Tonight I have had some fun playing with a new tool. I will not be putting in my creation just yet as I need to do some work on them. At the moment they look more like something out of an alien movie.
From the Sculptris image library
From the Sculptris image library
The program I downloaded was called Sculptris. It is free 3D modeling software for Windows (there is no Mac option). Sculptris is designed to create models of sculptures and 3D objects with an almost hand-made aspect. It allows you to sculpt a figure in three dimensions,is based on a ball. It is really very simple and reasonably intuitive to use and requires no special knowledge of 3D modeling. I simply started to shape the “ball” with the different tools just as though it were a block of clay.
The designer, Tomas Pettersson, created this application for his own enjoyment as a hobby and it is free. He does envisage developing it further and states that any donations to him would be used to help him fix any problems. It amazes me that someone has spent so much time and effort creating these tools and are willing to share them with us.
It is an amazing tool and to get a better idea of how it works have a look at the videos below. They show, in a much more effective way than I can put into words, just how to create images using this program.
This looks as though it might be a good tool for students in the visual arts area. They could use this program to design models for claymation models or sculpture projects. I haven’t used it a lot but it might also be useful in other subject areas where models could be created such as geography, geology and science.
Discover and Explore Macbeth – Main Menu The homepage offers an Interactive map of where different events in Macbeth take place. Also offers brief history, overview of the play, the scenes and characters along with some multimedia
Shakespeare Theme Page This CLN (Community Learning Network) page provides links to general sites about William Shakespeare and lesson plans for teachers
WebSlides – Turning bookmarks and feeds into interactive slideshows… WebSlides is an interesting tool which enables you to display a group of bookmarks directly as an embed in your site or as in this case as a link to a slideshow. Each of the bookmarked sites is active within the slide window with any annotations and/or sticky notes also active. Clicking on any links within the displayed page will open the link in a new tab on your browser.
Official Google Blog: Our new search index: Caffeine From the Google Blog. Google’s new indexing system, Caffeine. “We analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. Google Caffeine will provide 50% fresher results than their old indexing system. “
About us | veezzle.com Veezzle is a “free stock photo search engine”. Exactly like google but for free stock photos ONLY. So instead of wasting your time by browsing 25 different sites, you can type a search and find results from all those websites, immediately.
Wikipedia:Manual of Style (linking) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ”This page contains guidelines as to when links should and should not be used, and how to format them. Detailed information about the syntax used to create links can be found at Help:Link. The rules on linking applicable to disambiguation pages are set out in the disambiguation style guide.” Will Richardson
Free and legal music downloads – Jamendo Jamendo is a site filled with nothing but Creative Commons licensed albums that take advantage of all the various versions of the license. Before using any of them, make sure you understand which version the album is using.
Plug pulled on students’ virtual chatroom Article about the Victorian Education Department pulling out chat and befriending on the virtual classroom on the Ultranet.
CSI: The Experience Web Adventures | Bright ideas ”Any school studying forensic science will probably be interested in this site. Funded by the US National Science Foundation in conjunction with other organisations, CSI: The Experience Web Adventures provides three adventures, one each for beginner, intermediate and advanced. Registration is free and players can either sign up or play as a guest with no login”
Plagiarism Checker This tools gives you the option of checking against Yahoo as well as Google
The Plagiarism Checker The Plagiarism Checker allows you to run a Google search on large blocks of text. This is easier than cutting and pasting sentence after sentence.
Elizabethan Costume Part of a site created by Scott R. Robinson from the CWA Department of Theatre Arts (Department Chair – Professor of Theatre Arts). It includes information on theatre history, costume history, architecture, creative dramatics and children’s theatre
Patrick Ness – Diary The Author’s website. It is a place where he writes “info on me, my books and other writings, what I’m up to, and the inevitable deeply self-absorbed blog.”
Markus Zusak : Home of The Book Thief and I Am the Messenger This URL is a link to a very interesting video clip of the author discussing his book. Contents: Fiction. Written from the point of view of death, The Book Thief describes the life of a young girl in Nazi Germany
Startpage Web Search A metasearch site for the web for phone, video & pictures. A private search engine that also provides a proxy service for their results. With Start Page results and its proxy service your IP address isn’t recorded, no cookies are stored or fetched by websites you visit.
Readability – An Arc90 Lab Experiment Readability is a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you’re reading. Follow the steps below to install Readability in your Web browser.
My colleague Tania Sheko sent me a useful link this week. It was for a tool called ImageCodr. At the moment it only works with Flickr images but it is a great start.
I have been in Year 7 classes over the past few weeks. I have been showing them some of the ways they can better use some of the different search engines available to them. We have also been discussing plagiarism and when and how to quote. They have also been working on creating bibliographies that list all their information sources accurately. This has led onto questions about using images. The students, as well as staff, find it difficult to find and correctly use and attribute images (and music/sound). Many have never heard of Creative Commons although most know about copyright. They are all very interested in the CC sites and most like the idea of doing things that make them better digital citizens. One of the problems that many students have after they have located their images on the internet is understanding how to attribute correctly the images that they use.
Finding an image that has the licence best suited to their needs, getting the correct code for the image size required, giving the correct attributions with links back to the flickr page and the author’s profile can be difficult enough for teachers let alone students. This is where the ImageCodr tool comes in very handy. When I used it in my wiki the image was embedded with a clear CC logo, with the exact licensing terms for this specific image, as well as the name of the photographer and a link to their Flickr page. The image itself is linked to the image page, and correct alt text is used. You can you can see this when you hover over the image. The CC logo links to the Creative Commons.org website and the license explanation page are also there.
I showed the students how they can find flickr images.There is FlickrCC and FlickrStorm, Compfight and well as the Flickr searching option. (I have posted about how to use all of these previously). We also used Google to find images with CC licences.
Note: You have the option of using the ImageCodr to search for images also.
Once you have found an image in flickr you only need to copy the URL of the image and then insert this into the Get Code page at ImageCodr.
After pasting in the flickr code you hit the Submit Query button and in no time ImageCodr brings up a screen that gives you everything you need to embed the image. You have:
Information about the Creative Commons Licence attached to the image.
Options to select the image size you would like to embed and when you have done this.
A HTML code, that includes all of the attribution details attached to the image, will then be generated.
Lastly you can see what the image and the attribution will look like.
The code can be copied and inserted into the webspace.It did not work for this blog, wordpress.com does not like the code but it worked beautifully when I wanted to added images to the Shakespeare wiki I have been working on. I am sure that there will be an answer to this but I haven’t investigated it yet.
Even if you can’t paste the HTML code into something easily the information is very useful. The CC licences are very simply and clearly stated to help you understand them. You can then use that information to decide how best you can use it, even if you have to add the image in a more arduous way.
“Imagine an electronic page for each species of organism on Earth, available everywhere by single access on command.” – Edward O. Wilson 2007
I had not heard of the Encyclopedia of Life until I was looking up information about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. One of the resources I located was part of the EOL site. From here I did a search on EOL and came up with all sorts of information about it (some from here) and the man who set it up, Harvard biology professor and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Edward O. Wilson.
The EOL is managed by a partnership of natural history institutions in the United States, Harvard and five others: the Smithsonian Institution, the Marine Biological Laboratory, the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Field Museum of Natural History, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library, itself a consortium of 10 major natural history libraries, including two from Harvard. The content results from collaboration with a multitude of institutions and individuals from across the world.
It is an amazing and ambitious project as its sets out to organize and make available, via the Internet, virtually all information about life present on Earth. It is not just about biodiversity but serves as a gateway for anyone interested in finding out about life on Earth. It contains species descriptions and images and also provides links to a wide array of resources available on other Web sites. It offers comprehensive information for all species.
Set up as a series of Web sites, one for each of the approximately 1.9 million known species. The entry-point for each site is a species page suitable for secondary school students but you can follow-up on linked pages that are aimed at more for specialist users. The sites include text and supporting images that are in themselves worth a look. In fact I believe I read that there are more than 30,000 still images and video that have been uploaded to the EOL by the tools that have been added to the site to allow public contributions.
There are instructors at four universities, including Harvard, who are giving their students the opportunity to create species pages as part of class projects. “It’s about contributing to a real-world project. If the students do their job properly, it will go online,” James Hanken (chairman of the EOL’s Steering Committee)
The Encyclopedia of Life has achieved a lot in its first two years. Its further development, both in number of species covered and in depth and richness of content, will depend on its continued success in encouraging users to generate content and, at least as importantly, to monitor its quality. Intute post 2009
It is not just information from the USA, although there is much from the US organisations but EOL has also inaugurated regional groups in the Netherlands, China, and Australia.
I mentioned about the collaborative nature of the project above . You can contribute (see here). The quotes below explain some of the process and the checking/reviewing.
Any user of the site need only register to be able to add text, or images and videos (via Flickr), but these appear on the site with a yellow background until they have been reviewed by a curator, and a visitor to the site can choose between seeing everything or only “authoritative information”. Professional scientists can provide their credentials to sign up as curators to review content relating to the group of organisms on which they work, or register as content partners to contribute an existing online database.
The Help Build EOL page invites scientists, students, and teachers to contribute to the project in a variety of other ways such as adding tags to images or comments to content, or by submitting taxonomic information (a classification scheme or information on names) for a particular group. Intute post 2009.
I have spent 2 hours looking at the site. There is so much here and I have only touched the surface. I want to look at how teachers and their students can best use EOL. There is a blog, a forum, an extensive FAQ list, it offers news, announcements and has a “what’s new” section on the homepage that is constantly updating. Also of use to our students are the tips on citing information from the EOL site.
The Collaboration Cycle by superkimbo in BKK The image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
Home | storytubes.info Students make their own 2 minute videos about their favourite books. Join kids from across the U.S. and from Nova Scotia, Canada by making a short video about your favorite book. Use the online form to enter and compete for prizes. Note: make sure you check out the rules.
ImageCodr.org Flickr currently hosts more than 75 million images that are licensed under a Creative Commons license. Depending on the license, you may use the images on your webpage, or make changes to it. There are many things to check. With ImageCodr.org, there is no need to do all this manually, you simply enter in the URL of the picture page (as seen in your browser) you are interested in and ImageCodr.org will generate the ready to use HTML code. It will also display a brief and easy license summary, so you don’t get in legal trouble because you missed something.
Online University Reviews : 20 Amazing iPad Apps for Educators Educational apps for the ipad. Offers a range of creative ways to incorporate the iPad into the daily routine, and some of these great educational and organizational applications are a good way to get started.
CAPSpace A collaborative videoconference project gives you and your students an opportunity to learn with another school or classroom. CAPspace is a social networking tool for educational videoconferencing built into the new Read Around the Planet registration system. Login to find colleagues and schools interested in collaborative videoconference (H.323 and H.320) projects, and participate in TWICE sponsored matching projects. There are currently 2706 educators from 17 countries registered with CAPspace.
SocialVibe – Helping People Support Charity This organization pairs brands with consumers and ad dollars with causes in a way that’s good for everyone involved. Brands create microaction-focused games and activities, and users complete them. Brands pay for this interaction by donating to a cause of the user’s choice, such as feeding the hungry or preventing suicide. Users get to spread the word, both about the charities and the brands.
Plants-In-Motion Home Plants In Motion uses time-lapse photography to show how plants grow and change over time. Offers brief explanations about the processes you are viewing
