Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Wordle fun


Another cool tool is Wordle. Use this to make a word picture - great for poetry or making an unusual concept map. I used a poem about the sun.

Tag Galaxy


Have some fun with this cool tool using Flickr photos. You type in a tag - I did New Zealand and this tool creates a planet pic using hundreds of photos. Take a screen pic - on the Mac shift, apple and 4 to create cross hairs and make a selection or Print Screen on the PC and use for topic studies or any curriculum area!

Sunday, October 5, 2008

New updates on the cluster wiki

I have uploaded more resources on the cluster wiki including links to my presentation coming up this week at ULearn. I am presenting a workshop called 'The Social Web' and also two small presentations on strategy planning and interactive mihi's.

ACEC08 Conference in Canberra

I got back from the conference in the early hours of Friday morning very tired but with loads of ideas for working with the cluster! One of my favourite workshops was learning how to use Scratch and scratching at the surface of programming with Python.
The Keynote speaker was Mitchel Resnick who is a professor at MIT university. He was an inspiring speaker.
I am compiling a report of learning experiences of all who attended from our cluster - (Robyn, Kathryn and Katherine from Marist) with links to workshop resources where possible. I will put this on the cluster wiki.
I also bought a small movie camera called a Flip. ($220As) It is the size of a large mobile phone and has inbuilt software for editing, you just put the USB which flicks out from the side into your computer and download and edit the movie clips. It works on 2 AA batteries and takes an hour of video clips. It will be very useful for my work in schools.
Another highlight at Canberra was the Floriade Festival. This is a national festival celebrating spring. I have put a movie together using my photos to show you how spectacular it was!