This is everyone’s favourite advert at the moment - surely?
I spent a happy Saturday morning playing on the milkmatters site, not only can you watch the adverts and download ringtones (my phone screams as though I’ve no milk whenever I get a txt now;-)) but you can learn all about stop frame animation and play with the characters to make your own short films, and learn a bit about the commercial side to the production of milk. So it’s not entirely frivolous fun - it’s educational too!*
Great fun!
*I don’t know how well they treat their farmers though so I still probably wouldn’t buy Cravendale milk - apart from the fact of being dairy intolerant that is…
It go me thinking about my map of Scottish Schools again, there is already a list of ScotEduBlogs with certain pieces of data : blog’s name; blogger’s name; description; tags. If one of the bits of data was a postcode then it should be possible to output that to another application. I suddenly realised that there must be an easy way to get data into Google Maps dynamically using it’s API, how else would all of the mashups work?
So one quick search later and I’ve found this map generator from the Official Google Maps API blog which takes data from a Google Spreadsheet and creates a Google Map. I’ve not tested it yet but hope to find time soon. It should then be easy as pie to make a map for all schools in Scotland from a database that already exists, if I can get access to it.
With flickrvision going 3D this week that sort of toy was nearer the front of my mind than it might otherwise have been, it gave me this idea: what about a dynamically refreshing picture of the latest posts from ScotEduBlogs? While there’s a lot of activity I think you might still be looking for a while before it changes :).
I’ve just been playing with Microsoft’s new offering - 3D maps.
3D maps from Microsoft so far are very impressive(although it’s ground my machine down to a halt) I’ve been looking around New York for starters, and managed to get stabbed in the eye with the spike of the Chrysler Building! The level of detail is absolutely astounding. What is fantastic is that you can link to a particular view (or at least you appear to be able to, try this to see, or this one - you’ll need to install it first) from whatever angle you are looking from.
Like Google Earth it is very easy to navigate. I’m sure I’ll be spending a little more time on this in the future.
There’s a write up of it over on Read/Write Web which covers which cities it’s available for. I’ve had no luck with Google’s 3D images, which were also launched today. Those also sound pretty good - a 360 panorama taken from video recorded from a van driving the streets, so in effect you can see the view from any point along a street it’s been down, apparently you can make out faces in enough detail to recognise people…
This morning I had my last lecture ever as an undergraduate (assuming that I haven’t messed up somewhere and I actually pass this year!) and afterwards Krysia took the chance to show our class the resource she’s made as part of her dissertation. It’s a website that I’ve been helping her set up and it’s been pretty good to have something to work on other than my own dissertation for a while.
Anyway, now that it’s no longer under wraps I thought I’d share a little bit about it here. It is a site that has been set up to enable newly qualified tech teachers like myself and Krysia to share what we’re doing with other new tech teachers. It’s set up so that it is (fingers crossed) really easy for us to each have a blog where we can upload resources we’ve made, share our experiences in the job, and generally support each other through what is likely to be a fairly hectic and perhaps fraught year. With the magic of RSS everything that gets uploaded can be categorised and aggregated in any number of different ways. A user might want to keep in touch with everything that’s going on, another user might only want to see things about Graphic Communication, another user might only care about Intermediate 2 things, or any combination of these. I think it’s all set up so it’s really easy to do and all me and Krysia have to do is show people the power of it and to get them started.
The idea of it has come out of lots of research and reading that Krysia has done, and what really struck me when Krysia first talked to me about it was the similarities in what she was saying and what is being said and done in East Lothian with Edubuzz. What has come out of it is technoBuzz.co.uk. When we were trying to come up with names we really struggled but technobuzz really struck a chord, the problem we faced was deciding if it was too similar to edubuzz. In the end we went for it and I hope that we’re not ticking anybody off by doing so, but the two projects do have fairly similar outlooks so I hope we’re okay.
I hate to say it but even though we’re technology teachers the majority of my class wouldn’t have the first clue how to use RSS, will never have heard of Web2.0, and haven’t even considered using the internet in lessons. The word blog just makes some people sleepy before you can explain the potential. I really wish on my course there had been something like the lectures that David Muir and Ewan McIntosh have given at Jordanhill on using new technology in the classroom.
That said I’m actually really excited about technobuzz and can’t wait to see how my classmates take to it, I really hope they see the potential this has to make next year that little bit easier to get through and get involved. It’d also be interesting to see what other teachers think of the site - once it has been running for a while and any bugs have been ironed out it could be extended to all techy teachers, or into other subjects.
Spurred on by Ollie, and having lots of other work to do I’ve made a quick video on how to allow scrapblog to use you flickr images, take a look here: Adding your flickr images to your scrapblog
I’ve been playing with Srapblog again, here’s a work in progress of my trip to NZ last year, it’ll grow in time (another thing I plan to do in the Summer).
Another post about a resource, I’ve just found Scrapblog (via meish.org). This tool lets you easily create scrap book style webpages where you can bring in photos from loads of different sites like flickr and photobucket, videos form youTube, then style them as you like, add text and colours.
Once it’s done you can publish it to a load of different places, you can produce DVDs, or flickr photosets, or books, even embed it in your own website.
It seem very easy to use and links in with loads of different sites so it could be a fantastic tool to use in schools to create reports about school trips, experiments, shows, anything.
Until tonight I thought bubbleshare was just another photosharing site, then I came across this post from Pam McDowell and saw the story she had created. It is similar to flickr but it does have great potential for stories and tutorials for kids, it’s just a lot more fun than flickr.
Anyway, I spent a wee while (longer than I had hoped but there you go) making up a quick tutorial on using Inventor, a 3D modelling package. While it doesn’t go into detail about how I made the drawing it does I think show how quick and easy Inventor can be.
I think I probably broke all of the rules about good design with this tutorial, in fact I feel like the person who uses 18 different animations and sounds in Powerpoint, but it was fun, next time I’ll be more restrained
I was pretty happy with most of bubbleshare but it still felt a little rough around the edges, so I still prefer flickr but will definitely think about this in school.
Anyway, are you ready to see my work(!)? Here you go:
I’ve been wanting to practise more with screen capture software recently, I have a copy of Camtasia which I have used a little in the past and last weekend my dad (just back from trekking in Morocco, now golfing in Thailand - spot the new retiree) said he wanted to know how to put photos on the web so he can share them with people. So I set to work putting together two very basic tutorials on using flickr.
The second one is very grainy for some reason, the source flv file is fine, I had the same problem on google video so if anyone has any bright ideas about why or an alternative way of hosting videos like these then could you let me know. I could host them here but I’d rapidly run out of bandwidth and webspace.
They follow hot on the heels of Andrew Brown’s excellent screencasts on keeping up with blogs and not missing blog conversations among other things. Andrew’s work has prompted me to download a trial copy of Adobe Captivate which I’ve yet to use properly, but I’m put off by the US$600 price-tag.
I wrote yesterday about the Royal High School’s excellent CDT department webpage. It is an showcase of the work being done by their pupils, and an insight into the varied software they use. It is updated every week or so and it looks as though it is all done by hand - that is, creating the pages in Notepad or Dreamweaver or similar; cropping and resizing all the images and uploading them to the right directories, manually archiving the old versions of the pages.
I wonder if they realise how much easier it would be to update their site through some sort of combination of a blog and a photo sharing site like edublogs.org flickr.com, and the community they could create around their work - I already know lots of teachers check it regularly, I’m sure conversations would quickly take place and the benefits for pupils (theirs and outsiders) would be tremendous.
One thing I really used to miss about their site was a feed so I didn’t have to check if it had been updated (you do use feeds by now don’t you?) so I went away and made one using page2rss.com, so if you want to be kept up to date with what they’ve been doing then you can use it too: RSS feed for the RHS CDT Department.
And if anyone is out there from RHS I hope you don’t see this as any sort of criticism - I think the site is great and I just hope that it doesn’t turn into a chore and stop getting updated, I’d miss it!
I’ve just been playing with Microsoft’s new offering - 3D maps.
