On the off chance that there are regular readers out there, (and if they are wondering about the lack of posting here), I need to let you all know that Ms Vicki and I are on a five week trip in the UK. If you’re interested you can catch up with the trip on Vicki and John’s Great 2009 Expedition. Normal service on this blog will resume later .

Apologies in advance for the content of this post as I usually try to avoid what my mother used to call “blowing my own trumpet” however this time I hope you will permit me a little indulgence. Somewhere around this time 12 months ago a little book that a colleague and I had laboured long and hard over was finally released. Since then Technology Toolkit: An Introduction To Web 2.0 has done quite nicely.

According to our publisher the first print run of 1500 copies has basically sold out and a reprint has begun. This I’m told is not all that common in Australian education publishing so I guess is worthy of note. Along the way too, a couple of folk have been kind enough to reflect on the book including recently John Connell, an interview with the EdTech Crew and Gary Barker in his Green Guide column in The Age newspaper.

When I was first approached to start writing the book I actually demurred suggesting that as the content would change so quickly, a static print version was not  as appropriate as say an online iteration. As the publisher only dealt in books and as she is quite persuasive I was finally talked into compiling my practices into a book form and so the book was written.

Looking back over the 12 months it is interesting to see how the Web 2.0 landscape has changed. Perhaps the most significant change has been in the range of tools and enhancements that teachers can select from, Tech Toolkit has no mention of Twitter, Ning or many of the tools many of us take for granted. Despite this rapid expansion of options, anecdotal evidence suggests the majority of teachers and schools are still coming to terms with the very basics of blogs and wikis let alone considering enhancements or dare I say it pedagogy.

If you are interested in the book you can check out this flyer/order form, (though if you are looking to order a copy using this form I need to let you know that I will be overseas from the 19th of June for five weeks so I won’t be able to fill the order till late July ). Alternatively you can also order a copy from Edsoft. By way of a complete disclosure from the $59.95 cost of the book I get $2.50 royalty so the retirement will have to go on hold for a bit longer, (if you order through me I get an additional $5).

Tehcnology Toolkit: An Introduction To Web 2.0

One of the really invigorating yet often paradoxically annoying aspects of the current state of play in regard to Web 2.0 is the seemingly endless proliferation of tools that are becoming available. As noted in a previous post, some of these spaces are also disappearing  as with FURL and latterly Flowgram.

Whilst it’s not too difficult to find information about startups, Mashable and Go2Web20 are two that come to mind, very often these are general listings not specific to education. Jane Hart from the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies regularly polls selected readers for their suggestions of their favorite tools. In the case of the 2009 list Jane has aggregated the top recommendations and organised them under 25 headings into the following Slideshare Presentation. Most if not all will be familiar to readers of this blog but the Slideshare presentation might prove a useful reference point for awareness raising with other teachers.

Of more interest perhaps is the link on the final slide which links to Jane’s Top 100 Tools. Here you not only get to see an expanded list of tools but can track the relative movement of each tool on the list over the past three years. For those interested in delving even deeper, on the 25 Tools page you can also access links to a whole further range of tools under each of Jane’s 25 categories. Mind-boggling really and yet most of us know teachers who still have little knowledge or conception of the most basic of these tools.

• 4 Stages of Learning Twitter – come on in, the water’s warm!

  This post from Lynda Morceaux is a nice commonsense run down of how to find your way into the Twitterverse. Organised under four stages, Lynda offers suggestions on how to maximise your involvement with each one. Thanks to @murcha for tweeting this link.

  tags: twitter, newbies

• Australia Publishes CC Info Pack – Creative Commons

  If you’re an Australian teacher then you should definitely have this page in your Bookmarks/Favorites. As they say:

  “Through its Copyright Advisory Group, the Australian Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA) has published a Creative Commons information pack online, a bundle of eight documents that distills the basics of CC licensing and the philosophy behind it. This pack is a great resource for educators and students, and we encourage you to use it in your schools by adapting it however you like.

  The info pack includes concise and concrete answers to simple questions, like:

  • What is Creative Commons?
  • How to Find Creative Commons Licensed Material
  • How to Attribute Creative Commons Licensed Material

  and more. Find all documents at their Smartcopying website, “The Official Guide to Copyright Issues for Australian Schools and TAFE.” All of them are licensed CC BY, the most effective and open license for open educational resources.”

  tags: copyright, creativecommons, Australia, smartcopy, creative commons, edtechcrew

• TED Talks Demystified for Teachers

  Jeff Mummert from The History Teachers Attic has published this great post which lists the TED videos that he thinks are particularly useful and divides them up by subjects including the traditional curriculum areas. As he point out this list is not the sum total of all the TED videos, just a selection of those most relevant to education.

  tags: TED, video, TED videos, History, history teachers, Mummert, edtechcrew

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Stupeflix – Video creation made easy

  Stupeflix is another one of those online apps/spaces that enable you to create slideshows using images from online or your camera to which you can add a soundtrack. The big difference with this one is that you can actually download the “movie” to your own computer either as an mp4 or flash file. You can also select to group images so that they have the same transition. This also enables you to add soundtracks specific to each group. The only downside is that there is no direct embed code, instead you have to upload the movie to a thrid party site such as TeacherTube and then use this code to embed it as below.



This movie is also available via TeacherTube on MrP’s Test Blog Blog

tags: video, digital stories, slideshow, presentations, digitalstorytelling

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Things have been a bit quiet of late as far as posts go but that is because I have been just a tad distracted. It seems that sometimes things come in waves and so it was that over the last month or so I have been involved in a couple of conferences which of course has meant new presentations. This time I had the pleasure of presenting with a couple of colleagues from my old school, Rick and Suz. The sessions were respectively

• More Than Blogs A look at a range of different ways that teachers are using blogs and wikis in schools and
• More Than Flippin’ Videos The story of one teacher’s work with students developing digital stories

Both can be found, (along with a number of other presentations), under the Online Presentations tab at the top of this page.

One of the real pleasures in doing these joint presentations is not only celebrating the work of fellow teachers but also appreciating their growing levels of expertise and understanding of the conceptual and pedagogical underpinnings of the basis for the presentation. There is nothing like preparing for a conference session to concentrate and bring into question the how and why of classroom practice. It’s a pity more teachers don’t value their work enough to subject themselves to this process. Too often teachers don’t see what they have been doing as worthy of sharing however given just a modicum of support they find they have a genuinely interesting story to share with colleagues.

• Amphibian Research Center

  

• The Amphibian Research Centre site is the web presence of the centre dedicated to research and conservation of Australia’s unique frogs. They provide a range of services from the site including

  • Tadpoles in schools kits
  • A Field Guide to Frog Groups of Australia
  • Frogs of Australia: A Regional Guide to Frogs of Australia
  • Frogwatch
  • amongst other activities and links to amphibian sites.

  tags: frogs, amphibians, biology, life and living, science, Australian frogs, Field Guide

• Ecolinc: Frogs In Orbit

  Frogs in Orbit is a hands-on program which integrates Biology, Ecology and Physics from the Australian Ecolinc organisation. The pdf and Powerpoint files for a 2008 project involving the MIR space station are intended for use with secondary school students in year 9 or 10 but can be adapted for other levels. The lessons can be used individually or as a complete unit. This material is copyright free and can be freely distributed.

  tags: ecolinc, frogs, science, living things, life and living, biology

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• OffiSync – Enabling Collaboration

  If you are looking to use Google Docs but also want the security of Microsoft Word then the Offisync Beta plugin may be worth considering. Offisync allows you to open and save your documents online in Google Docs and access them from any computer. This enables you to access your files from any computer with or without Microsoft Office. You can also manage, create and delete Google docs folders and add collaborators to your documents and manage their permissions.

  

  For another perspective check out this readwriteweb article

  tags: office, sync, collaboration, google, microsoft, Googledocs, offisync, edtechcrew, Cloud Computing, Word

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Participation Inequality: Lurkers vs. Contributors in Internet Communities (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)

• This is, I believe, the original source article for the 90% lurkers 9% and 1% contributors quote that Jason Smith used in his Innovations Showcase Keynote presentation.

  90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).
  

  9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
  

  1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs.

  The article from Jakob Neilsen explains the basis for his assertion then it also goes on to explore the upsides and downsides of the findings as well as some ways to overcome the downsides. The article was written in 2006 so some of the context may have changed though I wonder whether the fundamentals are not still the same.

• tags: participation, community, web2.0, collaboration, research, usability, edtechcrew

• SearchMerge

  SearchMerge is another of those really interesting new search engines designed to search in real time as well as via the traditional Google search. You can select to search from one or more of the following Google, Twitter, Friendfeed, Flickr, YouTube, Last.FM, Technorati and Vimeo.



tags: searchmerge, search, search engine, Twitter, Google, Flickr, Friendfeed, youtube, Vimeo, technorati, edtechcrew

• Print Friendly Version

  With the Print Friendly Bookmarklet in your browser Bookmarks toolbar you can quickly clean up any webpage, removing ads, navigation, and all the junk you don’t want to print before sending it to the printer. Even better you can remove extraneous paragraphs from the page and then if you wish save the file as a pdf.

  tags: printing, print, printfriendly, webpages, web, remove ads, pdf, edtechcrew

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Readers who checked out my CoverItLive post re Martin Westwell’s recent Innovations Showcase might be interested to know that Martin has kindly added his slides from this presentation to the Innovations Showcase Ning. As I have also commented the Australian Secondary Principals have a report/record of a similar 2008 presentation from Martin.