Wednesday 27 April 2011

Online collaboration with TokBox

This video chat room will be available to students scheduled for participation times on the calendar. Any students not on the schedule are welcome to join and observe.




For best results:

* Use headphones to avoid echo.
* Make sure you have the latest version of Flash Player.
* Close out Skype or any other program that may be using your webcam.
* Use a wired connection if possible.

Monday 18 April 2011

Google Tools for teachers - in the cloud!

Google for Teachers

Friday 15 April 2011

Another presentation on Digital Citizenship

Some humour along the way...

Please, remember to work hard on both the content AND presentation of your power-point. If your presentation looks dull, unimaginative, old-fashioned to me, then it would definitely look the same to your staff if you were presenting it at your school. The best talk in the world cannot recover the situation.

Powerpoint or other screen based tools for sharing information should help:
  • Visualize ideas
  • Create key points
  • Impress
  • Act as a prompt
A presentation needs to engage the audience visually and support the content of your talk - not distract from it.

Here's some humour to keep you going..



Here's some  key things to consider to polish your presentations, once you have crafted that actual content of your talk.

Remember:

  • Create the content - your story!
  • Map out the visual presentation to support your story
  • Create the presentation
  • Refine and rehearse
  • Present 
Please note the Slideshare does not import animations, swinging objects or whatever. It does let you import the separate builds of a slide if you wish - but please not for this exercise.  The focus here is on the talk and in learning how to create visuals to match.
    Enjoy!

    Tuesday 12 April 2011

    Greasemonkey for Flickr - for the adventurous

    I promised a while back that I would share some more interesting ways to manage your image work online. Tips and tricks abound, but this one from Alan Levine is the niftiest around, so I've decided to share it first.


    cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Sebastián-Dario

    So what am I talking about? Well of course, as you prepare your presentation (or indeed work on other image-related tasks in your professional work) one of the things you are doing is noting where the image comes from and providing a hyperlinked attribution. If, like me, you are backed into a corner for time, then you will most certainly end up at Flickr. (Even if not in a rush I still prefer to use FlickrCC, and think laterally in my search terms! I also love the new things it throws up for me.)

    There are a few reasons for this:
    1. You can store your own images at Flickr and build your own collections
    2. You can 'favourite' other peoples images (something I regularly do as I collect images for my various bits of work)
    3. Now you can also install a nice GreaseMonkey script to make the image attribute even easier.

    Here's what it's about - read on, only if you are keen for an adventure!


    Alan Levine has written a Flickr Attribution Helper – a browser script that embeds easy to copy attribution text to creative commons licensed flickr images. Greasemonkey is an add-on for Firefox browser. Once Greasemonkey is installed, you have the ability to add all sorts of magical things to the functionality of your browser.

    To be honest, the only one I have ever added is Alan's Flickr Attribtion Helper - but its insanely useful! See the image above - that red tee-shirt and the attribution were simply copied from the HTML box and pasted here in the blog! Done in one go!

    Stephen Ridgeway, from New South Wales Australia, created a video that explains how to use the Flickr CC Attribution helper (thank goodness - a blog post by itself would never do it!). Download and install the Flickr Attribution helper (after you have installed Greasmonkey). Then watch the magic happen every time you go to a Flickr image!

    Teachers creating content online - handbook