How the digital future looked from 1987.
Month: July 2012
Posted with BlogsyEducational videos
Sorting out the wheat from the chaff on YouTube is often challenging.
Here's an article that gives 35 curated sources for educational videos.
Power up!
Project based learning
Chucker salvation
Are you a Chucker or a hoarder? We are a chucker family (no, this isn't our skip), but try to retain our green credentials (and save money and incovenience) using these sites
Classified Ads on the Internet – easy,low resale value
Auctions – better resale value, national coverage, fascinating, slightly trickier. PayPal make payment really easy.
Freecycle – giving it away, so no comeback. People will take almost anything away. you can be very specific, for instance: I have a sofa that must be collected by 6pm tomorrow – requires 2 strong men to lift. your address and phone number is not revealed, all communication via email: set up a separate yahoo mail account for preloved, as there is a lot of traffic.
YouTube facts and figures
In Bloom
Kathy Shrock has created a truly exceptional website – amongst many other gems, she has produced interactive diagrams showing which Apps and Web 2.0 program's support different areas of Blooms Taxonomy. Useful for lesson planning!
Shhh…
YouTube, much maligned by teachers, has its own utility. It is is the natural partner for the iPad – the videos are delivered seamlessly by the YouTube app provided. Unfortunately this same app does not handle the creation and searching of playlists.
There are thousands of [sometimes carefully curated] playlists for everything from kids cartoons to live gigs. You can also set your own up easily on your YouTube / google account.
Itubelist is a great app that lets you watch a selection of Postman Pat with little Molly or enjoy some air guitar with the Foo Fighters whilst washing the dishes – 69p for the ad free version.
Paint stripper.
IrfanView is simple, fast, and free. It is very small and light, loading up extremely quickly. it is installed on some of the college network, but you can install it on your own college computer without admin permissions.
IrfanView does what it does well. It's not going to replace a major paint program, but why use a meat cleaver to cut a stick of butter?
The program lets you open and edit images, as well as multiple media formats. You can cut and crop images, apply batch conversions, add, sharpen, or blur effects, create panoramas, and change color modes easily. The program continues to add support for an array of file formats and has plug-in support for most image, video, and sound formats, including MP3, AVI, audio CD, and WMA. The interface is far from fancy but should be easy enough for most users to figure out. An IrfanView Thumbnails shortcut on the desktop offers an Explorer-like file tree that quickly displays all images in a particular folder. The latest version includes a basic drawing palette made accessible by hitting F12. It contains simple Erase, Draw, Fill, Rotate, Draw an Arrow, and Color Picker commands, perfect for grabbing screenshots and highlighting image specifics.
Do I just Google that?
Students think of themselves as tech savvy, but their internet search skills are often very poor. Finding Dulcinea provide a really well written guide for older students, describing how to do it.
chrisfav 
