Something a little light-hearted today. Evelien Lohbeck is so so crazy clever! Her ideas exceed her technical genius in this show reel of animation/video mash-ups.

Enjoy!

Noteboek from Evelien Lohbeck on Vimeo.

Rather than the traditional ‘All Rights Reserved’ the licenses lean on a open and sharing approach which, by default, basically say: ‘just don’t claim it as your own, attribute the creator as … the creator & show some respect’.

There are a number of Creative Commons licenses available so the publisher is able to choose which rights he/she waives for the benefit of the audience. Flickr has a dedicated portal of Creative Commons content. In other words, the images from this portal is all available for re-distribution under the CC license.

Nowadays as schools are looking to release students work to a wider audience it’s important to understand CopyRight.

Further Reading: WikiPedia | Creative Commons Australia

Another amazing feature is the ‘Historic Imagery’. By moving a slider left and right you can view how the location has changed over time.

Keep reading to view the video demo.

Here’s a post I read this morning from the coal face where the following was proposed…

Did you ever have a kid tag something inappropriate?

You may or not find the answer shocking but for me it cements the fact that we need to EDUCATE our youth about how USE these tools.

Read the full article here

I asked her if she could point me toward any exciting projects she knows of where teachers are using technology in education. She suggested I checkout the Flat Classroom Project.

The Project uses Web 2.0 tools to make communication and interaction between students and teachers from all participating classrooms easier. The topics studied and discussed are real-world scenarios based on ‘The World is Flat‘ by Thomas Friedman.

One of the main goals of the project is to ‘flatten’ or lower the classroom walls so that instead of each class working isolated and alone, 2 or more classes are joined virtually to become one large classroom. This will be done through the Internet using Web 2.0 tools such as Wikispaces and Ning.

Now this is what I call moving beyond the PowerPoint presentation! Fully USING free technologies readily available to collaborate.

Australia has a participating school in the project; Presbyterian Ladies College in Melbourne.

The project won 1st Place in the Best Wiki 2006 category of the 2006 Edublog Awards.

You can download a copy of the Project outline here.

Is your school involved in anything like this? We’d love to hear about it.

Delicious and Social Bookmarking

I have just started my first Delicious account! This is the most popular social bookmarking tool which allows you to store your bookmarks online. This is particularly handy for teachers, because instead of just storing your bookmarks on one computer (and one browser), they are stored online for you to access anytime, anywhere.

You can also chose to either share your bookmarks with others or keep your bookmarks private. This is great, because I really don’t want people to know about my lithop obsession, but I do want to share links to the great technology in education resources that I find.

You can form networks with family, friends, co-workers, other educators and students to view and share relevant bookmarks. You can also divide your contacts into ‘network bundles’ so that the websites your students are bookmarking, can be viewed seperately in your Delicious account to those that Aunt Betty is bookmarking.

Creating Bookmarks in Delicious

You can bookmark important websites in three ways:

- Use browser add-ons

- Use a bookmarlet – click ‘Bookmark on Delicious’ in your toolbar when you visit a page you want to bookmark

- Select ‘Save a new bookmark’ on the far right-hand-side of your Delicious account homepage

More information about each of these is detailed in the sign up process (Step 2).

Some webpages also have a built in bookmark link, like this blog post. Down the bottom of this post, you will see little links to Delicious and a couple of other popular bookmarking sites as well (Reddit, Digg, Technorati and Furi).

I also found it very useful that I could export the bookmarks that I had already, so none of my previous efforts were lost. This was very easily done when I signed up for the account (this is the third step when you sign up for a Delicious account, or it can be done later as well).

To help you find articles again, you can use ‘tags.’ A tag is a way of categorising the information that you are looking at. For example, when you read this post, you might give it the tags ’social.bookmarking’, ‘introductory’, ‘education’, ‘Web2.0′.  These tags can be subjects, people, places, locations, names, ideas – virtually anything you might want to use to categorize information.

It becomes social, because other people can then search these tags and see the resources you tagged.

How is this relevant to education?

- Students can use Delicious to keep a record of all the internet resources they look at when undertaking a research task

- Students can share links with other students to resources that they find useful when researching a particular topic

- Teachers could use this professionally to share great resources with colleagues, whether they be on a topic or for a whole subject area

- When you meet innovative experts and professionals, you can share Delicious account details and keep up with what they are looking at.

Limitations

One of the limitations of Delicious is that bookmarks can only be marked public or private. This is a limitation for teachers that may not want to share bookmarked resources with everyone: for example, there may be essay topics or exams that a teacher may want to share with colleagues, but probably not their students. This limitation may be overcome by some of the other tools available, so I will be sure to keep you posted.

Nevertheless, be sure to tell us about your Delicious details if you are also interested in technology in education, by commenting on this post or emailing us.

Over the Jump you will find the full interview with Colin Gould who gives his candid thoughts as to how schools could spend their funding and recollects Apple IIe’s!

1. Colin – you got your start with an Apple 2E – what’s the rest of the story?
Gosh … That’s almost ancient history …. But here goes…
When the first Apple IIe arrived at my school (courtesy of CAP), I, being the teacher librarian at the time, recall making the comment “What on Earth are we going to do with a computer in a primary school?”
Due to circumstances I found myself being drawn to this lump of grey plastic and set about “mastering” it. Luckily there were a few other like minded teachers in the area then and over time we sort of became the “experts” locally.
From IIe’s I graduated to IIGS, 575’s etc and went from running word processing and other pieces of software to developing webpages and setting up networks. At the same time I began to be in some demand to run workshops for teachers and present at conferences – mainly showing what we were achieving at the school at that time. I was still a teacher-librarian, and the  computer coordinator but had a great boss who encouraged me to explore and gave me time to go away to do these presentations as well as visit conferences and “lighthouse schools” to gather ideas etc.
In the late 1990’s I was asked to set up a webpage for CAP and maybe run a few workshops if required – the expectation was that this would only be a part time position but by June 1999 it was obvious that I was never in my school any more and something had to be done – hence the position became permanent and I’m still here today.

2. Tell us a little about CAP and some of the great work that you see teachers producing.
Country Areas Program is a federally funded program aimed at overcoming the educational disadvantages encountered by students in rural and isolated areas. In NSW CAP supports in excess of 24,000 students in 240 schools (two thirds of which are small one and two teacher schools) including Distance Education schools which service the most geographically isolated areas of New South Wales. 
The webpage has given all these isolated schools a “focus point” as it houses all the admin forms etc, calendars of upcoming workshops as well as a mountain of resources including the OnLine Resource Modules (similar to Web Quests) and the Bloom’s / Multiple Intelligence Grids which were all written by teachers at CAP workshops.

Presently I am engaged with a number of teachers scattered around the state in some really exciting Wikispaces projects in which they are collaborating with each other and schools in Wales and the US. Teachers and students are sharing their ideas, thoughts and information using audio files and podcasts as well as the more traditional photos, movies and text. 
Where will it all end? That’s part of the beauty of it all – no-one knows!

3. How has technology changed education for country areas and their students?
Prior to the advent of the internet (and yes, there WAS a time) students in rural and isolated areas  had to depend on their school or local town’s libraries. In both cases, small towns and schools had few resources, leaving senior high school students especially, in a very disadvantaged situation. The internet, and the rollout of computers and broadband access by the NSW DET, has gone a long way to “levelling the playing field” for these students. Today, students from even the most isolated schools in NSW can access the world’s great libraries and museums, conduct searches for the most esoteric information, question and discuss issues with scientists, physicists, explorers, writers etc as well as with other students anywhere.
The challenge for teachers is to make the best use of this fantastic technology – to ensure that students have the skills to access the information they require when they need it.

4. You seem like the elder statesman of NSW Web 2.0 – how long are you going to keep doing what you are doing now?
ELDER statesman? Hmmmm OK I guess I’m sort of old (at the age when superannuation is REAL and not far away!) 
I probably won’t be in this particular position in a few years time but I think I’ll be doing similar work in a more part time manner – possibly assisting schools and teachers with remote support although I think I will always be keen for the “face to face” type of workshops when the enthusiasm of both presenter and participant are integral.

5. 10k to spend on technology in education – what are you going to spend it on?
Assuming I can’t spend it on me travelling to other parts of the world to attend Tech Conferences, I guess I would be looking towards investigating the use of iPod Touch in the classroom setting, using the money to purchase a bank of them and provide inservicing to ensure their full implementation. Probably where CAP differs most from other programs is in the provision of inservicing or training for teachers in the belief that the most effective way to improve the educational outcomes of students is to improve the quality of the teaching! Hence using the money for training.

When you check out the first page and you run your mouse over the icons, you get a brief description of what each of these web applications do. You click on a few that sound like they have potential and you may even become excited about the possibility of using these application to do something cool in your classroom. For example, Fotoll is an application that allows you to make your own opinion polls, which would have endless application for my humanities classes. Then you arrow down. There is another 70 applications. “Wow, there are so many great applications”, were my initial thoughts. Then you arrow down again. And again… another 10 times with another 70 applications each time. Then you just keep clicking the down button to see how many pages there could possibly be. It starts to feel like an endless abyss. I think I arrowed down more than 35 times before I got through all the pages.

Don’t despair. Just like we can never read all the books in the library (ok, so Joe’s an exception), we can never keep abreast of all these Web 2.0 applications alone. However, for the next month I am going to focus on new Web 2.0 applications with educational value and dedicate my posts to them. If there are any Web Applications that you use that we can feature in our blog, please leave a comment with the name of the application and how you use it.

For those eagerly awaiting how Google would approach building a browser it might well have been an anti climax. There’s not much to it really. It certainly doesn’t have the bells and whistles Firefox is capable of. It doesn’t even have a bookmark manager! So what’s the point?

Well becoming the next Internet Explorer competitor is just the beginning…

Google’s long-term goal is clear: Dominate the enterprise and small business market in the same way it now dominates Internet search. – Computer World Blogs

The aim

Currently Google have applications such as Google Docs which includes a spreadsheet, word processor and even a Powerpoint alternative for presentations, all of which remain online, within your browser. Rather than installing big expensive, resource hungry applications such Microsoft Office, the idea is that you’ll simply be able to use free services such as Google Docs and with that comes all the advantages of seamless collaboration. The speed and efficiency at which they will run will depend on the speed of your internet connection.

This isn’t just another online Web 2.0 application. Chrome, along with a few other behind the scenes technologies, will allow access to your documents even when your offline. Chrome will act as the ’skin’ to these applications. In the not too distant future, they’ll be releasing the code that runs these applications to allow web developers to build more applications. This is a similar to what Apple did with the App Store. They built the platform and allowed the developer community to create applications to run on it.

As of August 20, 2008, there are 2,139 applications officially available for the iPhone, not including the ones built into the iPhone. WikiPedia

BUT, would you be happy with storing all your data on Google’s servers? I guess it’s a matter of weighing up the pro’s and con’s. It’s not like the decision will need to be made next week either, it’ll take a while for this new trend to catch on, but it definately is a new trend. Have you ever known Google to do anything that didn’t make an impact?

If you’re finding these topics of interest, I’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment in the box below and hit submit. It’s that simple.