Holiday surfing and you come up with some weird stuff.
Check this out. Not one for the kids though. Enjoy...
http://www.willitblend.com/
Wednesday, 1 August 2007
Wednesday, 27 June 2007
Alternative to maps.google.co.uk?
Someone showed me an alternative to http://maps.google.com/ - this allows you to see very detailed aerial maps and of course is linked to Google earth.
http://maps.live.com/ - a Microsoft run version of Google maps. Very similar, but with one major difference that you can see views of certain areas from different angles. (North, South, East or West) This is all achieved from with the Internet browser.
Check it out - (Anthony this one is for you)
http://maps.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&cp=sk9n7hgr2r3r&style=o&lvl=1&tilt=-90&dir=0&alt=-1000&scene=7694281&encType=1
Nic
http://maps.live.com/ - a Microsoft run version of Google maps. Very similar, but with one major difference that you can see views of certain areas from different angles. (North, South, East or West) This is all achieved from with the Internet browser.
Check it out - (Anthony this one is for you)
http://maps.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&cp=sk9n7hgr2r3r&style=o&lvl=1&tilt=-90&dir=0&alt=-1000&scene=7694281&encType=1
Nic
Wednesday, 20 June 2007
Amimation Day 2007
Today I attended yet another useful ICT course. I was an animation Day and basically allowed us to explore and use some of the different pieces of kit and hardware out there. This was tied in with where could this be used in class.
First the curriculum side - The basic message is that animation can be used in lots of subjects, it is not an ICT only activity. (Though in an ICT session you could teach the skills needed.)
The limit is only how imaginative you want to be. Animation lends it self well to telling stories or explaining things. In science you could make a water cycle animation, in geography an animation to show cliff erosion, in history you could show what the ancient Greek Olympics where. The list is endless.
Literacy is where a lot of focus can be placed in the form of using animation to support story telling. Animation is a great example of a multimodal text, which is a flash way of saying a story with moving pictures and sound.
It is important to note at this point that children need a clear plan on their heads of what they are doing when animating, so using a storyboard is essential. This process requires children to think about what they want to do and then go back and edit it if needed.
Why use animation? The most obvious reason is motivation, animation is cool and exciting. But motivation links back to my post about Alan November, it has the scope to give children a much greater audience, by sharing their videos with other children and classes in school and with a wider audience by sharing their video's online, again only increases motivation. Animation also encourages collaboration as animation is not a solitary activity, it requires many people to get involved to get it just right. Children need to plan and then assign roles as to who is animating and who is recording, you might even have lighting and prop making.
On to the hardware and software - Over the course of the day we used. 2animate, Digiblue movie creator and Stop Motion Pro. We used Digiblue and Logitech cameras.
2Animate is a nice animation package that allows you to easily create, stop motion drawn animations. (Though I think you can use a webcam as well.) The animations save as an animated gif.
Despite past reservations of the Digiblue (I have experienced some annoying technical problems) they performed well on the day. The message I got is to keep them plugged in. Below is what me and Jack from Mossford Green created. We where very pleased with the end result.
We continued exploring stop motion, but moved on to use Stop Motion Pro and played around with choma key, which is basically green or blue screen. It took a while to set up but the results where exciting. Below is the video. (I will be updating it with sound later.) Just so you know the image of the town hall is what as added using the chroma key. The background was green really.
Stop motion animation was great fun, but very time consuming so keep that in mind when planning to use it, it might be a few weeks work.
Overall the day was great fun and really allowed us all to explore the software and hardware, so now we are all much more confident using it in school.
First the curriculum side - The basic message is that animation can be used in lots of subjects, it is not an ICT only activity. (Though in an ICT session you could teach the skills needed.)
The limit is only how imaginative you want to be. Animation lends it self well to telling stories or explaining things. In science you could make a water cycle animation, in geography an animation to show cliff erosion, in history you could show what the ancient Greek Olympics where. The list is endless.
Literacy is where a lot of focus can be placed in the form of using animation to support story telling. Animation is a great example of a multimodal text, which is a flash way of saying a story with moving pictures and sound.
It is important to note at this point that children need a clear plan on their heads of what they are doing when animating, so using a storyboard is essential. This process requires children to think about what they want to do and then go back and edit it if needed.
Why use animation? The most obvious reason is motivation, animation is cool and exciting. But motivation links back to my post about Alan November, it has the scope to give children a much greater audience, by sharing their videos with other children and classes in school and with a wider audience by sharing their video's online, again only increases motivation. Animation also encourages collaboration as animation is not a solitary activity, it requires many people to get involved to get it just right. Children need to plan and then assign roles as to who is animating and who is recording, you might even have lighting and prop making.
On to the hardware and software - Over the course of the day we used. 2animate, Digiblue movie creator and Stop Motion Pro. We used Digiblue and Logitech cameras.
2Animate is a nice animation package that allows you to easily create, stop motion drawn animations. (Though I think you can use a webcam as well.) The animations save as an animated gif.
Despite past reservations of the Digiblue (I have experienced some annoying technical problems) they performed well on the day. The message I got is to keep them plugged in. Below is what me and Jack from Mossford Green created. We where very pleased with the end result.
We continued exploring stop motion, but moved on to use Stop Motion Pro and played around with choma key, which is basically green or blue screen. It took a while to set up but the results where exciting. Below is the video. (I will be updating it with sound later.) Just so you know the image of the town hall is what as added using the chroma key. The background was green really.
Stop motion animation was great fun, but very time consuming so keep that in mind when planning to use it, it might be a few weeks work.
Overall the day was great fun and really allowed us all to explore the software and hardware, so now we are all much more confident using it in school.
Prometeus, the future of the web?
I'm on creative ICT's mailing list and the newest one had this video.
The future of web?
Credit to http://creativeict.typepad.com/my_weblog/
The future of web?
Credit to http://creativeict.typepad.com/my_weblog/
Saturday, 16 June 2007
Nightingale Mac Project - in review.
Recently Redbridge bought a bank of Apple Mac Laptops. I was lucky enough to be the first person in the borough to get them in my school. (Thanks David)
Now this was the first time my school had, had any contact with Apple Mac's as well as laptops in the classroom.
This was a bit of a learning curve, but one which I relished. I took a Apple Mac home, played with it and after a while, was happy with the interface. (Its not that hard once you work out that everything just has different names, they work in a similar way to a PC.)
The kids, took to the Apple Macs instantly, I just needed to compare some things to windows and they where away.
I had many plans for these laptops, over the term that we had them. Some worked out, others unfortunately fell to the side.
The most successful use, was when I used them with my year 5 Literacy Set. We were working on writing reports, so I planned to use the laptops to turn the children into newreporters. The children in my class where to become roving reporters, and then present their newsreports. We all worked on the same report, finding out "What kids are into?"
We used a program called iMovie, a really nice easy to use video editing tool. (Similar to windows movie maker) Since the purpose of the lessons, would be to create a newsreport, before those lessons came around I taught the children to use iMovie. This I felt was very important step as I didn't want to get bogged down in teaching the children how to create a newsreport, instead of them creating their newsreport.
So we did our interviews and then spent two lessons, working on our newsreports. The results where amazing. I should mention that my class is the lower ability set, but you wouldn't guess that from the results. The children where motivated and wanted to make there newsreport as good as they could. Some children even taught me a few things about what iMovie can do. You can view some of the results here, on our school site.
The Appple Mac's where also used a lot in year 6, for work in the foundation subjects. They where used for research and presenting of work. The teachers using them commented on how motivated the children where in their work and how useful it was to have the opportunity to use the Internet with the whole class without having to use the ICT suite.
Year 5 also worked on the Apple Mac's to plan and present a geography field trip on the local high street. The children used the laptops to create their questionnaires and then collate and present their findings.
One project I wanted to do was an animation one. But while the iSight cameras built into the laptops are of great quality they are in completely the wrong place to allow for animation work. Next time though.
Overall the Apple Mac's where a excellent resource. They allow a flexibility that you can't get with just having an ICT suite. Apple Mac's themselves have brilliant tools, for video, music and photo editing.
We'll miss them at Nightingale.... but lets hope we can get them back in the future.
Thanks again to David O'Neill for getting them in the borough and letting us have them first.
Now this was the first time my school had, had any contact with Apple Mac's as well as laptops in the classroom.
This was a bit of a learning curve, but one which I relished. I took a Apple Mac home, played with it and after a while, was happy with the interface. (Its not that hard once you work out that everything just has different names, they work in a similar way to a PC.)
The kids, took to the Apple Macs instantly, I just needed to compare some things to windows and they where away.
I had many plans for these laptops, over the term that we had them. Some worked out, others unfortunately fell to the side.
The most successful use, was when I used them with my year 5 Literacy Set. We were working on writing reports, so I planned to use the laptops to turn the children into newreporters. The children in my class where to become roving reporters, and then present their newsreports. We all worked on the same report, finding out "What kids are into?"
We used a program called iMovie, a really nice easy to use video editing tool. (Similar to windows movie maker) Since the purpose of the lessons, would be to create a newsreport, before those lessons came around I taught the children to use iMovie. This I felt was very important step as I didn't want to get bogged down in teaching the children how to create a newsreport, instead of them creating their newsreport.
So we did our interviews and then spent two lessons, working on our newsreports. The results where amazing. I should mention that my class is the lower ability set, but you wouldn't guess that from the results. The children where motivated and wanted to make there newsreport as good as they could. Some children even taught me a few things about what iMovie can do. You can view some of the results here, on our school site.
The Appple Mac's where also used a lot in year 6, for work in the foundation subjects. They where used for research and presenting of work. The teachers using them commented on how motivated the children where in their work and how useful it was to have the opportunity to use the Internet with the whole class without having to use the ICT suite.
Year 5 also worked on the Apple Mac's to plan and present a geography field trip on the local high street. The children used the laptops to create their questionnaires and then collate and present their findings.
One project I wanted to do was an animation one. But while the iSight cameras built into the laptops are of great quality they are in completely the wrong place to allow for animation work. Next time though.
Overall the Apple Mac's where a excellent resource. They allow a flexibility that you can't get with just having an ICT suite. Apple Mac's themselves have brilliant tools, for video, music and photo editing.
We'll miss them at Nightingale.... but lets hope we can get them back in the future.
Thanks again to David O'Neill for getting them in the borough and letting us have them first.
Redbridge ICT Conference 2007 Part 2 David Ware
The second speaker of the day was David Ware from Little Heath School, he is an AST and ICT Co-ordinator. Little Heath is a school for children with Special Educational Needs.
David talked about how ICT provided children with unique learning opportunities.
He said that there are no limits to children's achievement when given the correct opportunities and experiences. Children want to learn, but for some children learning equals failure.
Why can't learning be fun?
He showed a great video with children and staff reactions to ICT and one girl was talking about using educationcity. She liked it because it was fun, but didn't seem to consider it learning as that had to be boring. David said that we are at a crossroads where personal learning styles are becoming ever more important, and ICT is one why in which they can be tackled.
The videos he showed had been created showing the impact of ICT in the school. The school has a comprehensive intranet, which does many things that an MLE should do, keeping records and tracking progress.
The school also uses there intranet, to store and record all the events round the school. Cameras are in use all the time, he carries one with him at all times. They are using to document events and learning, its nice to catch children being good.
ICT had been used to create a community. The photos allow learning to be revisited and retold and presented. He showed a few videos which did this very effectively. The children are also involved in a school radio station that is hosted by pupils.
ICT helps to remove barriers.
Children are informing teaching.
David showed a wonderful snapshot, of how ICT can be used to support and aid children in their learning.
David talked about how ICT provided children with unique learning opportunities.
He said that there are no limits to children's achievement when given the correct opportunities and experiences. Children want to learn, but for some children learning equals failure.
Why can't learning be fun?
He showed a great video with children and staff reactions to ICT and one girl was talking about using educationcity. She liked it because it was fun, but didn't seem to consider it learning as that had to be boring. David said that we are at a crossroads where personal learning styles are becoming ever more important, and ICT is one why in which they can be tackled.
The videos he showed had been created showing the impact of ICT in the school. The school has a comprehensive intranet, which does many things that an MLE should do, keeping records and tracking progress.
The school also uses there intranet, to store and record all the events round the school. Cameras are in use all the time, he carries one with him at all times. They are using to document events and learning, its nice to catch children being good.
ICT had been used to create a community. The photos allow learning to be revisited and retold and presented. He showed a few videos which did this very effectively. The children are also involved in a school radio station that is hosted by pupils.
ICT helps to remove barriers.
Children are informing teaching.
David showed a wonderful snapshot, of how ICT can be used to support and aid children in their learning.
Thursday, 14 June 2007
Web 2.0 - The Machine is Us
David O'Neill Showed this youtube video to start off and its equally inspirational. Its showing alot of what Alan November was discussing. After his talk I forgot all about it. Check it out while you wait for part 2 of Redbridge ICT conference.
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