Image by Karen Biggs - Flickr CC
I want to introduce you to 2 web tools which I think are the absolute business…but I’m not going to tell you what they do yet, and I’ll explain why in a second. I want you to discover for yourself.
They are both created by Catalan company Pim Pam Pum and use Flickr as a gateway to all sorts of fun. Check them out…
Maybe I’m getting lazy as I approach my middle years but I’m starting to appreciate simplicity and elegance of design over technical wizardry.
Here you have 2 web tools that you can use to create simple pieces of media with the minimum of fuss using high quality content which is freely available. No long lists of instructions or complicated processes – just point and click goodness. You’ll be up and running in 2 minutes, I promise.
Kids I know that use it really love it.
A lot of what I do for my job focuses on using software and hardware that has quite a steep learning curve (see the green screening article below) and where some teachers we support are more than happy to absorb that technology not all have the time, inclination or confidence.
In the past I might have grumbled about “luddites” and “stick-in-the-muds” and thrown 32MB memory sticks at them but, not for the first time, I think I’ve been missing the point a little.
Some bits of ICT need to have a certain degree of complexity in order to function, take learning platforms for example.
For the most part, everything else should be as simple as possible. That way teachers and students can get on with the communicating bit of ICT without worrying about the technology bit.
There’s a growing body of web tools, freely available, that would allow a teacher to say come up with some ideas or tell us what you have learnt and use whatever tools help you to do it best. Then let them get on with it.
Check our resource page on web tools for our ever expanding list of favourites…
There is value in the more complex but wandering round BETT looking at the number of products that would require their own 1 day training course to turn them on it just made me pre-emptively exhausted.
So, from now on I am going to champion, whenever I can, ICT that requires as little mental effort to master as possible. And I shall refer to it in the echoing, solitary space that is my mind as “Simpl-ICT“.
See what I did there?
1 Comment until now
I liked both of those resources, havn’t quite got into flickr just yet.
Still struggling to get to grips with twitter.
I must be a social sites luddite?
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