LearnShifting

Between this blog and our Adobe Connect Friday meeting (which I can't attend today due to a little backlog of tasks) contributors in this space provide myself and the audience with some great links to tools that when I think:

"I definately want to share that with my friends who have school children, teachers and family."

I need to share it with you. This blog and our "digital donga" video conferencing meeting each week provides an opportunity to share ideas in our community of practise and re-find them. Having an informal get together is good as long as the great ideas are tagged, recorded and presented in a discoverable way.

This blog serves as one way to achieve that.

Before I show the links to the tools, I want to add an unrelated request. I notice that my blog font is quite small since the change to the new layout and although folks can adjust font size on the fly in a browser by holding the ctrl key and rotating the mouse wheel up or down, I'd like to know if this size is suitable as a default size. (It certainly is for my eyes). Anyway onto the tools...

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This entry was posted on April 1, 2011 at 12:32 PM and has received 395 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Three things rolled up into one blog entry...

• IE 9.0 Release Candidate available
• Finding out how fast your connection is and what ports are being used
• Partners in Learning links to applications and solutions

This is a bit of a Microsoft Entry. I meant to write about this on Friday and things go out of control. Firstly I downloaded and installed the Internet Explorer Release Candidate 9.0. It is quite good and now we have a complete set of browsers that support the <video> tag and most of HTML5.

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This entry was posted on February 14, 2011 at 1:31 PM and has received 433 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Moshi Monsters is popular with young children and the creators of this website have also created a free site for maths and english or literacy and numeracy depending on what you prefer. Much like mathletics, it allows children to compete against each other. I suspect it is good for kids up until about grade 4 who are achieving good grades in school. You can try it out at http://tutpup.com/ .

The other free website I came across is a story creating site that allows you to create a comic book story. The focus is on myths and legends. The resultant file can be played on an interactive whiteboard or on a computer.

http://myths.e2bn.org/create/

E2BN is the Learning Grid for the East of England and regional provider of the National Education Network. E2BN supplies Schools with broadband services and innovative online learning projects.

This entry was posted on November 1, 2010 at 5:02 PM and has received 214 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Just a quick entry to add to the millions of resources that are available for you to use with your children, your students, your colleagues or on yourself.

Firstly http://www.prezi.com a tool for creating animated moving, zooming presentations that are visually powerful and create presentations that really take you on a journey. Free and very easy to create, it uses a large canvas as the metaphor and you basically plonk items on the canvas and create a linking roadmap between the nuggets of information. Thanks Monica for putting me onto this.

Secondly http://www.lumosity.com/  a cognitive brain training site for kids and adults. Very nice layout and you can record your scores on a whole range of puzzles and games. Thanks to Irena for identifying this site.

It is free and I think I understand the business model but I think it best to possibly use a test email account in case your results are being analysed and sold. I don't think that is the case - but I think it is a startup company that has secured venture capital and even Facebook made a few privacy mistakes during its startup period.

Finally, http://www.moppetgames.com contains a limited, but useable set of games like hangman for about grade 1 - 4. Ideal for the end of class reward.

What is great is that by me starting this blog, I am now receiving links to really useful locations from readers of the blog, contributing far more to this site than I can alone. Thank you.

This entry was posted on September 14, 2010 at 9:40 AM and has received 226 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Every so often I get asked about where to get music without breaking copyright. Creative Commons tagged music is a good start for me because it tells me immediately what I can do with the music (or video, picture etc) without having to ask the author.

Anyway here are some links to "free" sites. If you have more, please add a comment to this entry. Update:- because of this blog's inbuilt spam filter, posting a comment can sometimes be rejected. The trick appears to be to leave out the http:// part of the url, so just type in www.somewher.com

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This entry was posted on July 28, 2010 at 9:06 AM and has received 346 views. There are currently 2 comments. Print this entry.

Mathletics is an online service that some schools subscribe to that let students log in and compete in math quizzes against the clock or against other students from around the worl. It costs about 90 dollars AUD for a home account which is what our son has and I believe about 30 dollars AUD for a school based account. I would love to see "Physletics" and "Chemletics" as well but having maths and english is a great start. (Spellodrome is their spelling product).

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This entry was posted on April 6, 2010 at 4:09 PM and has received 803 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

This article is taken from http://www.openculture.com which contains fantastic open source resources for you, me and our kids. By way of example, it was World Water Day the other day which I only knew because there was an offer by government to subsidise the purchase of rainwater tanks. Now,  if you go to http://www.openculture.com/2010/03/our_thirsty_world_a_free_national_geographic_download.html there is a free resource available until April 2 on the subject.

At a conference last year, over one third of the participants had an iPhone. Half my nieces and nephews have an iPhone. Half the people in the lift at work who want to avoid i-contact, look at their iPhone... so here is the borrowed article...

Since the release of the iPhone App Store, numerous sources have commented on the potential of educational apps. While these apps can’t compete with the general popularity of gaming and leisure apps, there are a number of educational apps that mobile learners will find handy.

Continue on to view the top free iPhone apps for education.

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This entry was posted on March 26, 2010 at 5:39 AM and has received 372 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

I have been exposed to quite a bit of microsoft product lately - an in depth look at SharePoint 2007 and the other day while looking for something I stumbled across Microsoft's Learning Content Development System which is an eLearning Authoring Tool. You can download it for free at http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/training/lcds.aspx. This is what is called the community version which means it is free because there are still some bugs in it. I found it mentioned on a list of applications that work within Moodle as zipped scorm compliant courses. So the idea is that you build a course, zip it up, upload it to Moodle and there is your course. You can also deliver the course standalone via a browser. Some of the interactions use Silverlight which is Microsoft's answer to Flash. Try it out and let me know if you think it is useful.

On another note, my borther Grant in searching for some of his resources came across an interesting resource link that has links to all sorts of tools and resource objects. You can check this out at http://etc.usf.edu/presentations/sitemap/index.html 

This entry was posted on February 23, 2010 at 11:32 PM and has received 1374 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.

‘Think before you post’ is the core message of today’s Safer Internet Day, the international cybersafety event co-ordinated in Australia by the ACMA, as part of its Cybersmart cybersafety program. Safer Internet Day is organised by Insafe, an international network for internet safety.

To mark the event, the ACMA is holding cybersafety educational activities in schools throughout Australia. Click more to view video if you have YouTube access.

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This entry was posted on February 9, 2010 at 11:12 PM and has received 234 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

See below examples of AARNet’s ONNet international content. AARNet brings Australian schools a rich world of content that is continually growing in scope.

AARNet Pty Ltd (APL) is the company that operates Australia's Academic and Research Network (AARNet). It is a not-for-profit company limited by shares. The shareholders are 38 Australian Universities and the CSIRO.

Thanks to Greg and Nick for passing on the information.

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This entry was posted on November 30, 2009 at 4:32 PM and has received 246 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.