Where Google + has fallen short in the past has been the editing tools, which have been so limited that it’s usually necessary to move the photo first into a separate photo editing package. But Google has now added Picnik editing tools into the Google + photo library page. See the screenshot on the right for what’s available.

The Halloween menu doesn’t interest me, and the Effect menu is somewhat limited – I would probably still choose to add effects using Android software on my phone such as Vignette or Little Photo. But the Basic Edits menu provides a very useful set of tools to fix the commonest problems. For example, the rotate tool now has a free rotate option to straighten photos as well as simple 90° rotation.

Editing photos in Google + was previously very limited but the set of tools imported from Picnik make this a much more effective package now for managing photos.

You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for a buck fifty in late charges at the public library. Will Hunting

Now admittedly this is a quote from a fictional character, but if this somehow represents the uncollege.org approach, it’s problematic. It seems to me there are two possible reasons someone might express such a bleak sentiment:

• The university they have experienced was no better than a pile of books or a one-way stream of information. I’m reminded of a catch-phrase from the 1980′s when the early adopters of computers in schools were confronted by teachers who thought their jobs might be lost. The response? ‘Any teacher that can be replaced by a computer ought to be’. Likewise, if a university could be replaced by a pile of books it should be.
• They are under a misapprehension about the nature of a university. In that case, perhaps universities are failing to communicate what they really do?

UnCollege makes a show of espousing a radical approach: ‘join the learning revolution’ and ‘success … without setting foot inside a classroom’. But elsewhere the site belies this, such as the page on UnCollege’s two advisors which makes a point of highlighting their university qualifications. Proponents of ‘hacking’ the education system need to better acknowledge aspects of the education system, such as its role in awarding qualifications, if they want to have any real impact.

Now that Yahoo’s MyBlogLog is no more, you should disable the tracking, no matter which approach you used. If you don’t, your WordPress site is likely to slow down alarmingly, driving away readers. Note that since the tracking code is not normally included in admin pages, the poor performance may only be apparent when viewing the blog, not when using the dashboard.

If you used a plugin, uninstalling the MyBlogLog tracking plugin in the normal way through the dashboard should be straightforward.

If your WordPress site used the code approach to MyBlogLog tracking, you will need to manually edit the theme files to remove the code. Here’s what I did to remove the tracking code:

1. Take a backup of your site :-)
2. In the dashboard, click on Appearance > Editor in the left sidebar
3. Choose the Header file (header.php) in the list of files in the right sidebar
4. Scroll down until you find the tag. Just below that you will probably see the tracking code as highlighted in the sample below:
5. Delete the highlighted text – ie all the text between and including the script tags. (Note that the id code will be different from that shown. Also, the code may have been inserted in a different file – if you can’t find it in header.php, you will need to browse the theme files to find it.)
6. When you are confident you have made an accurate edit without deleting any other code, save your changes.

Disclaimer: since every site is different, I make no guarantee that this will work for your site. This is what worked for me. Remember that manually editing theme files is risky, so make sure you have a back up first and be very careful if you are not familiar with this process!

Once you’ve download the app and set up your profile, you can quickly create a new site using one of the supplied themes. The themes are generally clean and clear and can be changed at any time. Then it’s just a matter of adding content – note from the screen shot that there are only 3 content types available: text, photo or link. Content items are normally added to the bottom or top of the page, but you can drag the items to re-order them.

Each site created in Zapd has a unique and short URL – my test site is located at http://59x.zapd.co. It took me about 10 minutes to make my simple online portfolio of photographs – that is, about 1 minute to add the photos and text, and the rest of the time playing with the themes :-) Fun.

The bottom line

Why use Zapd? I do like the flexibility and much greater feature set of Tumblr, but I would recommend Zapd to any teachers who want an entry-level tool for creating simple sites. It lowers the barriers to creating online content for both teachers and students.

What I like about QuickCite

• The app is generally fast to scan the barcode and return a result.
• The app seems mostly reliable in returning a result for non-fiction books.
• QuickCite is very simple and it’s easy to set set up. On the configuration screen you enter your email address and select one of the four available formats: APA, MLA, Chicago, and IEEE.

What I don’t like about QuickCite

• QuickCite is not so good at returning a result for fiction books. If you need to create APA references for lots of novels, you might be disappointed.
• The app doesn’t always behave as you’d expect of an Android app – eg the back button on your phone does not work when a scan is completed.
• The only option for sharing the reference is via email – one of the strengths of Android is the ability to easily share content with social networks tools or cloud services.
• The only option is to receive each reference as a separate email. A much better option would be for the app to save each reference into a file which you can then send via email at the end of a scanning session.

Overall, the QuickCite app seems a little unfinished for a paid app, and it doesn’t appear to have been updated since its initial release. But if all you need is a simple app that scans a single book and emails you the reference, it could be for you.

This article raises all sorts of  issues – including what (if any) internet filtering schools should implement. But what really interested me was his observation that students changed what they were doing on their laptops depending on what else was happening in the classroom:

When the topics appeared relevant to students, the note-taking pages appeared; when the topics veered to the arcane and irrelevant, the screens veered to facebook, gaming sites, and other distractions…

When [the] teacher moved towards more discussion, though, asking questions to facilitate conversation… Nearly half of the screens veered away from both note-taking pages and distractions; appearing instead were google, wikipedia, and other information source sites.

This seems very positive – students appeared to be responding to classroom discussion activities to maximise their own ability to contribute. However, the report does raise a few issues:

• In my experience, students don’t always know what is relevant information and what is ‘arcane and irrelevant’. So there is a risk that a student with little prior knowledge will assume something is irrelevant when it is not.
• Discussion is not always about ‘finding the right answer’, so searching the web is not always a good strategy. For example, a teacher may want to explore learners’ prior knowledge in order to help them acquire new learning – a sound constructivist learning strategy. If learners immediately turn to an external information source rather than reflect on their own understanding and experience this would tend to undermine the effectiveness of the activity.

I’m not arguing here that students should not be in charge of their own learning. But teachers do need to take a proactive role in guiding the learning process. Both issues suggest that making the learning process explicit is important:

• If something is likely to seem irrelevant to students, point out why it is in fact important. And if it really isn’t important and relevant, drop it!
• Make it clear that not all learning is about ‘finding the right answers’ from an external source. Discuss why making prior knowledge explicit is an important stage in the learning process.

Diana and audience members identified some challenges for members of a teaching and learning community:

• Teachers take time to develop a voice online because creating and managing content is a complex skill set. There is a growing need for teachers to develop ‘real-world’ technology skills such as working with social network technology. We need to ‘go to where the learners are’ so need to move beyond the institutional  Learning Management System.
• Teachers have varying levels of resilience – when something goes wrong such as a technical problem, some are inclined to give up straight away while others see it as only a temporary setback.
• There is a tendency to form splinter groups, as some are more comfortable with interacting a small group. This may have the effect of decreasing overall activity and interaction.
• Data protection and copyright are ongoing issues as teachers move to more open technologies such as social network tools.
• Online safety and privacy is an issue for both teachers and learners. Separating the personal and professional online presence is complicated but necessary.
• When working with teachers as community members, we should not make assumptions about their level of technical skills – patronising them is a real turn-off.
• Finding time to contribute actively to multiple communities and online spaces is difficult for busy teachers. RSS is a great tool for managing all the sources you read, but it doesn’t really help with contributing through writing.

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McPherson, M., & Nunes, M. B. (2004). Developing Innovation in Online Learning: An Action Research Framework (Open & Flexible Learning S.). Routledge Falmer.

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The Breadcrumb page also shows a sample (unformatted) output as it would appear on a mobile device, a ‘mind-map’ of the page structure and some minimal help. The sample output and mind-map are updated when the text file is saved. The page also includes a QR code that can be scanned directly off screen or used in print or a web page elsewhere to allow mobile users tor jump directly to your finished work.

The Breadcrumb screen

Teachers can use Breadcrumb to create interactive stories, scenarios and traditional ‘branching’ learning materials. For example, it would be easy to use Breadcrumb to create something like the Learning Design Challenge, a problem-based learning resource in the form of an interactive game-like story in Mediawiki. Breadcrumb can also be used to create decision tree resources.

Breadcrumb issues

• The biggest issue with Breadcrumb is that there is no page security – anyone with the URL can change or delete all the text. So you really need to keep good backups of the resource code! Until this is fixed, Breadcrumb is really only useful as a fast and easy way to prototype a new resource.
• Breadcrumb markup is similar but frustratingly different from other widely-used markup conventions. If you’re familiar with a form of wiki markup, learning Breadcrumb’s markup is easy. But moving resources between systems (eg using Breadcrumb to create a prototype as above) would be a chore.
• Breadcrumb resources do not always display well on mobile devices – for example, on iPhone or iPod the text is very small and double-tap to zoom does not work properly. On Android the display is better but not perfect.

Breadcrumb tips

• Backup constantly by copying and saving the text to a local file on your hard drive or an online tool such as Springpad or Evernote.
• Plan before you start – eg create a mindmap or tree diagram on paper.
• Use the Breadcrumb group to learn more, as Google’s documentation only covers the real basics.
• Don’t use numbers for pages – one thing the Google documentation doesn’t tell you is that page names can be words. See my example in the diagram – I find meaningful page names much better to work with.

Breadcrumb has a lot of potential as a tool to allow non-technical users to create interactive, branching learning resources such as stories. Currently it seems to be not quite ready for real world use by teachers, but let’s hope Google Labs continues to develop this tool.

For example, Vignette is a camera app for Android which has a free demo version as well as a paid version. The free version is limited to .3M pixel images, but these are fine for small illustrative images on a web page. The software has a wide range of effects which are fast and easy to use. And they provide some useful tweaks for web display.

For example, some of these effects produce a small square image (about 500 x 500) with a white border. So it’s really easy to produce a web-optimised image that is small and fast to download and has a built in margin for text wrapping. The image shown here is just 49KB and uses the Velvia filter which increases colour saturation. It’s not a great photo, but I love how fast and easy it is to capture an image like this, all ready for sharing on the web.

And because Android is a very ‘open’ OS, once you’ve captured the image there are many options for sharing it. Vignette will send the photo to Twitter, Facebook, email or other apps you use. I use the WordPress app which allows me to edit posts and pages on my phone, and Android makes it easy to send the photo directly from Vignette to a new WordPress post. Again, fast and easy – and a lot more flexible than just having a ‘Send via email’ option which I got used to on an iPhone.

Where there is a need for high resolution and high quality images a phone camera is not going to be appropriate. But where all that’s needed is a quick informal snap, a phone camera can be a great tool. Many of the teachers I work with don’t find it easy to get to grips with optimising images for the web. An Android phone* with Vignette is an easy way to get images into a blog or an LMS like Moodle, and it also integrates well with many of the social software platforms they use. I’d recommend it as a useful tool for teachers wanting a simple and convenient way to enhance their online presence with images.

* Note: not all phone cameras are equal. I chose one with 3 MP resolution and macro capability, but no flash as I prefer to use natural light anyway. Others will have very different needs.