Social media is part of our world

The above is a short but interesting video that all those in education should pay heed to.

Social Media Revolution 2 is a refresh of the original video with new and updated social media & mobile statistics that are hard to ignore. Based on the book Socialnomics by Erik Qualman

Agree or disagree with the statistics and/or the sentiments, you can’t deny that social media is part of our world. Educators ignore it at their peril. At my school all our students are involved in varied aspects of the social media, in one way or another. I do not say they all use it well, or that they all understand how it works or the ramifications but they are there. Schools, and the educators in them, need to educate students in how to best use the media available to them. Parents must not  use the excuse “I don’t know anything about….” as an excuse for not knowing or understanding the world their children inhabit. Adults and mentors need to be aware of and, at some level, know about the various media. We all need to educate ourselves and apply our understanding and knowledge of the broader world to help educate our young people. Our young people need to know how to use the media safely and how to get the best out of it in the time available.

There is a lot of material online to help us, parents and teachers, to gain better understanding. You do not have to do a formal course, “playing with”  with the tools is most often the way our young people learn. Many schools offer parents introduction to various media and building up our own Personal Learning Networks, inhabited by like-minded professionals, is a great way for teachers to learn/share ideas. I also find students a good resource and always happy to help increase my technology skills.

Here is some more information about more learning tools. Multimedia Training Videos is  a series of completely free and open educational resources for learning a variety of multimedia and ICT tools and was mentioned in a post by Patricia Donaghy, on her Using ICT in Further Education blog.  The site has been created by members of the in the media area of the University of Westminster and offers training videos that step you through using tools such as Flash, Photoshop,  Dreamweaver, Director, Audacity and HTML. These are all useful for many e-learning tasks.

One tab takes you to a set of Student Tools Videos. This a great resource for teachers as well.   This section covers info links, second life, the social bookmarking tool Delicious, mind mapping tools, better searches, creating surveys, RSS and Blogger. The mind mapping tool, bubbl.us is a very good example of how to make the most of the on-line tool and how it can be used as oth a single user and collaborative tool for class.

These are great professional development for those who have not used the tools before. There is also a list of useful External Training Videos Links for further education.

Useful links (weekly)

• Tools for the TEKS: Integrating Technology in the Classroom Offers a good outline of terms and usage of many and varied tech tools. 

• PBworks: Free Collaboration, Intranet, Extranet, Education, Business Wiki Formally known as PBwiki, the new site is a collaborative tool that offers more than just wiki functionality. Students and teachers can use to create classroom wikis

• Birmingham Grid for Learning – Multiple Intelligences (Secondary) Multiple Intelligence online quiz 

• Social Media Classroom Developed by Howard Rheingold ward and funded by the McArthur foundation, it is an open-source education wiki-social software. It uses Drupal and provides teachers and learners with an integrated set of social media that each course can use for its own purposes. 

• plagium (beta)::: plagiarism tracker & checker ::: home Track plagiarism by pasting your original text into this sites search box 

• Socratic questioning Socratic questioning seeks to get the other person to answer their own questions by making them think and drawing out the answer from them. 

• Educational Videos for Kids about Science, Math, Social Studies and English This is a listing and repository of educational videos suitable for students from K-12. The videos in the listing are reviewed and screened by teachers and are drawn from YouTube, MetaCafe as well as some other video sites. They are arranged under listings and can also be searched from within the neoK12 site.

• ReadWriteThink: Lesson Plan: Book Report Alternative: Comic Strips and Cartoon Squares Website for teachers to use in lieu of writing a book report, students create comic strips to illustrate facts. Includes template

• Musée Hergé The Hergé Museum has officially opened in Louvain-la-Neuve, a small town near Brussels, Belgium. The museum is dedicated to the work of Hergé (Georges Remi), who created the Tintin comic-books

• Stripgenerator v1.0.3 Make your own cartoon strip. Stripgenerator is free of charge project created to embrace the internet blogging and strip creation culture, helping the people with no drawing abilities to express their opinions via strips. 

• New Creative Commons Information Pack The National Copyright Unit and Creative Commons Australia have jointly developed an information pack for teachers and students on Creative Commons (CC). The pack explains what CC is, how to find CC material and the best way to attribute CC material.

• Appetizer – The Open Source Dock Appetizer is a neat application launcher, or dock, for Windows. Appetizer lets you organize your shortcuts and folders into a convenient dock, enabling you to tidy up the desktop. You can even run it from a portable device such as a USB drive. With Appetizer, you can easily add/remove shortcut icons, re-order icons and even create groups for related icons.

• SIMILE Widgets | Exhibit Exhibit lets you easily “create web pages with advanced text search and filtering functionalities, with interactive maps, timelines, and other visualizations“. With Exhibit you can create dynamic visualizations of your data collections without having to resort to complex database and server-side technologies.

• Add Multimedia to Your Website with One Click – Apture.com Apture provides “the first rich communication platform allowing publishers and bloggers to easily turn flat pages of text into multimedia experiences“. With Apture, it is really easy to add images, videos, audio files and wikipedia articles to your page. 

• Explore | North Shore Site that offers many short videos on all types of global issues and countries/regions

• Public Domain Photos and Wallpapers A site for free public domain photos and desktop wallpapers. Large collection of High Resolution photos and wallpapers, Thousands of high quality public domain pictures, easy to search, All photos on Photos8.com are public domain. You may use these images for any purpose, including commercial. 

• OER Commons OER Commons is all about sharing open educational resources. Subject areas include: Arts, Business, Humanities, Mathematics & Statistics, Science & Technology and Social Sciences. Over 16 different types of course materials are provided. You can search OER Commons by subject area, grade level, material type, media format and conditions of use or by selecting a relevant tag.   

• 140 FAQ A unique film project that will bring together 140 filmmakers from all around the world to capture 140 seconds of footage at the same time.

• Software & Industry Information Association Outlines SIIA’s vision that by the end of the decade, every K-20 institution can—and should—have an instructional and institutional framework that embraces technology and e-learning in order to: • Increase student engagement and achievement • Provide equity and access to new learning opportunities • Document and track student performance • Empower collaborative learning communities • Maximize teaching and administrative effectiveness • Build student proficiencies in 21st Century skills 

• copyrightconfusion – Reasoning A wiki offering guidelines for reasoning your way through to fair use

• 40 Examples of Incredible Photo Manipulation | Webdesigner Depot Photo manipulation is an ever evolving collaboration between photography and graphic design. Combining certain elements to create a unique image, that can convince even the most experienced set of eyes, requires a very creative set of skills. Because the manipulation of a photo gives a realistic view of an unreal picture, you should have an open mind when gathering ideas on how to get creative with your images. Photo manipulations are a great source for inspiration, generally because designers are able to express their creativity through various aspects of design. So here are 40 of some vey incredible examples of photo manipulation. 

• CC0 New cc licence. Using CC0, you can waive all copyrights and related or neighboring rights that you have over your work, such as your moral rights (to the extent waivable), your publicity or privacy rights, rights you have protecting against unfair competition, and database rights and rights protecting the extraction, dissemination and reuse of data.

• Primary Teacher UK: 29 Useful Writing Sites 

• Read Graphic Novels Online. Where and How? 

• Top Ten Top Ten – The Top Ten Videos Inspiring Us To Rethink The Way we Learn zaid.alsagoff’s current top 10 list of videos that inspire us to rethink the way we learn and educate. Also, this initiative encourages others to list and share their top 10 favorite videos that inspire us to rethink the way we learn and educate in the 21st century.

• wiki.dbpedia.org : About Knowledge bases are playing an increasingly important role in enhancing the intelligence of Web and enterprise search and in supporting information integration. Today, most knowledge bases cover only specific domains, are created by relatively small groups of knowledge engineers, and are very cost intensive to keep up-to-date as domains change. 

• http://www.wikiupload.com Upload documents, videos, images, mp3s, ebooks, shareware 5GB and create a link 

• Nine Elements 9 themes for digital citizenship from Mike Ribble’s new website.

• wwi_poetry – ShareTabs – The easy way to share your links as tabs A selection of WWI poetry sites put together using the Sharetabs tool

• Brooklyn Arden: Theory: A Definition of YA Literature 

• http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/books/review/Rabb-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all 

• Redefining the Young Adult Novel  

• Teenagers? Young Adult? Fiction? | Justine Larbalestier 

• “Think Future” Panel Debates What Makes a YA a YA – 4/30/2008 9:56:00 AM – Publishers Weekly 

• MostlyFiction Book Reviews 

• Francisco Stork Young Adult Novelist 

• Global Teacher – Blog Directory and Web 3.0 Community » Guidelines 

• xtimeline – Explore and Create Free Timelines XTimeline is a collaborative time line creation tool that gives users the option to include photos, videos, text, and web links within each entry of the timeline. After creating a timeline the creators can invite people to comment on and discuss the timeline. Think of it as Youtube for timelines. Timelines created with XTimeline can be easily embedded into another website like a blog or a wiki for example

• Continuous Improvement This Protopage site is devoted to free Web 2.0 applications which support not only collaborative learning for our 21st century students, but also collaborative professional development for our 21st century educators.

• Myebook – get it out there! Create a virtual online book. This site allows you to easily publish and share your own content online as well as read ebooks published by other people. You can publish your novel, comic, magazine, photo album or brochure for free.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Exploring our amazing world

Today there were no students at school. All the semester 1 exams are finished and we are now writing reports. We are looking forward to finishing this task. I have also spent few breaks sorting through files, emails, etc. Whilst doing this I found a post by Patricia Donaghy about the Explore site.

Explore.org creates short documentary films, amazing galleries of photographs and offers interviews with NGOs  that showcase some amazing non-profit efforts.  These enable you to observe a world that many of us might not otherwise ever get to see. 

The array of destinations is amazing. Places covered include those from all corners of the world, from 1st world to 3rd world. The wildlife videos are great. I have always liked zebras.

Explore’s many film and photographic resources “document how people from all over the world, from every walk of life, are taking positive steps that have local impact and global relevance“.

How amazing is the short film of Tibetan monks debating the scriptures in the following footage. If you think that their lives are just quiet contemplation, think again!

How about a visit to the amazing Arctic region, with its towering glaciers and vast, open expanses. This landscape just oozes feelings of immense cold and tremendous power but it is a fragile environment.

It is all so much more interesting than report writing.

There are many  research articles for extra information and the site also offers links to other relevant websites.

Useful Links (weekly)

Uploaded to Flickr by CanadianAEh http://tiny.cc/nCepf

• Tom March :: Thesis Builders Great online tools (from Tom March) to help students develope a thesis, topic and outline for a paper. 

• Make Awesome Images With Your Photos – JPGfun.com Amazing effects for images online. Allows for the creation of exclusive avatars and pictures, using your personal photos. Online photoshop alternative, makes difficult photoshop effects in two clicks. 

• Hetemeel.com : Dynamic images You can change the text on this image to whatever you like. Change the text in the form below, then click on “preview image”. The text in the image will change accordingly. You can align the text with spaces and enters.

• piZap – free online photo editor – free photo effects online editor Pizap is a fun free photo editor that lets people easily create wacky images with their digital pictures. PiZap was created as a tool primarily for social networking users who want to post their images to their favorite social networking sites.

• FOTOCRIB | Online Photo Editor Fotocrib is a web based photo editing service. Fotocrib currently allows users to: Create montages, add 3D effects, encrypt photos, create rounded corners, convert between jpeg, png, gif, pdf and postscript formats, send photos to email recipients and lots more.

• WriteOnIt – Fake pictures Online photo editing web site, easily create your fake pictures, captions and fake magazines and other funny jokes for you and your friends.

• LoonaPix.com. Make Funny Pictures and Add Photo Frames Online. This is a free photo editing online service. Add photo effects or photo frames to your photos online. LoonaPix.com is a photo processing online service, that lets you make your photos funny and unique.

• MagMyPic.com – Fake Magazine Covers with your Photo! Novelty Magazines and Novelty Gifts! There are 30 different magazines to choose from for now. You can select any of them and make an impressive, unique, custom fake magazine with ease.

• Effects – PhotoFunia PhotoFunia is a free, online photo editing tool and very easy to use. Just select an effect you like from over 100 different effects, upload your photo, and PhotoFunia will handle the rest for you. You upload any photo and just wait to see the magic. “Our proprietary technology automatically identifies the face in the photo and let’s you add cool photo effects and create funny face photo montages.”

• Digital Photo Effects – Photo505. Online Phoshop Effects. Photo Fun Huge collection of photo templates.

• PicArtia-:-Create photo mosaic Online and Free!(Free online Photo Collage Maker) This site is a powerful photo collage maker. Create your photo montage in 3 easy steps and than 2 minutes! 

• FunPhotoBox – funny pictures, funny photo effects. Make fun with your photos online. This site offers a free photo editing online service that allows you to add special effects to your photos.

• Huge list of free icons download links tags:freeware,

• AudioBoo Interesting app that allows for mobile podcasting. You can use an iPhone and this free application/web service AudioBoo to share some observations from the field! This is live-blogging at its best. You can insert an image and it also creates a google map of location where audioboo is recorded.

• PodcastAlley.com — The place to find Podcasts Podcast Alley is the best site to find all your Podcasts, podcast feeds, podcast definitions, podcast software and best podcast directory.

• Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free | Open Culture Download free MP3′s of great works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Authors include Twain, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Asimov, HG Wells, Jules Verne, etc. Also see link to free audio and video downloads of university/college lectures on many different topics 

• Podiobooks.com – Serialized audio books in podcast form Free audio books delivered as podcasts. Subscribe for free to any book and start from chapter one

• BooksFairy.com: Best Places to Download Free Science Fiction Books The list of some very good collections of science fiction novels, short stories, ezines, and other sf related stuff. All ebooks are available for online reading and/or free download in various formats.

• Web 2.0 Backpack: Web Apps for Students – ReadWriteWeb 

• TypeNavigator An interactive visual font search tool.

• Pupils to study Twitter and blogs in primary shake-up | Education | The Guardian Guardian article about the proposal that UK children should leave primary school familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter as sources of information and forms of communication.

• The Art of Writing Great Twitter Headlines – Copyblogger A long article about creating the best short tweets. Your headlines must: 1. Be useful to the reader, 2. Provide him with a sense of urgency, 3. Convey the idea that the main benefit is somehow unique; and 4. Do all of the above in an ultra-specific way.

• 13 Tutorials & Resources for a Perfect Twitter Background | Design Reviver The popularity of the website means that you get to connect with tons of other users, but it also means that you’ll have to stand out to do so. For that, having a great Twitter background is recommended to make a great first impression. Learn how to do this with the following collection of tutorials. 

• Digital Storytelling – Ms. McGraw’s English Wiki Digital storytelling on Ms. McGraw’s English Wiki. This is very comprehensive wiki.

• MLEARNING-WORLD.COM Education For The iPod Generation 

• Skype in Schools / FrontPage 

• Twitter for Professional Development A Google Docs spreadsheet of educators using Twitter for their own professional development, and stating why.

• Multicolr Search Lab – Idée Inc. Search for photos according to colors you choose.

• ktitraci – home How to make glogster files within google earth 

• Wallwisher.com :: Words that stick A great way for teachers/students to collaborate and exchange ideas as it creates a virtual bulletin board in which students could place notes, links, videos for class projects.  collaborative

• Be Very Afraid Each year a selection of ingenious students using web2.0 tools – from primary to university age – are invited along to BAFTA in London’s Piccadilly to show and talk about the extraordinary things they are doing with new technologies in their learning. 

• Educators’ Guide to Innovation – Connecting Innovators A ning that will connect educational innovators from all over Victoria to share their amazing practice. This year, for the first time, six outstanding sessions will be offered live online and face-to-face simultaneously. This event will also connect you up to an active community of innovators in this Ning as part of Making Connections – a series of online events, facilitated and open conversations, collboration stories, and networks focused on education innovation. 

• hugin – Panorama photo stitcher An opensource tool to create panorama photos. Thegoal: an easy to use cross-platform panoramic imaging toolchain based on Panorama Tools. With hugin you can assemble a mosaic of photographs into a complete immersive panorama, stitch any series of overlapping pictures and much more. 

• GoView™ Beta : Home Capture your computer’s screen, add audio, and embed into your website. 

• Top Visual Search Engines: The Most Interesting Ways To Visually Explore Search Engine Results – Robin Good’s Latest News Robin Goods’ post on the most interesting ways to visually explore search engine results

• Twitlonger – When you talk too much for Twitter Twitlonger is a simple service that lets you post those tricky messages that really do need more than 140 characters and send them to Twitter.

• World Digital Library Home National libraries from more than a dozen countries, in coordination with the United Nations’ education agency, put some of humanity’s earliest written works online April 21 with their launch of the World Digital Library, a web site in seven languages — English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian — that leads readers through a trove of rare finds. 

• TwHistory ”We believe that history is filled with exciting stories. We also believe that these stories can be told through Twitter; through the people who lived and experienced them. We go through journals, diaries, letters, and other original sources to deliver the day-to-day lives of people who lived through some of histories most exciting times. We broadcast this information through Twitter, and feel this is a new and exciting approach to understanding history. Instead of reading about a month-long campaign in a few hours, you experience it over the course of a month, in small, 140 character ‘Tweets’”

• TwitIQ.com – Smarter Twitter Web Application TwitIQ is an enhanced Twitter interface that provides insight into your Twitter stream and Twitter followers.

• moonflowerdragon: How to cite Twitter posts in APA style A useful description on how to cite tweets and blog entries using APA style guide.

• Twitter Toolbox: 70+ Awesome Twitter Apps, Mash-Ups, Plugins And Services « Websites, Internet, Software Tips And Reviews Twitter Toolbox: 70 Twitter Apps, Mash-Ups, Plugins And Services « Websites, Internet, Software Tips And Reviews

• QuizEgg – Online Quiz Maker for Educators QuizEgg is a free, powerful and easy to use, quiz maker that enables educators to quiz their students online. lIt allows you to quickly and easily make sophisticated quizzes that can be published online, completed by your students (online) and then results viewed in easy-to-read reports

• TwitZap ”TwitZap lets you slice Twitter into channels of stuff that matters to you. Once your channels are set they will update in real-time, all in a familiar interface.”

• Twitterfall Twitterfall is a way of viewing the latest ‘tweets’ of upcoming trends and custom searches on the micro-blogging site Twitter. Updates fall from the top of the page in near-realtime. 

• TweetChat A great way to monitor your favorite hashtag through a chat like interface – somewhat like creating private chat room within twitter.

• Animations in the Classroom This free software allows you to create stick figure animations easily and without any artistic skills. Includes Pivot. Offers examples.

• The Hyperwords Company With Hyperwords for Firefox you can select any word on any web page and do useful things. (via Stephen Fry)This is a useful extension for Firefox and it even twitters! 

• ARKive Education – Homepage ARKive Education is a free-to-us. It provides downloadable, ready to use modules on a wide range of curriculum topics, suitable for geography, biology, environmental education and citizenship lessonse, multi-media resource bank for teachers and other educators.

• Visual Understanding Environment ”The Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) is an Open Source project based at Tufts University. The project is focused on creating flexible tools for managing and integrating digital resources in support of teaching, learning and research. It provides a flexible visual environment for structuring, presenting, and sharing digital information. “

• Creative Commons: A Quick Overview The Official Guide to Copyright Issues for Australian Schools and TAFE

• Classroom 2.0 LIVE!

• Copyright and Creative Commons-Special Guest Kristin Hokanson - 

• Addictomatic: Inhale the Web Find news, videos, photos, blogposts and more. Set out by source 

• ONLINE GRAPHS AND CHARTS | create and design your own graphs and charts online | INDEX Design and share your own graphs online and for free. A number of different chart types like: bar charts, pie charts, line charts, bubble charts and radar plots supported 

• amCharts: flash charts, stock charting software Flash charts for your websites and Web-based products. Download for free. 

• Many Eyes A collection of data visualizations and a new social kind of data analysis. View and discuss, or create visualizations from data sets. 

• Create free online charts with online chart builder ChartGizmo.com – Use our chart software for visualizing your data. Create stunning charts online. Create charts for your website, blog and social network profiles. Useful for visualizing financial, scientific or other type of data. 

• cooltoolsforschools – Graphing Tools A collection of 12 tools on the Cool Tools for Schools wiki

• Newsmap# Useful when discussing cultures as you can compare the leading news stories in various countries. Good for searching for current events and to see the emerging news. This offers meta analysis of the news. It is a good place to START research

• Oddcast – PhotoFace Portrait editor that allows you to make a Voki like animation from your own image 

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Storyboarding for our crime novel trailers

We are beginning to create the book trailers for crime novels in year 8 today. The students have read the books and I have shown them examples of all sorts of trailers. Some were professional, some were done by students like them and some were very good and others not so. We discussed what they liked, what they thought worked well, what appealed to them and then set them a brainstorming task. To come up with ideas about their chosen novel.

Next they are going to plan their trailers. We are going to use storyboarding to help them visualize and plan their short video.

A colleague, Marie Salinger, sent me the link for the ABCkids link for the RollerMache site for storyboards. It is a great introduction for our students.

Some other sites I visited for information on storyboarding included:

• Karen J. Lloyd’s storyboard blog She has worked on many well known projects and offers advice and templates.
• The Knight Digital Media Centre site that presents a web page storyboarding. It offers a good explanation of why and how to do a storyboard.
• YouthLearn An introduction to making movies. A website, designed for kids, about producing videos.
• Making Movie storyboards Offers steps for teachers to address the creation of digital story in the classroom. Divided into five sections: Prep — Preparing for the lesson Steps — Conducting the lesson Extensions — Additional activities Community Connections — Real world actions for students after completion of the lesson

I also enjoyed watching the following Google video about the art of storyboarding. Using old Disney footage, as well as more up-to-date items, the video reviews the art of storyboarding as it is used in the story development and production of films. “A storyboard is a sequence of images and words drawn together on a page to form a plausible narrative. Storyboards are routinely used in the movie making business to ‘preview’ a movie before a single shot is taken. “ 

 After reading the different websites and watching the video, I came up with a page for the students to consider as they begin to develop their own storyboards. I used examples from the YouTube videos of Hitchcock movies to show some visual examples.

Storyboarding 

A storyboard is a sketch board detailing how to organize a story and listing its contents.

 Storyboards:

• allow you to plan out your digital story in a visual way. Look at what happens first, second and so on to the last scene (the timing)
• communicate your ideas about the story
• make a blueprint for your video before the production stage
• organise and develop the focus of the story
• allow you to see the entire sequence flow/continuity) of your video
• allow you to see what you are doing – and what to keep and what to cut out (unnecessary scenes/pictures, dialogue, etc)
• enable you to work out the interaction between images (the visual transitions)
• enable you to work out any dialogue (voiceovers) for the images
• enable you to work out the music that will “go with” the images and enhance the feel/emotion you are looking for.

Your drawings must have meaning and portray feelings/emotions.

A good storyboard will allow you to plan out the impact you intend to make on your audience.

 Consider:

1. How long an image stays on the screen (3 seconds is often considered optimum)
2. Too short viewers don’t get the visual clues, too long and it becomes boring

Consider visual clues:

• Low angle (viewer may get a sense of danger, threat, up against authority)
• Or High angle (viewer may get a sense of being in charge of being above &separate from the action)
• Close-up (can show feelings/emotions and the view identifies with the item in the close-up. It also means they don’t directly know what is happening around the item in the close up
• or Wide angle (long shot) Often used to show action, to put a character/item in a landscape/place
• lighting and shadows – use to create emotion and feelings in the audience