Family connections is an application where users can set up their own private website, for the purpose of secure communication and sharing with family and friends.
Sharing with only selected family and friends means that photos, documents and messages are secure and only those you have selected can view them. Ideal for anyone with family and friends interstate or overseas.
Masher “lets you easily create a video by mixing together video clips, music tracks, and photos all for FREE!” Masher also has a large library of videos you can select from, or you can use your own.
There a three steps to Masher:
Masher is similar to animoto, but still a fun and easy way to develop your own funky video.
Free eLearning content by and for teachers is being developed at the WikiEducator wiki.
What is it and who developed it? The website states:
Sir John Daniel, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Commonwealth of Learning was the founding patron of WikiEducator. The project has adopted a community governance model which is coordinated by WikiEducator’s Open Community Council, building on the work of the Interim International Advisory Board. Ambassadors for WikiEducator promote the project around the globe, and our technology roadmap helps us make the future happen.
WikiEducator’s technical infrastructure is supported by a financial contribution by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) to the Open Education Resource Foundation an independent international non-profit head quartered at Otago Polytechnic New Zealand. The servers are hosted by Athabasca University, Canada.
There are ways for interested teachers to get involved with WikiEducator. The website explains how:
Get Involved ~ There are so many ways…
Thanks to @wizdommy for the information on WikiEducator!
Links to lots of teacher resources are available here. Created and maintained by Gail Shea Grainger, many sites are US oriented. However, there are quite a few sites that would be useful for Australian educators. Subjects available include:
Worth a look to see if there is something you can use or adapt for your own school.
Classroom Web Tools is a nicely organised resource site for teachers wanting to identify Web 2.0 tools for a specific school subject.
Bright Ideas featured Glogster back in March. Now there is Glogster.edu designed specifially for schools. From their website comes the following information:
A New World of Educational Innovation Awaits You
Glogster EDU is your original educational resource for innovative and interactive learning. Glogster EDU was conceived to imaginatively, productively, and collaboratively respond to the dynamic educational landscape and exceed the needs of today’s educators and learners. We value the participation of educators and strive to assimilate their contributions to Glogster EDU, Glogster EDU is yours! Educators from all over the world are integrating Glogster EDU’s resourceful platform to make traditional learning more dynamic, more interactive and more in tune with learners today. Most importantly Glogster EDU is FUN for teachers and learners alike!
Why Glogster EDU?
For Educators:
- A creative, dynamic, and innovative digital outlet that captures learner’s excitement for online creations, keeps learners engaged in course content, and makes teaching and learning more fun.
- A private and safe platform, monitored directly by teachers. Teachers control all the activities of their learners.
- A valuable teaching tool that integrates diverse core subjects including math, science, history, art, photography, music and more for individual learner portfolios, unique alternative assessments, and differentiated instructional activities.
For Learners:
- A fun, imaginative, and powerful learning experience which fosters independent creative self expression, positive learner-teacher relationships, and teamwork on collaborative class projects.
- A vibrant, multi-sensory learning experience which integrates learner’s knowledge and skills into traditionally text-oriented subjects and motivates learner’s desire to explore topics in which they may previously have been less interested.
Glogster now supports videos from SchoolTube!
From now on you can easily search and embed SchoolTube videos directly from your Glogster edit tool!
Animoto was reviewed in May and have also released an education specific application. This information comes from their flyer:
Your classroom will never be the same.
FOR EDUCATION
http://education.animoto.com
Animoto for Education
Your students are using the Internet to learn already, so engage them on their own turf with Web 2.0 tools like Animoto. Animoto is a web application that turns pictures and text into beautiful video clips with the click of a button.
Use it to create content for your lesson plans, assignments, or course materials – or even have your students create their own educational pieces.
Free All-Access Passes
Teachers and students get free All-Access Passes, giving them unlimited full-length video creations. Check out case studies and apply at:
http://education.animoto.com
Post your videos to YouTube, put them on your class’s blog, download them for in-class presentations, email them out to parents, use them to recap a semester or year, and so much more! Welcome to the cutting edge of online educational tools.
LearnCentral are encouraging educators to run webinars via LearnCentral public Elluminate. Any educator can use these resources for free as long as:
the events must be 1) education-oriented, 2) free (you’re not charging those who attend), 3) recordable, and 4) open to anyone to attend. We’re really excited to see what you do with this capability, and are hoping that it allows you to regularly gather other educators around curricular interests in “historic” ways.
The current instructions are below. This is a new service, so your feedback and help are greatly appreciated!
Before Scheduling a Meeting
We ask that you go through the live or recorded free Elluminate training (http://www.elluminate.com/support/training/index.jsp) before hosting a session, and suggest strongly that you attend another session as a participant to see how an Elluminate session works. Please don’t go in without any actual experience–it won’t be good for you or your attendees! 🙂 This is an honor system, but we do ask that you are prepared as we don’t want these free sessions to reflect poorly on Elluminate!
To Schedule a Meeting
To schedule a meeting in the LearnCentral public-use Elluminate room, please create the event using the calendar for this group by going to the events tab here and clicking on “Create Event.” Please check the calendar first and take care not to schedule over another event. Please also leave at least 30 minutes before and after each event (so that you and the organizer who follows you both have time to come into the room to prepare before your events).
The URL to put in the calendar event, or to give out to others to attend, is https://sas.elluminate.com/d.jnlp?sid=lcevents&password=Webinar_Guest. You can also use this shortened version: http://tinyurl.com/lcparticipant. Participants do not need to be members of LearnCentral to attend the event, but please encourage them to join!
Once your event is scheduled in the group calendar, you are welcome to also add it to the calendars of other groups you are a part of. If you believe your event might be of interest to the LearnCentral community as a whole, please email me at stevehargadon@elluminate.com so that I can place it on the community calendar. You also need to email me for the moderator log-in information of this is your first time holding a LearnCentral Elluminate meeting.
Please keep meetings to under two hours in order for others to be able to use the room. If you need a session that is longer than two hours, please contact me directly. Also, the LearnCentral Elluminate room has limit of 300 participants. If you believe that you will need to accommodate more than this number, please contact me directly as well.
The Actual Meeting
When you enter the room, there will be one or two standard slides that we ask that you leave in place. Any slide you want to upload should be placed after our default slides.
You will also need to start the recording. There should be a pop-up box asking if you want to do so. You should wait until your formal session is about to begin.
If you need to set up a telephone bridge, see the instructions in the Elluminate manual at http://www.elluminate.com/support/docs/9.5/telephony/index.jsp. You’ll need to have your own conference call system and dial-in number.
Ending a Meeting
When your session is over, please clear the room of all participants, yourself included. The room must be empty for the recording to process. If you have participants who have left the session running and don’t exit on their own, you can click on them in the participant window, then right-click to manually remove.
After a Meeting
When your meeting is done, you will need to find your recording link and place in the post-event URL. Here are the steps:
1. Go to the Recording Table is at https://sas.elluminate.com/drtbl?suid=D.40F698971780B7AEE5FAD85F5E2D6D. Look for the date and time of your session for the link (you can change the times to reflect your time zone). When you have found your session, right-click on the “Play” link to copy the URL.
2. Return to the LearnCentral and find your event. It’s usually easiest to do so by going to the group calendar in the “Host Your Own Webinar Group” or by using the top “Event” menu item and then selecting “My Events.” Click through to your actual event details page, then click on the “Edit Event” button. Scroll down to the “Other” box and click on “Expand.” You’ll then see a “Post-event URL” field, and you should now past the link to play your event recording. Then click the “Submit” button at the bottom to save these changes.
3. Repeat this process for each listing of the same event if you’ve put the event in multiple groups.
Feedback
We hope you have fun and find lots of good uses for this service! Please give us your feedback and ideas by posting in the discussions of this group, or by emailing Steve Hargadon directly at stevehargadon@elluminate.com.
A great way to save time, money and the environment! As a regular user of Elluminate, this is a great tool.
Tagul is a resource similar to Wordle. However, Tagul allows users to sign up, save Taguls and embed them into webpages.
Here is some information from the Tagul website:
Tagul is different
…Wordle clouds cannot be used as in the way tag clouds are usually used, like being embedded on a web page and serving as navigation units. That leaves the niche that Tagul is intended to fulfil. Tagul clouds are not toys and designed to be used on blogs, web pages or any kind of sites as a replacement of ordinary tag clouds. Each tag in Tagul cloud is linked with an URL and is “clickable” that enables visitors to use it for navigation.
Tagul sounds great but be warned it does have some limitations. Tag clouds can only be copied from websites via URLs at present, so if you want to copy and paste your own document into a Tagul, you’ll have to publish it to GoogleDocs or a similar site first.
One new resource that has caused a stir in the last few days is Google’s Sidewiki.
Sidewiki homepage
Once Sidewiki is downloaded by a user, it lets them comment on any webpage, with the comments available for anyone to view. Here’s what was published on Google’s Official blog about Sidewiki:
As you browse the web, it’s easy to forget how many people visit the same pages and look for the same information. Whether you’re researching advice on heart disease prevention or looking for museums to visit in New York City, many others have done the same and could have added their knowledge along the way.
What if everyone, from a local expert to a renowned doctor, had an easy way of sharing their insights with you about any page on the web? What if you could add your own insights for others who are passing through?
Now you can. Today, we’re launching Google Sidewiki, which allows you to contribute helpful information next to any webpage. Google Sidewiki appears as a browser sidebar, where you can read and write entries along the side of the page.
Google’s brief video explains more:
Jeff Jarvis, author of Buzzmachine, isn’t convinced. He says of Sidewiki:
Google is trying to take interactivity away from the source and centralize it. This isn’t like Disqus, which enables me to add comment functionality on my blog. It takes comments away from my blog and puts them on Google. That sets up Google in channel conflict vs me. It robs my site of much of its value (if the real conversation about WWGD? had occurred on Google instead of at Buzzmachine, how does that help me?). On a practical level, only people who use the Google Toolbar will see the comments left using it and so it bifurcates the conversation and puts some of it behind a hedge. Ethically, this is like other services that tried to frame a source’s content or that tried to add advertising to a site via a browser (see the evil Gator, which lost its fight vs publishers).
So this goes contrary to Google’s other services – search, advertising, embeddable content and functionality – that help advantage the edge. This is Google trying to be the center.
Jarvis goes on to report Twitter comments about Sidewiki and his further thoughts:
On Twitter, Google’s Matt Cutts says: “@jeffjarvis points taken, but if it gets larger group of people to write comments on web, that can be good. Plus API allows data to come out” And: “@jeffjarvis and I do see one very nice use case where people can add their comments about scammy sites, e.g. work-at-home scams.”
Points taken as well. It would enable sites without commenting functionality to get comments, including negative comments. In the case of a spam site, OK, that could be useful. But that could also include attacks that one now must monitor (watch out, Google: every story about Israel and race and Obama and health care will attract venom that affects my site but is not under my control).
I don’t think this was done maliciously at all. I think Google didn’t think through the implications.
Have a look at Sidewiki and decide for yourself. Perhaps only time will tell how people will use this new application.
Bright Ideas met YA blogger Adele Walsh at the Inkys virtual longlist announcement. Adele has been selected as a judge for the Inkys and she explains more about her blog:
Can you tell our readers a little about how your blog came to be?
I am a teacher at a poorly resourced school, specifically in our book area, so I thought I might be able to blog in order to receive books for the students. I have blogged here and there previously but in Persnickety Snark, I had a specific goal and I was determined. During the summer break, I reviewed everything in my YA collection and then contacted Australian publishers and they happily helped me out by sending me review copies. The school’s collection has grown and now I am reading a book a day.
I am now nine months into the YA blogging biz and I have received so much more than books for my class. I have been able to interview many YA authors, meet a range of fantastic readers from across the globe, attended Reading Matters, been invited to be part of the Inkys judging panel and written a blurb for a book. More importantly, I have deepened my knowledge and appreciation for Australia YA and now I have the pleasure of highlighting it on Persnickety Snark.
Do you market your site at all?
In terms of marketing, I am not all that active. Word of mouth with the authors and Reading Matter seemed to have raised my profile somewhat. My reviews (or quotes from them) occasionally turn up on websites and blogs with a lovely hyperlink. Twitter has been amazing in that it allows people to follow the link to my newest review. I have noticed that I have become more frequented of late as authors have mentioned me on their blogs. I am also getting some great feedback about my reviews so I think more people are returning as they like my review style and they trust that I will be honest in my regard for a book.
Where do you work/go to school?
I am a Year 8 English, Studies of Society and the Environment and Information Communication Technology teacher at Burc College. It’s a small independent school in the North-East suburbs of Adelaide. It’s lovely as I can switch the class from reading Hunger Games, to editing podcasts to making World War 1 trench models. My class is relatively small and largely ESL as they are from a whole host of countries – Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Bosnia, Iraq, etc I am also the curriculum and behaviour management coordinator so my days can be rather hectic!
How did you get involved in the Inkys?
Lili Wilkinson asked if I would like to be a judge a few months prior to the announcement. My answer was a emphatic YES. I have been reviewing and interviewing a whole host of Australian YA authors since January and am one of the few Australian YA review bloggers. I guess my work on the blog and with publishers/authors brought me to her attention as a possible candidate. Meanwhile, I was just flabbergasted that I was asked and continue to be honoured that they thought of me.
Any other information you’d like to add?
One of my favourite aspects of YA reviewing is that I have come across authors I might otherwise been unaware of. Julie Gittus is one that has made a particular impact. Her novel, Saltwater Moons, was released last year and because of the blog I was able to review her book and email with her. I think it’s a fabulous book that should have been recognised more. I love stumbling over Australian YA authors accidentally and getting caught up in their stories – Mo Johnson’s Boofheads was a novel I bought as the title tickled my fancy and it ended up really striking a chord with me. It’s the debut authors like Julie and Mo that make reviewing really exciting.
A big thanks to Adele for taking the time to inform us about her wonderful blog. It is an excellent model for any students or even teachers wishing to begin their own blog.