Monthly Archives: July 2013

Global Education Project

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In this guest post Heath Graham (Project Officer for the Geography Teachers’ Association of Victoria) introduces resources and webinars for the Global Education project. 

The Global Education Project is an AusAid-funded initiative, designed to encourage teachers to take a global perspective in the classroom across all learning areas. The Global Education website features teaching activities, videos, image galleries and other resources. Resources cover a range of Global issues including Water & Sanitation.

The Victorian branch of the Global Education Project is hosting a series of webinars on range of global education topics. The first session covers Primary level resources on the topic of water, to coincide with the International Year of Water Cooperation. The second session gives a general introduction and overview of the global learning emphases and their application in the Primary classroom.

Webinar details:

Global Education And The International Year Of Water Cooperation

August 6, 2013 from 3:45pm to 5:15pm Session details

Global Perspectives in the primary classroom: building global citizens

August 7, 2013 from 3:45pm to 5:15pm Session details

These sessions are hosted in Blackboard Collaborate. If you have not used Blackboard before, DEECD have set up a Virtual Conference Centre to help you get started:

http://www.education.vic.gov.au/school/teachers/support/Pages/vcc.aspx

Using Postach.io to blog with Evernote

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Whilst Evernote is an incredibly powerful organisational tool on its own, one of the most exciting aspects of the service is the way it connects with other tools. One such service is Postach.io, a new platform that lets you blog from your Evernote account. 

Use the ‘published’ tag in Evernote to publish your work

Postach.io works by connecting with your Evernote and creating a blog from your notes. You define which Evernote notebook it can access and notes will only be published on your blog once you tagged them ‘published’. You can also set notes to appear as pages rather than posts by tagging them with the tag ‘page’. If you want to unpublish you can just remove the tag or drag it out of your notebook.

Postach.io blogs come with a number of different themes and there are also options to modify a theme if you know how to code. The theme editor options aren’t as easy to use as the visual theme editors in Global2, Edublogs or WordPress, so if you can’t code you only have the option of prebuilt themes at this stage. I’d expect that as the Postach.io user base grows (the service is still in Beta at the moment) that more themes will be shared by users. 

Postach.io comes with a few built in themes and the source code can be edited to create your own theme

One of the advantages of Postach.io is that all of your blog content is stored in your Evernote account. We’ve seen the angst caused in recent times with the closure of online services like Posterous, so storing your data in a service like Evernote, which syncs back to your computer, reduces the risk of data loss. It also means you are investing less time and effort in a single platform- if Postach.io doesn’t suit your needs you just close down your account and take your data with you. Hopefully this signals a move towards more data portability between online tools.

One other advantage of Postach.io is the wide range of apps produced by Evernote. Evernote works well on almost any device, either through desktop software, web browser versions or mobile apps. All of the Evernote apps are free, so you don’t need to buy a specific app to get blogging on your mobile device. You could even use the Evernote email feature to create blog posts via email (which coincidentally was a much loved feature of Posterous).

The Postach.io developers recommend you create your blog entries in the web browser version of Evernote, as many of the formatting options are the same as traditional blogging software. We built a sample Postach.io blog and decided to test out some of the standard blogging tasks like formatting text, adding images and embedding media. This included trying to recreate some recent posts from Bright Ideas. Creating simple notes with bullet points, text formatting and images was all as easy as creating a new note in Evernote. Postach.io also coped quite well with embedding media from popular sites like YouTube, Flickr and Twitter (see our test post here). There seemed to be very little lag time between a note being updated in Evernote and the changes being reflected on the Postach.io site which is very promising. Comments can be enabled using the Disqus service and your blog avatar can be updated using Gravatar. Postach.io blogs also include RSS feeds and tagged posts.

Postach.io lets you embed media from popular sites like YouTube, Flickr and Twitter. Click on the picture to see our sample post.

Nevertheless, we did find some elements of Postach.io lacking in comparison to standard blogging platforms. There is less control over items like captions and alt text, and it obviously lacks some of the fabulous features of Edublogs and Global2 like student blog management. Postach.io also ran into problems when we tried to attach files to a note; the text of the note appeared as a post but the attachments were not added. I also found that not being able to see a preview of my post until it was published was quite limiting, so if you are someone who likes to triple check your posts before they are published then this might be a difficult adjustment to make.

But what Postach.io does represent is  an easy way to create simple blog posts very quickly. Postach.io harnesses the power of Evernote to simplify the blogging process and also shows the value of developers building services that work well with other apps.

It’s not a replacement for a fully featured blogging platform like Edublogs (particularly if using it in the classroom) and the service is still in beta so you can expect bugs and downtime. Despite some limitations, Postach.io could end up being a great way to introduce beginners to the concept of blogging or to create simple blogs with very little effort, particularly if you are already using Evernote.

Check out our Sample Postach.io blog and see how the notes originally appeared in Evernote.

New to Evernote? Have a look at our guide to organising yourself

 

All About Change: Raising Modern Learners

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Raising Modern Learners (RML) News is a new go-to place if you believe in real educational change and want to stay informed, be part of the conversation and help educate your school community about issues in contemporary education. Raising Modern Learners was created early this year by two giants in the field of educational technology, Will Richardson (US) and Bruce Dixon (Australia). They were concerned that current school reforms largely missed the point when it comes to the changes necessary to meet students’ needs for success in modern society. They wanted to find a way to inform and shift conversations away from how to tweak traditional curriculum and get people talking about new literacies, skills, and dispositions.

We’re dedicated to helping parents (and educators) stay abreast of these changes in timely, thought-provoking, concise, and interactive ways, and to help them find ways to advocate for more modern, student-centred change in their schools that reflects the needs of [our]time.

The latest article entitled If High School Wasn’t Compulsory, Who Would Go? examines disengagement issues in school and has some intelligent conversation already clocked up in the comments. News articles come out fortnightly and can be accessed via the website or you can download the free iTunes app for either iPhone or iPad.

Image Credit: (c. 1935), Elton Fox instructing a student at the Fox-Morgan School of Commercial and Fine Art [photograph], State Library of Victoria Pictures Collection.

Create word clouds and analyse text with Textal

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Word clouds are a good way to visually represent the frequency of words in a piece of writing. While there are plenty of apps available that will automatically generate word clouds, a new app for IOS devices aims to make word clouds even more useful. Textal turns a text passage into a word cloud and also includes some interesting tools for analysing word usage.

A Textal cloud can be created using the text from a web page, a Twitter feed or one of the sample books provided. There’s also an option to simply cut some text from another app and paste it into Textal. Like most word cloud apps you can choose different fonts and themes (though there are no fancy shapes like Tagxedo). You can also choose to set the number of words displayed in your cloud. Once you create the cloud you’ll be presented with a pretty standard word cloud, with the most frequent words displayed in the largest text. Check out our sample Textal word cloud of #vicpln tweets here.

Textal lets you choose basic font and theme options, and clouds can be created from text, a web page or Twitter. In this case we’re creating a cloud of VicPLN tweets.

It’s when you tap on a a particular word that Textal begins to get really useful. This will display statistics about the frequency of word usage, the relationship of this word to other words, the overall word count and the number of unique words used in the document. The word cloud is also created online (though statistics aren’t available unless you open the cloud in the Textal app). Each Textal word cloud also has a unique QR code to make sharing easier.

Textal provides a breakdown of the number of unique words used, the popularity of your chosen word and the relationship to other words.

Textal is a relatively new release and is currently only available on Apple devices. At this stage it looks like it also requires access to a Twitter account (though it doesn’t auto post without your permission). This may make it difficult for students to use unless you have a shared class Twitter account.  Despite these possible drawbacks, Textal is definitely a useful tool for helping students analyse word usage in their writing and visualising the frequency of words they have used.

Download Textal from the Itunes store

Clip go the shares with eduClipper

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The web is awash with curation and bookmarking tools that promise to help organise resources and links. Given the vast range of educational and teaching resources available, it’s not surprising that educators have embraced many of these tools, using them to organise personal libraries and share with colleagues and students. In recent times we’ve seen curation tools like Learnist and Edcanvas aimed specifically at education, and the recently launched eduClipper is another interesting entry into the educational collation field.

eduClipper helps users bring together their own uploaded resources and material from the web  into subject boards. These boards can be collaborative, making it useful for teachers who want to share planning or collate resources with a class (student accounts are available) . Popular file types (such as JPG & PNG images, PDF or Word files) can be uploaded manually, and web pages can be added as a bookmark or as a clip of specific text using the eduClipper bookmarklet. Google Drive files can also be added. Each eduClipper account includes 1 gigabyte of storage.

Clips can be taken added from Google Drive or a URL. Popular file types can also be uploaded. Details and tags can be added to a clip, and clips can be organised into subject boards.

eduClipper is designed for and limited specifically to primary and secondary educators and students. Several features demonstrate the level of thought that has gone into the design, such as the flag feature that can be used to identify inappropriate content. The eduClipper help page outlines the flagging process;

When you flag a piece of content, the following will happen.  It will be frozen from the site meaning that it is no longer able to be seen.  The user will get an Email notification that their content has been flagged and why.  Their teacher (if associated with an educator) will also receive an Email letting them know that the student’s content has been reported.

The student may enter an appeal for the content which will be sent to their teacher and eduClipper employees.

One exciting aspect of eduClipper is the citation feature, which uses the EasyBib service to provide a citation for each clipped resource. In our tests it worked very well when clipping links from the web. It would also be great to have an option to manually enter citation information for items that aren’t recognised automatically by EasyBib, so hopefully that comes in future updates. The citation feature was brought to my attention by Celia Coffa, who has also written a great post about how she plans to use eduClipper with her class. I look forward to reading more posts about how it goes.

eduClipper’s citation tool sets it apart from many other organisational sites

In my initial testing of eduClipper I did find some slight bugs when clipping items, particularly when using the eduClipper bookmarklet in Google Chrome. (Update: The bookmarklet has now been updated and seems more reliable. Here is Adam Bellow’s video demonstration of the bookmarklet). Some pages and boards also took a bit of time to load. This is probably to be expected with a relatively new web app  and we’d expect any bugs to be ironed out soon, but at this stage I wouldn’t recommend using it as your primary way of storing resources. We’re also yet to see how eduClipper will cover costs in the future, and the Terms of Service do list the service as ‘currently free’. As always, we’d encourage you to read these terms and consider the issues in using any free tool. eduClipper does include an option to export data out of your account, so that can give you some peace of mind.

My initial impression of eduClipper is that it is definitely worth testing out, although I do have some minor reservations related to a few bugs that should hopefully be ironed out soon. Already the growing community of users are sharing some great resources, and limiting the site to K-12 levels makes these resources much more relevant than what you’ll find on a site like Learnist. At this early stage eduClipper looks to be a valuable and promising addition to a growing field.