Electric Chalk

I was shown this ages ago then promptly lost track of it but Indiana Jones-style, I’ve dug it up from the Mediasnackers blog archive.

It’s a nice, easy way of creating timelines from a list of events (either type them in or import a CSV file) and then link the events to explanatory text and/or bits of media.

The results can then be viewed on the x-timeline site or embedded in another site like I’ve done here. SPOILER ALERT - if you don’t want to know what happens to Dumbledore don’t look at it.

I can see great applications in history but also english if your analysing a novel or play or even an author’s output. What about the timeline of a natural disaster?

Enjoy.

I want to showcase some work that one of our partnership schools has done with our help.

Tom Gardiner at Birley Community College in Sheffield finished this project this week. It’s part of a wider module on character archetypes and comparing Batman Begins with the 1960’s Batman movie. For this exercise a group of Y9’s storyboarded a trailer about a superhero character they had developed. With our help they Photoshopped themselves into various environments and then put the movies in a photostory with a soundtrack of their choice. 

It was an interesting group being all boys and being neither high or low achievers they rarely get a chance to do special activities. We did it over 2 stages, the first at the school taking the pictures and the second at our City Learning Centre completing the Photoshopping and then putting the photostory together using Logotron’s Revelation Sight and Sound. As a side note, their behaviour  was excellent despite being locked into one activity for a whole school day.

This is the example we used as inspiration to get the students thinking about what they could achieve technically. (I did it - I don’t mind if you think it’s crap!)

This is the work of 2 groups.

 I really wish there was a film called “I, Penguin”. Genius!

I think the real effectiveness of this project came not from the use of IT but because of the choice of group by Tom and the focus on the preparation and writing that happened before any student got near a computer or camera.

NOTE: All the images (apart from the students’ own) come from the Creative Commons section of Flickr. I meant to give credit for them but neglected to keep the URL’s. My apologies to the owners. If the images are yours and you would like credit please leave a comment and I will amend the post.

The music was taken from the Audio Network Production Library (on schools’ broadband package.

Just came across this on Martin Weller’s excellent Ed Techie blog.

You cut and paste a piece of text or put in the URL for a website that has a RSS or Atom feed and it generates a cloud of the most used words (excluding the really common ones like prepositions and articles). It’s a bit like the tag cloud you get on blogs but for a whole body of text.

It would be an excellent reflective tool for essay writing or analysing a body of poetry, maybe also as a starting point for creative writing.

Just as an example, here’s what you get if you put the Electric Chalk URL into Wordle (click thumbnail to see full size)…

Interestingly, the word “education” doesn’t figure as much as “PDA’s”. Think I’d better stop ranting about them!

Some issues - The Safari browser I’m using doesn’t like the Java application so try IE or Firefox. Also, when embedding the HTML it needs to be all on one line, not as published on the Wordle site which has line breaks.

Have a look at Sarah Peacock’s thoughtful blog, Innovate and Educate on technology and pedagogy.

We’re about to embark on a multi-modal poetry exercise with Y7’s using 2Animate software and there’s good guidance in Sarah’s post.