John's World Wide Wall Display

Links for 2009-07-13 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Audio | soundzabound - Royalty Free Music for Schools
Soundzabound is the ONLY royalty free music library which meets all the licensing and technology requirements needed for education! Soundzabound Royalty Free Music supersedes Fair Use in that we fully license the music with unlimited rights for education and sign off that you are protected. Fair Use has limitations in use and states the you are liable should there be a claim. Soundzabound also provides the solutions for:
Lit2Go: MP3 Stories and Poems
Lit2Go is a free online collection of stories and poems in Mp3 (audiobook) format. You can: Download the files to your Mp3 player and listen on the go, Listen to the Mp3 files on your computer, View the text on a webpage and read along as you listen, Print out the stories and poems to make your own book.

Links for 2009-07-07 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 00:00:00 PDT

45 Websites For Students To Create Original Artwork Online
List of online art web apps, from snowflake design to photoediting from Making Teachers Nerdy
Primary ICT Child-Speak Level Descriptors - Resources - TES Connect
5 posters displaying what ICT capability is expected at each level of the curriculum in child-friendly language. Useful for children to self-assess where they're up to. // CfE
Psycho65: Want to animate? Animate!
blog post on 4 years expierence of using animation in primary classroom

Links for 2009-07-06 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:00:00 PDT

YouTube - Noteboek
wonderful animation of a notebook (computer) inside a notebook (paper)

Links for 2009-07-05 [del.icio.us]

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Kennings - Kids on the Net
Kids on the Net - the children's writing website celebrating 10 years online! - publishes many kennings from young writers all over the UK and the world. Explore those below and the links above.
Sorry I'm Late
Live actor stop motion film and details of how it was made, quite amazing.

Links for 2009-07-03 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 00:00:00 PDT

ffmpeg2theora
A simple converter to create Ogg Theora files. right now ffmpeg2theora provides only a command line interface. --in html 5 FF will play ogg files in the vidio tag, Safari H.264 so you would need both.
BBC - Schools - Primary History
Explore the distant to the very recent past, with the Primary History timeline: Ancient Greeks Romans Anglo-Saxons Vikings Children of Victorian Britain Children of World War 2

Links for 2009-07-02 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Soungle - A simple way to search for sounds
Soungle is a free site, developed by Southern Codes, for finding all kind of sound FX and musical instruments samples on our mega online library. As different from most of similar sites, Soungle is NOT a Web search engine. It only searches in our growing monster database. Our goals are to keep it simple to use (search, preview and download) and to keep it free.

Links for 2009-06-28 [del.icio.us]

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Lure of the Labyrinth
"Lure of the Labyrinth is a digital game for middle-school pre-algebra students. It includes a wealth of intriguing math-based puzzles wrapped into an exciting narrative game in which students work to find their lost pet - and save the world from monsters! Linked to both national and state mathematics standards, the game gives students a chance to actually think like mathematicians."
Samorost, Twitter and Scratch – Part 1 - The FordLog
"Creative writing stimulated by the Samorost 2 online game, edited in the Twitterverse, with an introduction to Scratch programming thrown in for good measure, proved a fun and rewarding combination. The activities were carried out with Year Five and Six pupils"
Samorost, Twitter & Scratch – Part 2 - The FordLog
part 2 writing stimulated by Samorost and published in scratch projects, inspiring post from Peter Ford

Holiday Mo blogging

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 23:16:00 +0100

I am just back from a weeks holiday. While I was away I had just about no connectivity. I had packed my laptop and iphone, but there was not internet access I could find and I had to walk about a mile to a nearby cliff top to get a mobile signal!

I gave up on following RSS, twitter and getting email and left the laptop shut. I did do a bit of photo blogging from my phone to my posterous account, and this worked very well.

The new iphone software allows you to mail up to 5 photos instead of just one, posterous makes pretty galleries of sets of photos. The mail app on the iphone allows you to create mails and then will send them later whenever you get a signal, this turns out to be a great feature in comparison with other iphone blogging applications.

The results are on John's posterous, photos from my camera rather than iPhone were uploaded to flickr when I got back.

enviable stuff

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 11:52:00 +0100

I've set up yet another blog, I know I don't really write enough on this one to justify all the others, but I was looking for an easy way to tweet quotes. I was also looking for a way to use one of my favourite quotations:

“Talking about it isn't good enough
But quoting from it at least demonstrates
The virtue of an art that knows its mind.
Seamus Heaney : Squarings

Setting up a second posterous blog took about 30 seconds, most of which was finding the quote for the subtitle.

I can now use the Posterous Bookmarklet to post a quote and tweet it: example.

I like saving quotations, but sometime I don't want to use delicious, instapaper, evernote or any other of the myriad of services I've signed up for.

Posterous is continuing to evolve into a more compelling tool all the time and will hopefully be a good fit for sharing and storing quotations.

Smart Pop Art

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 22:45:00 +0100

Back in the day, I enjoyed getting children to create pop art style pictures with Flash a 2004 example:

The children brought in photos as guide layers and traced them. Flash is rather a complex app for children, but we managed to have a fair bit of fun with it over the years. I've a set of instructions Cartoon your face with flash in pdf format for flash 5 (or maybe mx?) produced a while back.

Recently I've discovered an easier way to achieve the same thing, I've been out in a couple of classrooms team teaching using the smartboard, and this is a nice way to get children drawing on the board:

1. Get a photo onto the board
This can be done pretty quickly with Photo Booth on a mac, just drag a picture onto smart notebook:

Or you could take photos with a digital camera and import them, or use a webcam or get a photo of someone famous from the web etc.

2. Trace the photo

3. Hide/remove the photo

4 Copy the image and paste into another application for editing.

This is quite a lot of fun and an easy way to get pupils using the pens.

I've added this to the wonderful Forty Interesting Ways (and tips) to use your Interactive Whiteboard - Google Docs where there a lot of great ideas for using iwb.

More mapping

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 03:58:00 +0100

Yet another Mapped Walk.
New this time:
exiftool commandline tool which can geotag photos from the terminal or in my case SuperCard
I can link to open a particular marker, for example this one with video or this one with sound.
And I've started to document this on a wikp page: Mapping Walks,

Animation With Oscar

Tue, 26 May 2009 04:09:00 +0100

Last week I was lucky to be involved with an interesting project. LTS had organised a GlowMeet where Oscar Stringer would teach stop motion animation to primary classrooms around Scotland.

Oscar worked with a group of children at Newmains Primary the lesson was video conferenced via Marratech. The conference was watched by classes from around Scotland some of whom joined in with the lesson.

I was working with Oscar's groups classmates next door. I was also nice to see Stuart Oliphant, the lts video conferencing expert, who helped Sandaig out many times.

There were a few North Lanarkshire schools watching the show and taking part. It is an interesting way to learn from an expert and one worth doing again. The children in several classes made successful animations which have been posted on the North Lanarkshire ICT & Technical Services website.

Oscar did an excellent job of explaining the basics of animation, he has a wealth of experience and tons of practical tips. I noticed that the children I was working with, once they had started found it difficult to stop and watch the screen and I sometimes was too busy 'helping' to stop the children to listen. If this style of learning practical tasks via video conferencing becomes more common we may have to experiment with different ways of timing and delivering instruction. I'll be interested to see video of the second animation workshop on Friday June 5th, unfortunately I'll be busy as will the Newmains p6 but I hope to be able to revisit them when they view the recording of the 2nd animation GlowMeet which is aiming to improve their skills.

I am also looking forward to seeing animations from around Scotland on the glow site and being able to replay Oscar's class.

...