Encyclopedia's to use online?

With the use of search engines, what is the point of an Encyclopedia? We can just Google what I want to know, right?

Well something that must be remembered about the web is that it is not always 100% accurate. Its validity must be checked. I spoke about this before in reference to Alan November and web literacy.

An online encyclopedia is owned by someone, such as Britannica, or Encarta, so is much more like a traditional book, where we trust the content to be correct and checked. A lot of these online encyclopedia's unfortunately need to be paid for to get full access.

That's where Wikipedia initially seemed great, (full access and pictures) but of course as we all know Wikipedia is a great resource, but its is not always 100% correct, its validity needs to be questioned at times, because it is able to be edited by anyone. The website dos its own checks, but is not always on top of this, you can come across articles that state that it hasn't been checked. The site is clear about what has and hasn't been checked.

But I would be uncomfortable letting children loose on Wikipedia, it is not a child safe environment. That where this new Wikipedia Selection for schools comes in.
Visit the link below and check it out, and read more information about how it works.
http://schools-wikipedia.org/index.htm

Basically it is a chuck of the Wikipedia site that has been checked and edited by Wikipedia themselves and an outside organization. So we get the advatanges of full infomration with images. (lacking in the free encyclopedia)

It is free to download and thus host on your local server or just use the online site.

Its worth checking out.

Scrapblog's Part 2

This is it my scrapblog.

Such a nice piece of software to use.

It has some issues which I'll go into in another post, but the results speak for themselves.

Check it out.

Scrapblogs...

I have discovered this very powerful tool called scrapblog.

Basically it is a online slide show generator. It is a powerful piece of kit. It allows you to add text, draw shapes, add backgrounds, import photos and videos.

The real power is the way it interfaces with youtube for videos and a number of photo hosting sites. (You can also upload, it interfaces with PhotoBucket, Yahoo! Photos, Flickr, Webshots and Facebook) Web 2.0 in action.

I've been using it to create a holiday scrapblog. I've uploaded my pictures to flickr and then just import them into my scrapblog.

The screen shot show what it looks like. It is very easy to use and can create some great pieces of work. The website has loads of examples since these are created just like a blog.

http://www.scrapblog.com/

Check this one out... http://www.scrapblog.com/viewer/viewer.aspx?sbid=54249 and then look at the community page.

Linking this back into education. I've been reading Anthony's Blog and he has been exploring ICT and the skills needed within the Primary Frameworks.

This tool can be applied to a number of areas. For example:

In Y2 when design a website is offered as an activity. - sracpblogs could be a useful tool, along with wikkis.

Year 6 Non-fiction - Unit 4Formal/impersonal writing(3 weeks) - children create a guided tour presentation.

ICT Applications in Literacy - Multimedia - Shows all the possible uses of Multimedia software - scrapblogs would fit in aith all these areas.

Thats all for now - ill post my finished scrapblog later in the week.

Will it blend?

Holiday surfing and you come up with some weird stuff.

Check this out. Not one for the kids though. Enjoy...




http://www.willitblend.com/