Thunder

I have just received an email from Josie Fraser informing me that this years nominations for the EduBlog Awards are now open.

More details can be found here:
http://incsub.org/awards/2006/edublog-awards-2006-nominations-open/

Go on, get voting

My latest podcasting adventure was at Priory school in Shrewsbury.  Trina invited me in to work with a group of 20 Y10 students, prior to my visit she had worked with them to produce their scripts - this was done in Google Docs, and example of a script can be viewed here.  As the students were working in groups the use of google docs to produce their scripts was ideal, all of the group could participate in producing the final script.

The podcasts were produced in Garageband, the final podcasts can be viewed/listened to below:

Alex, Nick & Absar (mp3 or m4a)
cfrd (mp3 or m4a)
Condoms (mp3 or m4a)
Hott Pink! (mp3 or m4a)
Matts Music (mp3)
Mindless Chatter, Pointless Talk (mp3)

The deputy headteacher was really impressed by the work that the students produced and the learning environment within the class, several of the students have asked if the school can buy Apple computers.

At the last Shropshire Advisory Service day I did a short demonstration of my blog and to show my readership I clicked on the clustrmap and then struggled to name some of the countries my readers come from.

Last week I was reading a post on the TecnoTeach blog entitled ‘Where did you say you were from?‘ the teacher appears to share my lack of geographical knowledge.

…. asking the children to start naming new locations as they appear on the map. Making this a game with the possibility of winning school house points has opened up a new curricular area in our blog that was not intentional. The children are now looking at the map, with interest, and locating marked areas as they have a desire to find out who their world wide audience are.

If you have a school blog, go and create a clustrmap now to develop your pupils’, and possibly your own, mapping skills.

This is a great idea and I wholesomely agree, put a clustrmap on your blog - not to record the number of hits your blog gets but where people are coming through.  You could produce a huge world map on your classroom wall and insert pins in it when you get a visit from a new geographical region.

Taken from Google Earths Sightseer newsletter (sign up here):

Picasa is free software from Google for finding, organizing, editing and sharing photos on your PC. Now, starting with version 2.5, Picasa allows you to use Google Earth to quickly locate (or geotag) the place your photos were taken. You can then create a map in Google Earth to share your photos with your friends. The process is really simple. Once you have your photos in Picasa, simply select a group of photos you want to locate. Then choose the “Tools -> Geotag with Google Earth” option. Google Earth will open and a small window with thumbnails of your photos appears. Find the location where the photo was taken in Google Earth using search, or by moving to it with your mouse. Zoom in as close as you need to identify the location. Finally, select the”Geotag” button. You can also select a group of photos taken at the same location and choose the “Geotag All” option. The location information is stored in a standardized fashion in the photo file itself.

You can then use Picasa to generate a Google Earth file with snapshots of your photo as a map by choosing “Tools->Geotag->Export to Google Earth”. If you choose “Tools->Geotag->View in Google Earth” and your geotagged photos will automatically appear when you look at their respective locations.

View the latest issue here.

Slideshare is like Flickr for Powerpoint presentations, once you have created your account you can upload your powerpoint presentations and then either embed them in your blog or provide a direct link to them.

Unfortunately I can’t get mine to embed I guess it is a Wordpress MU issue, so here is a link to mine.

As powerpoints appear to be the common means of communication in lessons in our schools nowadays this seems an easy way for teachers to be able to publish their lesson notes etc, pupils or other teachers could then comment on the presentation.

The following is taken from the wikispaces website:

Back in January, we decided to offer our Plus Plan to K-12 teachers for free. We didn’t set out with a grand strategy, just an interest in helping teachers with our easy to use wiki technology.

Over 10,000 educational wikis later, we’ve heard countless stories of excited students and empowered teachers. They’ve told us about their collaborative essays, group study guides, online lesson plans, and classroom notice boards coming alive on Wikispaces.

Now we’re taking the next step - we want to give away 100,000 free K-12 Plus wikis. That includes all the features and benefits that normally cost $50/year - for free. No fine print, no usage limits, no advertising, no catches.

We hope that you’ll read on, try a wiki at your school, and help us spread the word.