/thoughts to control actions in a game." They are working to develop their headset so it can also be used with other games that you presently own. Their research team is working on this amazing technology and exploring other areas other than video games where their system can be used.

NeuroSky is the company that initially sparked my interest in this area. Two weeks ago I was watching the morning news in a hotel room in Singapore and a news report came on about a company that had developed a technology that used brain power to move objects in a virtual world....this was NeuroSky. This company is based in Silicon Valley with business operations in Asia. An article written about NeuroSky in USA Today writes that NeuroSky headset "captures brain wave signals measuring anxiety, attention, drowsiness, and meditation levels." The NeuroSky development team have a contract with an "international toy manufacturer that plans to unveil an inexpensive gizmo with an embedded NeuroSky biosensor at the Japan Toy Association's trade show in late June. A U.S. version is scheduled to debut at the American International Fall Toy Show in October."

Pondering......

WOW! Think of the possibilities. How will this change the physical learning environment? What impact will this have on how students learn or teachers teach? Will it alter how we communicate with one another?

Thinking of how this technology can be applied in various industries such as medical, transportation, etc... is mind boggling!

I encourage you to go to the websites and read about this new technology. It would be a great discussion in any classroom!

Online garden planner and house plan for blueprints

smallblueprinter is a great online tool that allows students to "design a set of house plan blueprints online with smallblueprinter,
then take a 3D walk through their design,
using an isometric view and print out their plan."

This online tool is quick and easy to use for budding architects/builders of any age.

The other tool available at smallblueprinter is the gardenplanner. You can quickly design a garden plan online with a drag-and-drop interface. There is a small cost for the download version but the online version is presently free. Just use a screen capture tool to save your finished plan.

Great for horticulture programs, design studies, architecture, science, etc....

Other related links:

TMW Interactive Landscape Guide
Visual Landscape Design - Interactive Multimedia Training
Web Garden
Garden Organic for Schools
Green Teacher Magazine
California Foundation for Agriculture in the Classroom

Wufoo - the tool to help you create web forms for any type of survey

So you may not be the world's greatest web designer but you want to create a web survey for your class. Wufoo is the web based tool that can help you do just that.

Wufoo "allows you to filter through entries, create reports, and build graphs based on your collected data." You can export your data to Excel or CSV for further analysis.

If you have your own website and would like to include your form(s) on your site rather than hosted on Wufoo you can easily copy/paste the form code onto a webpage or use CSS or XHTML markup.

Free to sign-up (this includes 100 entries per month - 1 entry = 1 user filling and submitting an answer to a survey) and then minimal cost for further plans (see sign-up costs.)

Creating Mosaics with Digital Photographs

I found this freeware software several years ago and thought it was worth another salute as it was a lot of fun when I used it with my students. AndreaMosaic (Andrea also happens to be the name of the programmer who designed the software) is a cool PC piece of free software that converts a collection of images into a copy of the original image.

The mosaic of the kiwi and strawberries up above was made with a collection of images (replicated to only 500 tiles).

Looking for a similar free program for your Mac? MacOSaiX works similar to the PC version mentioned above. Choose the image you want to make a mosaic from....choose the shape and number of tiles in the mosaic....choose the sources of images to use for the tiles....and step back while your mosaic is created.

Have some fun....create your mosaic then create some wall sized posters from the mosaics for your classroom using The Rasterbator or Blockposters.com.

Other Mosaic Links:

• How to create a LEGO mosaic
• Mosaic Maker: Create a photo mosaic from your digital photographs
• mosaickr: create mosaics from your flickr pictures

Reducing your Carbon Footprint

What is your carbon footprint? There has been a lot in the news lately about reducing one's carbon footprint.

What is a carbon footprint? "It is a measure of the impact human activities have on the environment in terms of the amount of green house gases produced, measured in units of carbon dioxide." (from: Carbon Footprint)

Carbon Footprint gives some tips on reducing your primary footprint:

• holidays (don't go by air)
• electricity (sign up to renewable energy)
• gas (try using solar wate heating)
• traveling around (use public transport as much as possible)
• car share (sign up to a car share scheme)

BeGreen also has a lot of tips an information on reducing your cabon footprint including a carbon calculator. Looking at the amount of electricity used, how many miles you drive each year, how many cities you have flown to in a year, and the amount of therms (natural gas) used each month or year....you will then be able to calculate your carbon footprint.


an inconvenient truth has made a lot of news since it has been released as DVD. Vice President Al Gore presents an impactful look at global warming. The website has a free educational guide to go with the DVD.

Other sites to checkout:

• New York Times: On the Web, an Advanced Carbon Calculator for Personal Use
• ABC News: Reducing Your Carbon Footprint
• Hippy Green: Reducing your Carbon Footprint
• Enironmental Leader: Companies measure the Carbon Footprint of consumer products

BBC Languages Web Resource

One thing I always hear from my colleagues that teach languages is there are never enough resources for their programs. The BBC Languages website is full of great ideas and resources for language programs.

French, Spanish, German, Italian, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, Greek (along with some other languages) are focused on this website.

Podcasts available to download, games and quizzes to help improve your listening skills, lists of radio stations and television shows (in that particular language) are just some of the resources available.

Whether you are an adult learner brushing up on your vocabulary or teaching a language program you will find this website a great resource.

Making Sense of Ads

Making Sense of Ads is a combination of History, Media and Marketing.

Walking through the history of American advertising the website (produced in association with the Visible Knowledge Project) explores questions one should ask about an ad:

• What is the ad trying to do?
• Who is the intended audience?
• What strategies are used to sell the product?
• What do ads reveal or conceal about an era?
• What else do you need to know to analyze an ad?

The last section of the site is full of web resources for further research on advertisements. Great website to explore for lesson ideas for advertising concepts.

Celtx: cross-platform application for the preproduction process

Celtx is a free "cross-platform media application that provides support for the entire pre-production process."

Use it for preproduction for: film, video, theatre, animation....or any media development.

Available for Windows, Mac and Linux, available on or offline. Split into four areas:

• writing tools (storyboard development and scripts)
• pre-visualization tools (storyboarding and media rich breakdowns)
• organization tools (project folders supporting external documents and scheduling/reports)
• web services (collaboration tool, private work spaces, back-ups, and publishing

Working through the preproduction process....this application assists you in:

• getting started - "Location, Character and Scene development tools help you start a dynamic story line"
• writing - with all the features of a document editor to assist with the writing momentum.
• collaborate - features enable teams to work together in the development of a project
• media breakdown - enables you to tag (comment) on props, characters, etc...with notes, pictures and audio.
• storyboard - drag and drop your images into the storyboard to be grouped and tagged. Play them as an animatic to help with the flow of the story.
• scheduling - is a "real-time" feature to help plan your shoot/digital story.
• web services - using Celtx server features allows you to back-up your project, share your project with others, or publish to Celtx central.

Great tool for students as it can be used as a whole or in separate parts (eg: storyboard section). Thanks Mr. Thomson for this link :)

MediaPredict....the online marketing game

Inkling markets key phrase is "none of us is as smart as all of us...." This young Chicago company has brought a unique prediction game to the web for all to play.....MediaPredict.

If you are teaching media, business or just have a love for marketing and the media....MediaPredict might be of interest to you.

How it works:

After your free registration you receive $5,000.00 virtual dollars that you can immediately start using for media investments online. Users are able to scan the market and put their virtual money on media investments that they think might be the next big hit.

"Better predictions help media companies choose the books, CDs, films, and television shows that people really want. That means you'll get media that you like, and so will everyone else."

This online game is quite a hook and is a great learning tool for students to learn about investment, trading and marketing.

ThinkFree gives you digital freedom

ThinkFree really lives up to its name with some unique applications!

ThinkFree Write is a free web based office suite. Create an account and receive 1 GB of free storage. Capabilities to collaborate and share your documentation with others.

If you are looking to expand your iPods use other than for music and photographs.....another really cool appz is ThinkFree show iPod edition ($29.95 US). "ThinkFree allows iPod users to create, edit, store and transport PowerPoint® files and use them Standalone on all new iPods with color display....leave your laptop at the office or home show your presentation all with the convenience of an iPod. Just plug your iPod into a host computer and the iPod is recognized as an external harddrive.

Virtual Museum Tours for your students

The weather is cold. Just can't imagine taking that whole class onto a bus for another field trip?

Then take your class on a virtual field trip! Some of the best museums from around the world offer online tours and virtual activities for students of all ages.

A one-stop-shop for over 600 science and technology museums world-wide is the ASTC (Association of Science-Technology Centres) website.

ASTC "is an organization of science centers and museums dedicated to furthering the public understanding of science among increasingly diverse audiences. ASTC encourages excellence and innovation in informal science learning by serving and linking its members worldwide and advancing their common goals."

Search for museums within any country and you will find a list of all of the S&T museum web addresses worldwide just waiting for you and your students to explore them.

Well okay, so now you have some links that will take your students through a digital tour...but why use virtual field trips?

"Through electronic field trips, students also have the opportunity to connect, face-to-face and in "real time," with "real" people through video-conferencing."
"... electronic field trips give students a number of unique tools that enhance the field trip experience and follow-up activities based on the field trip."
"...electronic field trips are not subject to the same restrictions that constrain actual field trips."

(Ellefson & Worthington) .

Need some ideas on integrating VFTs into your lessons? Listed below are some websites with tips and ideas on how to use virtual field trips within your program.

1. Virtual Adventures
2. Internet 4 Classrooms - Virtual Field Trips
3. Using Virtual Field Trips in Your Classroom
4. Electronic Field Trips
5. Guidelines for a Virtual Field Trip
6. Virtual Field Trips....some lesson ideas

Design Inspiration & Resource from Japan - PingMag

PingMag is a bilingual online design magazine that writes about ideas and inspiration by two designers from Japan. This online magazine is full of great articles and content.

LOVE THIS MAG!!!



Storyboard Design: Hey teachers, feeling like you need a little inspiration? Looking at that storyboard unit and dreading it? Check out the article in PingMag. The writers take you through 5 different storyboard case studies:

• TV drama
• Film festival trailer
• Online game
• 2 different TV commercials

With each case study there is an example of the drawn storyboard, discussions about the creative journey of the "storyboarders" and examples of the finished product.

As I was reading through their archives I came across a hilarious and entertaining article they did on the Website Development Process. Using Lego they created a superb visual story of what all web designers have gone through with their clients....from conception to completion of a design project. Great resource to help your students understand what is involved in the completion of a project (plus it will give you a giggle.)

Clothing and Textile teachers there is a huge amount of information on this site for you!

My husband will shake his head when I write about this one....but every morning before work, my husband packs up his eyeglass case, wallet, Tupperware bowl of cereal, spoon, bits and pieces of paper and religiously places them all in a nice plastic grocery bag. I keep teasing him and tell him that I am going to buy him a real man bag.....anything would be better than the plastic bags. Well in Tokyo apparently the fashion IS for a man to carry a fashion "man bag" .....who would of thought.

You really need to check out this site! Some of the categories that are available (which I am sure are growing daily):

• Architecture
• Arts & Crafts
• Conscientious Design
• Events & Exhibits
• Fashion
• Film/Animation
• Graphics
• Illustration
• Internet
• Japan
• Music
• Photography
• Products
• Street Art
• Technology
• Typography
• Worldwide

And in case you didn't pick it up at the beginning......LOVE THIS ONLINE MAG!!!

Young musicians learn by sight, sound and "doing"

I started my young days in a small town in the Saskatchewan prairies in Canada. With no kindergarten or preschool, I started taking piano lessons when I was 5 years old. My mom taught me but I quickly moved onto taking lessons from a Sister at the convent once a week. Those were the days when discipline meant a sharp whack across your hands with a ruler if you made too many mistakes during your piano lesson. I can only remember one such "corrective measure" happening to me....funny I never made that error playing that particular song again!

I enjoyed my piano lessons throughout the years with my piano teachers BUT I am very much a "senses" learner and I wish this software had of been around when I was learning to play the piano. StarPlay would have been a great support during those loooooooong practices early in the morning and after school. I learn best by doing, seeing and hearing.....pretty much all at the same time. Today we call this multi-tasking but when I was a kid I think they called it being "hyperactive" :)

If Celine Dion can sing with Elvis Presley during the American Idol special....why couldn't I practice with Lang Lang (Chinese pianist)?



A software relationship between Siebelius and InTheChair has developed StarPlay which will soon be released. It is a "whole new experience, StarPlay is music software that allows your students to perform with professional bands and orchestras. They become part of the band, hearing the musicians around them while watching the conductor or the other musicians. "

Technology Adventurer - Indiana Jones for the future

As I was reading through my feeds tonight I came across an article that shouted at me to give it a read - "Designing mobiles for the world" from the BBC News website. The article is about Jan Chipchase who is a principal researcher at Nokia Design (the good folks that design communication mobility).

Nokia has sent this "Techno Indiana Jones" to 15 countries in the last 12 months to study human behaviour.....particularly how people interact with their mobile phones. This research has lead to a greater understanding of the relationship we have between our mobile phones. Whether you are in the Sahara desert, on the ice fields in the Rocky Mountains or Zorbing down the hills in Rotorua New Zealand....they will be exploring your communication habits and looking at how you use, store, carry, and interact with your mobile phone.

Jan Chip's blog Future Perfect is not a story about a company called Nokia, but rather a journey of how people live and communicate from the corners of the world. What an amazing job....exploration, technology and human interaction all in one package!

A research document called " Where's the phone? A study of mobile phone location in public spaces" was written by J. Chipchase and two other Nokia researchers that reveals some interesting gender and cultural trends.

It is somehow reassuring to know that leading technology companies still believe that human face-to-face interaction is a great way to help evolve technology....even if it is to make a better or new product.

Even though I am a technologist and dare I say "geek", making human connections is still more important to me than network connections. Could technology be as exciting as it is without the human aspect? I hope humans will never stop needing human contact....good or bad. After all isn't that what makes us human?

Classroom

Check out Chipchases' blog and some of his articles. Great discussion for psychology classes, business and economics, technology and social sciences.

Expertvillage - videos to help and learn

In the aftermath of the YouTube craze many websites have embraced the "you upload a video" theme. Expertvillage has a lot of great videos that teachers could use within their programs (be sure to view the video before you show it to a classroom full of students....just in case.)

For example:

Dance: many dance programs find it difficult to source out samples on video to show their students. Some of the types of dance videos available are

• Salsa (advanced)
• Salsa (beginner)
• Cha Cha Cha
• Mambo
• Tap (beginner)
• Breakdancing

Phys Ed: in the New Zealand curriculum for phys ed there is a section for "circus skills". Some of these skills are shown:

• Scarf juggling
• Ring juggling
• Diabolo juggling
• Ball juggling

Other video categories:

• Soccer
• Pilates
• Stop Motion Animation
• Digital Camera
• Applying Special Effects (facial)
• Basics of Indie Film Making: Tips for Scripting, Casting, Shooting & Editing
• How to develop your own film in a dark room
• How to draw cartoon animals
• How to install a computer motherboard
• Learn common French phrases

and it goes on and on...... You will have to check this site out.

Here is a sample from Expertvillage on Industrial Product Design:

Click here for more on "Industrial Product Design: A Free Introduction Course on Video"

Learning Support:
Each video has a section where you can link to the video or embedd the code (as I have done above). You can also bookmark any of the videos. Great option to include on your class blog.

Adobe Labs: Kuler - color tool for creativity and inspiration

Just a reminder for those designers needing inspiration that have not found Adobe Labs: Kuler yet......go check it out today!

It is a great tool that is helping designers around the world with color schemes and inspiration. Whether you are building a set for a play, designing a line of clothing, illustrating for a magazine or building a website.....color is an important element that will have a true impact on your final product and an impact on your target market.

Use as an instructional tool in any color lesson. Students can create accounts and log into the web version of Kuler or download the standalone version for their desktops. They can create their own colour themes around colour rules:

• analogous
• monochromatic
• triad
• complementary
• compound
• shades
• custom (move the colour arms to form own themes)

Below each colour swatch Kuler also gives you the code for the following colour models:

• HSV (hue, saturation, value)
• RGB (red, green, blue)
• CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black)
• LAB (the most complete color model used conventionally to describe all the colors visible to the human eye)
• HEX (color code for HTML)

Students can tag their colour themes and save them to their MyKuler space, publish to the Kuler community and/or save it as a Photoshop exchangeable swatch file that can be used with their Photoshop creations.

Great tool to get students inspired!

Cool and unique projects to "make"

This first site makes me wonder if you need to be a musician, an electronics specialist or both.

Creating your first synthesizer....this would be such a great project to do with groups of students in a competition atmosphere. The Sound Maker Project website gives you all of the directions needed to create a "Weird Sound Generator " (WSG) out of just about anything, and well, people have done just that. Various pictures have been submitted by by developers who have made their WSGs out of things like lunch boxes, an IKEA key box, plastic toys, VHS plastic cases, even a stuffed teddy bear....are just a few of the great projects.

Would love to hear if anyone takes this on with their classes!

_________________________________________________

Make: technology on your time is a great website. I have spoken about it before and it is worth revisiting again. I was in San Francisco in 2005 for the FlashForward conference and I picked up the first Make magazine that was published and have been hooked on Make ever since. Published by the computer publisher O'Reilly....it is a combination of "Geek meets MacGyver" (for those of you who don't know the television character MacGyver...he was a laid back secret agent who was always in trouble with the bad guys and could make bombs out of paper clips or machine guns out of a pencil.)

Some of these unique projects are posted from avid fans or you can purchase a kit online from Make. For example, how to make your own strobe light for a camera or how about making your own USB charger for your iPod or other gadgets.

________________________________________________

And as we move into our Winter months here in New Zealand....how about a website that makes snowflakes.

Make-a-flake is a fun interactive website created with Flash. Use a pair of digital scissors to cutout and create your own snowflake which you can post to a gallery (or use a cropper tool to save to your computer).

Spice up your documents with cartoon characters

Have some fun with the assignments or presentations for your classes.

The first one is from a Dutch website called Planearium....a SouthPark Studio designed in Flash. You drag and drop the parts of the cartoon to create your own character. Capture your characters individually (using a cropper tool) then place them in documents, animate them in Flash....have fun - thanks for this link Mr. McColl.

The second site is based on Superheros. The Hero Machine is a great Flash application that can be used in English classes (which was passed on from the English dept....thanks Mr. Thomas). This is the free version to try but I encourage you to try the commercial version (which is very reasonable) which gives the designer a huge selection of different possibilities to design unique Hero Characters.

Print anywhere, anytime and without ink!

You may remember the original instant Polaroid camera....point, shoot then out pops your picture. Wave it around in the air for a few seconds and like magic your Polaroid image appears. Great technology at the time, but wasn't that camera a big clunker to carry around compared to the cameras today?

Zink (which stands for zero ink) has taken that Polaroid paper technology even further. Still using only heat (no toner or coloured cartridges) to develop the picture from the coloured crystals that are between the layers of paper.

Zink has developed two types of printers. One is an integrated digital camera/printer that is a full featured digital camera with a built-in full color printer. The other printer is the size of a credit card that is a companion printer to your mobile camera phone or digital camera. It attaches wireless or with a USB cable.

These should be available on the market in late 2007.

Companion Printer

Integrated printer and digital camera.

Google The World

Google Sightseeing Blog explores the world via satellite. Making posts every weekday viewing weird and wonderful things around the world using Google Maps or Google Earth.

One recent posting shows a unique Solar Project in the Mojave desert, California (The image bottom left is a photograph of the Solar Project. Bottom right is a Google image).









Some great lead-in stories with images to begin many class discussions.

________________________________________

Another website you need to check out is Flash Earth.

It is an experimental Flash application that uses satellite and aerial images from online mapping websites (you have 8 different mapping websites to choose from). What I really like about this web application is the speed and ease of use. You can zoom in and out so quickly into any corner of the earth.

Use a cropper tool and voila.....you have some great images to use in your classroom.

School 2.0: join the conversation

This is a site that I stumbled upon late one night while doing some research. With one eye open and the other already sleeping....School 2.0 website appeared on my screen.

The website and poster (image shown on the right) is a tool that has been created "to help schools, districts and communities develop a common education vision for the future and to explore how that vision can be supported by technology."

The poster is an amazing tool that has a huge amount of detail. This is a tool that can be used to create dialogue with ALL levels of your school community, from students to Trustees.

You can order up to 5 copies of this poster for free and may I encourage you to do so today.

Resources, resources, resources

Shambles is a website that was designed to support international school communities throughout South East Asia. With a database of over 25,000 education websites that have been approved and recommended by teachers it is a very rich resource!

Some of the resources available are:

• elearning
• Google Earth Lessons
• International Baccalaureate Links
• Info Literacy

There are so many great resources and links for all grade levels in this website it is a must to check out.

yackpack: new web based communication tools

yackpack is a collection of free web based communication tools.

Walkitalkie Widget - "Instantly connect with everyone on your blog, wiki, site -- anywhere. 1-click installation. "

YackPack UC - "Live voice, presence, voice and text messaging. Perfect for keeping teams in touch."

Yackplayera - "Record and embed or link rich voice messages, quickly and easily. "

These are great communication tools to introduce to your students. Use them with a local or global project or use them on your class website.

There is an information section on the website that suggests different ways teachers can use these products.

mscape - HP building interactive experiences

In February I looked at augmented reality and some of the new GPS devices that may be coming to a classroom near you....in the future.

Well according to HP....the future is now!

mscape: creating new user experiences

HP has a new venture called mscape that is quite a different pathway for a company that has been known for the hardware it develops. Free to sign-up and try.

It is a website where the users create and share games, tours, stories, art and other location-based experiences called mediascapes.

What is a mediascape you ask?
Mediascapes are environments you create from the actual landscape around you. "Mediascapes are mobile, location–based experiences that incorporate digital media with the sights, sounds, and textures of the world around you. A mediascape blends digital images, video, audio and interactions with the physical landscape. "

Do you want to create a school tour....create a "school mediascape."

Do you want students to relive a battle scene from a historical event....create a "history mediascape."

The possibilities are limited only to your imagination :)
HP Labs:
If you want to follow to see what projects are developing in the HP Lab give their website a peek. http://www.hpl.hp.com/