Steve has been kind enough to lend me his Asus minibook for a few days.  Have only been playing for a few minutes but I’ve easily connected to the wireless network at Welti, multi-media files on the web are great (no need to download flash) and I’m getting to grips with the smallish keyboard.

So far so good – next step is to get school on board.

Andrew Roland from RM is demonstrating the Asus minibook and giving examples of current educational use.

1. Could be used as a live blogging device.
2. Great for accessing the web – has built in open source software for accessing the web, RSS feeds, google docs etc.
3. Maybe this could be a solution for our 6th form?

I gave a talk to parents at Shrewsbury High School yesterday evening on Internet Safety. Below are the main points and some links which might be useful. You can download the PowerPoint presentation here.

Using the internet- stay anonymous – Social networking- only be friends with friends – Cyberbullying- don’t read it, keep it, tell someone –

http://www.kidsmart.org.uk/
http://www.thinkuknow.co.uk/
http://www.dfes.gov.uk/bullying/

I read about Magic Studio on this Fusion Finds post.  Magic Studio is a free site for publishing image explorers and timelines.  I’ve had a quick look and it could be a very valuable resource for teaching and learning.  There are plenty of resources created by others which you can use, it looks very easy to create your own resource but the most potent use for this would be putting it in the hands of the students so that they can create valuable resources which can be valued and used by others around the world.

Another Independent article. This one covers loads of useful space websites and can be found here.

I’ve had a newspaper cutout from the independent for some time now which lists some “essential open-source downloads”.  I thought it was about time I made a record of these and then threw the paper away.  A link to the online article is here and the programs covered are;

• openoffice – office software
• gimp – image manipulator
• avg – anti-virus
• videolan – media player
• audacity – digital audio editor
• inkscape – vector graphics editor
• nvu – web-page creator
• thunderbird – e-mail

I’ve used openoffice, had a look at gimp and I make regular use of avg and audacity.  I would add firefox to this, my web browser of choice.  Anyone used the others?

Steve asked if anyone could help with a little excel project he was working on and I’ve had a go and the result can be downloaded here.

I copied the original sheet into a new sheet and recorded a quick macro that copied the random numbers from one sheet and then pasted them as values in the next.  I also added a little conditional formatting for the incorrect/correct statements.  I think it works OK but if you change the sheet names you will need to change the macro as well.

This is a quick, easy, free and effective way of getting the work of your pupil’s out there for everyone to see.

1. Upload images to flickr
2. Use these images to create a slideshow in slide
3. Use the generated code to add the slideshow to your wordpress blog

Click on the slideshow and then move your mouse over an image to see the creator 

After seeing this post on lifehacker and also Steve’s post I thought I would give mindmeister.com a go.

My form have exams soon so I introduced them to mindmeister a couple of days ago and a few have them have got together to create a revision mind map.  It seems to work very well as a collaborative tool and the map can be found here.