http://www.electricchalk.com Because everyone learns from everyone else Tue, 06 Jan 2009 12:59:00 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://www.electricchalk.com/animoto-turn-photos-into-cool-slideshows/ Check out Xtranormal. 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, ... http://www.electricchalk.com/xtranormal-make-movies-by-typing/ 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 ... http://www.electricchalk.com/new-digital-learning-resources-directory/ Today we wanted to add a resource directory to ElectricChalk – we found one that did almost EXACTLY what we wanted, unfortunately, it was broken :-( 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 ... http://www.electricchalk.com/wordpress-link-directory/ I was a little taken aback this week after talking to my sister-in-law who is a primary school teacher in the north of England. 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 ... http://www.electricchalk.com/how-not-to-use-a-learning-platform/   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 ... http://www.electricchalk.com/x-timeline-useful-web-app/ Cards on the table: I don't think so. 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 ... http://www.electricchalk.com/are-managed-it-services-in-schools-a-good-idea/ Well, top marks for a speedy answer from the previous post. Here's what they said... "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 ... http://www.electricchalk.com/audacity-the-update/ I'm shattered!  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 ... http://www.electricchalk.com/using-audacity-with-sharepoint/ Another good piece from Teachers' TV. Part of their excellent ICT SOS series. 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 ... http://www.electricchalk.com/web-quests-internet-research-in-the-classroom/