… actually it was Friday – day #3 of the 2010 school year. According to my planner Friday is ePortfolio posting day – and yesterday was my students (8 & 9 year olds) first introduction to their Edublogs ePortfolios.
The first few went ok – they had cheat sheets to refer to if they forgot what to do and their login/password information was on a laminated card for them. I had 5 students working at a time on the computers. (Although I could have had 13 working at the same time I wanted a smaller number in case I had to problem solve.)
The problems started when the second person onto the computer went to log in – instead of arriving at their own dashboard they arrived at the previous person’s dashboard. I switched them to a different browser and that worked ok for the first person but the same problem occurred in the second browser.
Oh No!
Then one of my students published his post and got a pop-up message about it being spam.
More Oh NO!
I quickly wrote a message in the box on the page explaining that this was an 8 year old making his very first post, submitted it and went to my laptop.
Here’s where Twitter comes in. I knew that Sue Waters – Edublog guru and Aussie superhero was on Twitter – we’ve chatted on and off over the past few years. I sent two Tweets out to her explaining the problems.
Within 30 minutes she’d responded with a solution for the first and fixed the second problem and even sent a message to my students explaining antisplog in kidspeak to them.
Without the ready access to Twitter and people/experts this problem would have taken quite some time to fix. One of the good things with Twitter is that I can have DM (direct messages) sent to my cell phone so I had a sound alert that she’d responded to my call for help.
A huge thanks to Sue for her help.
As an aside – my tweeted messages and the responses weren’t private/hidden from my students – they saw me send the tweet and they saw the responses. It’s things like this that show them responsible use of Twitter.
I’ve been experimenting with creating some Wordle displays to use as posters in my classroom. Here are the four I’ve done so far. My aim is to have them photocopied up to A2 size for displaying in the classroom.
In my mind whenever I see PDF I think “pretty damn fine” which is how I think of PDF files. I love them even more because I have a mac which has built into it a “save as PDF” option when you print anything. (Snapshot below is an example of that.)
So I was excited to discover a new site (via a post from someone in my Feedly feed – can’t remember who unfortunately) – PDFmyURL.com. Sometimes you just want to save the whole page!
I tested it out on this blog post from a friend of mine – Phone a friend. It saved into 4 pages – here’s a snapshot of the first page.
By dragging the bookmarklet from the home page to your toolbar you can then just click on it whenever you’re at a page you want to save as a PDF file.
NOTE: Tested only on a Mac and with Firefox – I have no idea how this works with a Windows machine or other browsers. What DOESN’T work is trying to save secure pages – for instance trying to save this page as I was editing it resulted in the Edublogs login page showing.
I’ve been playing around with AudioBoo over the last couple of days. I have an iTouch and AudioBoo is an app that allows me to record an mp3 file and upload to the AudioBoo website and then embed where-ever I want. This is a test to see how it embeds here:
Like many other educators I’ve been pondering how to use Google Wave in my classroom this year. Having created an account for use in my classroom I’ve come up with my first use.
I’ve created 3 private waves between my class and me.
1. How to use Google wave
2. Questions for me
3. Photography Task
#1 is obvious – it’s a wave showing things like formatting bar and reply button etc. #2 is for asking me questions about school work – I’ve used Edmodo in the past and will continue to but this is a way of also introducing wave to parents. #3 is for the students to let me know when they’ve finished a photography task so I can mark/assess/comment on it.
Most of us learn best by doing – this is a simple way to use Google Wave and to get the students used to the format of it.
I found myself wanting to both video the action at Unicon XV and take photographs and ended up holding my camera on top of the vado and shooting both video and photo at the same time.
This is a photo of how I hold the two (note that I use two hands but my 2nd hand was taking this photo!):
I’ve been meaning to buy a new camera for quite some time – my cell phone is all very well for quick spur of the moment snapshots but sometimes what you need is something better.
Today I bought a Samsung PL50 – entry level type camera – but what a difference it makes in shots.
I cropped yesterdays 365 photo and one I took today with the new camera; then I uploaded them both into Picnik and created a collage to compare the photo quality. When you click through and look at the bigger sizes you can see the quality difference quite clearly.
