Bookmark: Math and Biology instructional vids

Kahn Academy

Bookmark: Story writing

Web based story writing software to check out when I have some TIME!

storybird

kerpoof

piclit

storystarters

For demonstrating how to expand on ideas in narrative writing: telescopictext
Links to online comic creators

For making 30 second free movies... animoto

iaza and prezi

I've had a play around iaza, a simple to use and free online image editor.

It was The Book Chook's suggestion, and she has written a number of posts about using image editors for literacy teaching that are worth a read.

I found the program very classroom (and CRT) friendly as it doesn't require any login and it is easy to use a file or a web sourced image - so, you don't even need a camera in order to use it.

I've used prezi as a kind of album to display the photos I made on iaza. Prezi, a web-based alternative to powerpoint has a free basic model that older primary students could enjoy, but it requires an email address to make an account. (Also, there is a 30-day free trial of the offline program available). The website has a number of video tutorials and examples to get people started and I found them informative enough to make this without any other guidance. It is a slightly idiosyncratic program, so kids will probably need a number of sessions to get the hang of it and make anything. Could be useful for story-boarding, making comics, and organising information.

This embedded prezi seems to take most of a million years to load (and even then struggles). You can also view it through the prezi site. Click on this sentence to find it there!

I highly recommend checking it out.

iaza.com on Prezi

Bookmark: Twitter for teachers

I'm just (very tentatively) beginning with twitter. I want to use it for professional conversations and political participation, and follow a few of my favourite public commentators. It seems a bit full-on at the moment and I worry a bit about privacy and security.

Some useful resources:

Plain speak intro to twitter

List of useful ed hashtags

#DUedchat 7pm thursdays, Down Under edchat

For once I have the basics down, some advanced twitter skills for teachers

Kids blogging:

Comments for kids

Useful youtube vid about adding multiple users to edublogger

bookmark: online privacy

Just bookmarking these for future considerations about online transparency vs privacy:

Transparency as Pedagogy

5 reasons why your online presence will replace your resume in 10 years.

More about public/private borderlines and writing

Memoir as suicide by Susan Bradley Smith

Delicious Library 2.0

I've been trying to find a database program that I can use to catalogue of all the childrens' literature that I read. A tool to help out with those moments of searching for that perfect book that you read that time, with the mouse and the... maybe it wasn't a mouse, some kind of animal... it had a yellow cover... it would be perfect for this unit/kid/age.. if only the librarian could read my useless hand waving...

For each book, I wanted to record the title, author, two or three summary sentences and reminder of what it can be used for, and up to about 6 tags (probably themes, key phonics, genre, ...), in the hope that I could search by title, author, or tags... and find the book!

An easy way to do it would be to create a blog, and have each book as an entry, and use the tags to do all the organising. Unfortunately then I'd need internet connection to access the list, and when I'm relief teaching, that might be a pain. Also, I was sort of self-conscious about creating web junk. It's not going to be a resource worth sharing, there are fantastic wiki-style websites where people properly review and catergorise literature. My database would be merely an electronic (therefore searchable, expandable, transportable) version of a box of file cards, organised and expressed with a logic all of my own. No need to display that.

So anyway,

I'm trialling my friend's suggestion, Delicious Library 2.o. It's only available for Macs and if I like it, I will need to part with US$40.

Advantages: 1) Its stand out cool feature is that for most books, I don't need to type in any of the standard details. I just hold the barcode of the book in front of my inbuilt camera and it reads the barcode! Then the program contacts amazon.com to get the cover pic, all publishing details, summary, reviews, and even a list of other titles by the same author. Beautiful! 2) There's space for me to add my own notes (though annoyingly it wont let me do paragraph breaks). 3) The display is very attractive:

Annoying features: 1) There is no tagging function. I am able to catergorise books by creating "shelves" but that requires me to drag and drop books one by one. 2) There is no text based search function? I think? There is supposed to be a speech recognition search function but it doesn't seem to like me or work or something... or maybe I'm not doing it right, not sure. 3) Within shelves I can't reorder the books and it orders them alphabetically according to the author's first name. 4) 4 of the 5 Australian books that I have tried to input have not been identified by the amazon database. They're common books, one is by a major Australian writer, and yet they didn't register. They are the grey blocks where covers should be in the pic above.

So I'm feeling a bit ambivalent about it. Love the visuals and surely that will be an important compensation for the lack of searchability. Love how quickly and easily the scanning happens - it's better than I ever imagined. I think it will do the job of helping me recall books I've read. But then I just feel perplexed by the lack of tagging and search function...

Will trial it for a little longer and keep looking at alternatives.