Another one for the resource directory…

Are you keen to get away from endless PowerPoints and uninspiring slideshows?

Animoto has been making waves for some time now. This is a great tool for taking a selection of still images and turning them into a professional-looking multi-media slideshow. Once you have an account it’s fairly straightforward to upload your gifs or jpegs, add text and then pick music (either your own or from their library)

Animoto then stitches them together with cool animations and you can embed, email or download as an mp4. For a fee you can get the results at DVD quality.

Here’s an example I put together. The pictures in themselves are pretty dull, they’re from a project we did on the anti-social behaviour and the built environment, but it gives you idea what can be done. It tok me about 10 minutes to make.

 
They have got a dedicated mini-site for education users which gives free access to just about everything for a limited period (6 months I think) so a class can access it. Check out the Learn More link for further details.

Great for creating visual interest getters, discussion starters for teachers. For students, a great way of  presenting work in subjects right across the curriculum.

Loads of potential!

Sometimes I have to remind myself that I’m actually working when I come across things like this! Once again thanks to The Ed Techie for drawing it to our attention.

Basically, it’s a 3d animation tool for dummies. You type in your script select character costumes, pick camera angles, sounds, music etc.

The results can be crude but have a certain charm to them. Here are a few examples…

Introduction to a teaching topic on digital media

 

Something more fun…
 

Excellent tool for teaching about storyboarding and pre-production or maybe just general cross-curricular idea presentation.

Word of warning, it’s at beta stage at the mo so using it as a class activity may not be reliable. Also, when it comes out of beta testing you may find that you have to pay to put stuff up on it.

Here’s a wee Christmas present to all you struggling teachers.

Aaron, Electric Chalk’s web-wizard, has created a new resources directory site accessed form the tabs at the top of the page. Or here…

Blogging what we come across is fine but finding stuff later can be a bit of a mare so here we’ll be categorising everything for quick access along with links back to the post evaluating it.

Feel free to nominate links to appear in the directory. We’ll be moderating it to keep it clear of rubbish, mind.

Merry Christmas!

image: Christmas Cliche by Cayusa

SeanBluestone.com has made an amazing WordPress plugin called: “WordPress Link Directory”.

You can read more about the plugin here.

The WordPress Link Directory Plugin (at the time of writing this post) was Version: 1.8.
This doesn’t seem to work with the latest version of WordPress: 2.7.

So we’ve had a little look and got it working. We haven’t tested all the features. But these work on our site: adding/updating/removing links and categories. (We haven’t looked at the “Premium Links”, as we wont be using them – let us know if it works)

We cannot wait for the next update by Sean, and are sure you’re all the same, but until then, if you want to get your Directory working again, or add it to your site, you could try this fix. (We have only tested this on ElectricChalk, with the versions shown above)

Guide:

1. Download and Install The WordPress Link Directory.

1. From: http://WordPress.org/extend/plugins/WordPress-link-directory/
2. Or: http://www.seanbluestone.com/wp-link-directory

2. Make sure you upload it to /plugins/wplinkdir This is hard-coded into the plugin. So uploading it as “WordPress-link-directory” (which it unzips as) will NOT work!

3. Replace the “link-directory.php” file with this one here: Updated File

That should be it.

NOTE: This was a hack that we made for us. There are no guarantees, do not blame us if it loses all your links, or messes your WordPress installation up.

If you need help, or have any thoughts / comments, please leave them below, I’ll do my best to help you get your links directory working again. (But check the main sites for guides on using/Permalinks/etc)

(p.s we installed ours with a fresh installation not an upgrade, so if this gets your directory working again after you’ve updated your WP, let us know)

Cheers

The LEA she works with has provided an LP which is great but she was saying that her head is keeping tabs on teachers by checking their lesson plans for the week on a Sunday night.

In itself, not a problem - visibility of work can lead to sharing, collaboration and all that lovely stuff.

What gets me is the secretive, Big Brother approach where the staff only found out the head was doing this after the head dropped hints in casual conversation.

Has anyone else had this sort of experience? Are you a head or head of department who sees this as a valuable management technique?

Speak your brains!

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.

Fiona Miller in the Guardian this week says it better than I could.

I’ve worked in a large telecoms organisation with a very well run IT services team. The hoops that I had to jump through to justify the procurement and installation of something fairly standard (Macromedia Flash) were numerous and fiddly (fiddly hoops?).

Picture a teacher. She has just found an IT resource that will transform a difficult lesson but she’s only found it at the last minute. A school-based IT team is more likely to be negotiated into getting it installed at 24 hours notice than a outside provider with a central call centre working to a 2 week service level.

Make IT more complicated and less people will use it as a tool. Teaching’s hard enough as it is.

“We have some disabled (because buggy and limited) development code that permitted upload of already exported files to a FTP server. This was last available in 1.3.3 Beta:

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/audacity/audacity-win-1.3.3.zip

We have longer term aims to improve this and allow direct exporting from the Audacity window to a server but this is not a current priority.

Also the FTP implementation has a number of potential security issues to be worked out. 

I don’t personally use SharePoint so I can’t advise you whether a FTP solution would work or something else is needed. Web searches are not all that helpful, but there is an article here about uploading files to Sharepoint:

http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/sharepoint-blog/windows-service-to-upload-documents-into-sharepoint-2007-14358

Audacity projects require the .aup file and the _data folder to be present, so those would have to be put in a zip file. If the project includes imported files, they must be copied into the _data folder if they cannot be accessed locally or on the network:

http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php?title=Sending_your_work_to_others     

If you can advise more about the Open Office feature to export to web folders, we can certainly log it as an Audacity feature request. 

Thanks 

Gale 

Audacity Team“ 

We’re working with one of our partnerships schools on a project with some 11-year olds where they record a desert-island diary entry in Audacity and create an mp3 out of it.

We want to be able to then put the mp3 onto the VLE but have hit a real snag.

Far from making the process of saving and sharing work easier, having the learning platform involved makes it harder.

The issue is that when you log into the VLE (MS Sharepoint in our case) where there is a document folder for saved work in some applications like Open Office and MS Office you can see these folders when you click on “Save Project As…” 

The problem with Audacity is that it can’t see these web-based folders so at the moment we have to go through a lengthy process of saving the work in progress to either a document folder or the local machine and then copying and pasting into the web folder.

This is harder than it sounds when you have a reluctant, stroppy group of Y11’s and understandably the partner teachers are anxious about taking the project on themselves as it seems too complicated.

I have a dual plan of attack on this and I’ll keep you updated on the outcome.

I’m going to BETT this year so will accost the Microsoft stand for their advice but I’ve also emailed the Audacity developer team with the suggestion that they include the ability to sve to web folders in a future release.

It’ll be interesting to see how much value they developers put on finding a solution and whether a pleb like me can influence development of a piece of open-source software.

NOTE: Here’s an update… (10th Dec 2008)

I’ve talked about using VLE’s to list suggested links for students rather than free-Googling. Here they suggest using MS Publisher to create an HTML page and including writing frames in the document to help them structure their responses - a great idea as just expecting the students to write what they find isn’t effective.

Check out the resources page for instructions and lists of software.

The 2nd part is about podcasting to help with revision and is also worth your time.

I’m going to have a play with the Podomatic podcasting software featured and post an evaluation for you before Christmas.

(Note: The spelling on the link in the resources document is wrong - my link should work fine)