NeoOffice is a build of OpenOffice that integrates with the Mac OS X desktop much better than OpenOffice does.

Make tag clouds from text

The humble spreadsheet can encourage students to talk about doing mathematics. Ideas and investigations you develop are futureproof. The ‘small laptops’ that are becoming more common allow more flexible use of class based pair and group work.

The multimedia capture device we all carry

Teaching Creative Writing blog by Susan Lee Kerr

Feedback from the InTuition Spring 2008 article

How to use tumblr.com and why you would want to

Low power PC bolts onto the back of your LCD panel and provides Web access and basic wordprocessing and office.

What do the built in microphones sound like? Not too bad, a bit low on the treble but reasonable sensitivity. High pass filter in Audacity sorted it.

Windows or not?

We like this…

How to explain what VLEs, eportfolios and such things do

How about this as a synopsis of the role?

Scoping a portal for a college

Microsoft foobar

A series of course designs from the Institute of Education

Scatter diagram with draggable data points demonstrates line of best fit issues

You can use KeyNote 08 to make screencasts

Cross platform tape slide package for the Interweb thing

It is that time of year again – some text I wrote for an online conference on blogging.

For Mac OS X, cocoa native based on the Gnu Image Manipulation Program

How to install the well known quiz generator on Windows XP

Migrants are big users of communications technology

Oddmuse is a wiki script written in perl. It is based on the Usemod wiki script, but can produce valid xhtml. Oddmuse does not need a database, page data is stored in text files.

To get a wiki running on a Web server that runs Apache (1.2 upwards) and that can run perl cgi scripts, you [...]

Quiz program for individual student support

I’m both in different parts of the lesson. I think that many people assume that PowerPoint use implies Sage role, and I was trying to provide counterexamples.

Charles Nelson takes me to task in my post about PowerPoint in a post on his Explorations in Learning blog as follows
“One point that needs to be considered a [...]

What is appropriate, when and why?

The Learning Circuits blog has posed this question about PowerPoint, with some detailed side questions. My answers below. See also Clive Shepherd’s answer on his Clive on Learning blog. I like the example slides put up by Jay Cross, especially the little chap ‘reading’ a technical manual upside down! In [...]

Testing the ScribeFire blog tool, a plugin for Firefox. You can post to blog directly from Firefox, and you can upload pictures using the WordPress image upload script.

The HTML produced by the rich text editor is familiar to Firefox and Mozilla users, full of line break tags. At present, there appears to be no [...]

Using a blog to get views before a staff development event.

Document sharing site, will this be useful?

Get a blog going, use flickr and TeacherTube, just do something

Latest stable version installs easily on hosted server space

YouTube for teachers uses ‘post anything, the community decides’ model for inappropriate content.

A list of names, each name appears and disappears in a three second cycle

What do we need to teach people about computers?

Being a little subtle can pay off, and not just with IT support

Do the findings actually help you design activities?

Michael Wesch and students producing remarkable stuff

Installing Apache and UseMod on Xubuntu

Slideshare.net lets you share slides. Imagine if you could record sound and time transitions…

The social browser has limited blogging tool built-in.

Mohamed Taher has assembled a nice page of links

Jason Fried’s short blog post is all about communities of practice

From JISC North West. Value added over projector?

Kodak EasyShare C310 for quick snaps

Alan Staley gave a talk at the Moodle User Group meeting today. He showed one slide that struck me as being a very useful way of explaining the various ways of using Moodle to teachers. This simple (well, simple when you see someone else explain it) diagram provides a classification scheme for VLE courses.

This small app allows you to enter a Web address and then save a PNG graphics file of the whole page – screen grabs that are a couple of thousand pixels high.

Change two image files in the default WordPress theme to produce a white page area with sparse header image. I wanted a high key look with plenty of space and no ‘boxes’.

YouTube screencast of RBL session 5 deals with distance travelled, the planning and milestones for resource based learning projects, the way I intend to use progress reviews to support participants in carrying out their project plans, and some quick hints on a piece of writing that is due in shortly. The screencast took two takes of about 7 or 8 minutes to produce. The visuals are simply the slides I will use in the f2f session anyway.

9 minutes and 46 seconds on basic probability, including the probability scale, expected frequencies, mutually exclusive and independent events, possibility space diagrams and even a without replacement problem. All aimed at a GCSE Intermediate group. The .mov file was produced by ‘presenting’ a PowerPoint while speaking a commentary recorded using iShowU screen cam software. YouTube provide the hosting and convert the .mov to a Flash movie.

Option-Backspace does deleting…

The screen design screencast MOV was uploaded to YouTube. I’m now waiting for it to be ‘processed’ so that the video can be watched.

A screencast made on Mac OS X using iShowU and Video2SWF to produce a flash movie with synchronised sound.

Just a trial of the tags for embedding. This post should show the Tiny Dot video about the scale of the solar system posted by saulatali79.

Intellectual property rights may damage innovation and split markets. Lessig explains using the Google Book Search as an example, through the medium of a presentation with sound track.

In previous years, we have used a collective blog for journalism students with the tutor acting as editor. Perhaps it is now time to encourage NCTJ students to set up their own blogs on blogger or similar and self-publish (with safeguards for the College).

Download a 34 page handout that describes the various ways in which a teacher in an FE College in the UK might support students using various ICT/ILT/e-learning facilities. This is a draft, and I’m starting with the text and then adding photos, screen grabs and Web addresses later. Some of my colleagues will actually scan a handout like this and read parts that attract their attention.

What is an Interactive Whiteboard? How can I use it? A description of the two main kinds of whiteboard (‘hard’ and ‘soft’ or membrane boards), and the two main modes (screen annotation and whiteboard).

MS PowerPoint makes it easy to produce screens with a mix of images, text and embedded sound and video clips. Microsoft have included a set of ‘slide layouts’ based on bullet points and screen-width text containers. Both Tufte and Godin are critical of these templates for contrasting reasons.

PowerPoint allows you to associate actions with buttons and other objects on slides. You can switch off the slide transition and use PowerPoint as a system for producing screen based learning packages. This 12 page handout covers the basics…

Staff development notes: I may turn these into a script. Just a few points on how to use e-mail effectively with students.

PDF newspaper free download from Guardian Unlimited

Minimalist pages show just the news stories as they update

What to do if one arrives in your room

Some web applications that let you choose and customise pictures

a bit of that reflection and story writing…

wikispaces.com provides relatively cheap wiki hosting

Learning through play

Keith patents breathing…

Richard Treves has analysed a free course on Google Earth and found that ‘build it and they will come’ does not always work

Inexpensive ‘technology’ to get all students responding

How to reduce cable noise…

Milton Keynes and the Open University go moodling…

Can students teach themselves using the Web?

It may be the technology

Now I have the topics mapped, it is time to start adding bits of content

Draggable triangle with perpendicular height

Time to start putting some content in soon

Tabbed browsing and RSS feeds in a side bar…

Photoshop and then copy paste a calendar in

Winner of recent BBC redesign contest does a Being John Malkovich

e-learning definition used by OFSTED very broad and includes ILT/ICT

This timeline is all my own work and I didn’t look at the textbook… Lesson 2 and 3 applied to an animation showing how the area of a parallelogram is calculated…

Hog Bay software provide a small app that turns your iBook or MacBook into an Alphasmart with built in hand heater

External mailing lists and registrations can be a source of spam. Use plus addressing to keep tags on where the spam is coming from

Tinderbox from Eastgate systems allows rapid development of complex web sites and a visual map of ‘emergent structure’ of a teaching task

1 Gb storage for files on the Web.

Just some notes for colleagues for a training session

If you have any version of the Flash Player from 5 upwards installed on your browser, then the yellow and blue grid above should show a blue square and a red triangle moving around and changing their opacity.

The animation loops once and then stops, and the frame rate is 15 frames per second. According to [...]

Being able to express thoughts in writing is key to any career

Flash Journalism by Mindy McAdams, lesson 1. Why is a maths teacher using a book aimed at journalists?

Sound track acts as anchor to video

4 minutes and 15 seconds on what a Virtual Learning Environment can do for you

Does the blog act as a gateway to the VLE or does the VLE contain the blog?

Cheaper digital speech recorders can’t produce CD quality but may have plenty of uses in the classroom – just put an external mic on!

Moodle at Shefcol according to Julia DugglebyBlogging by meSeb Schmoller’s fortnightly mailing is now published by typepad. Seb is inviting guest contributions, and I was honoured to be asked to contribute. I wrote about using blogger as a way of getting colleagues interested in online support. My contribution meshed in with Julia’s about the next [...]

“Some lecture classes have 250 students, so I question the effectiveness of a didactic lecture for an hour.”
Dr Bill Ashraf will be distributing lectures by podcast soon in place of live lectures in a theatre. In groups of 250 plus I can see his point: no one ever asks a question in a group of [...]

Not tabloid hacks with fast habits but a book about how to use Macromedia Flash to make Web based news stories. One included exercise is about synchronising sound with image transitions: flash lessons here we come…

We were looking at finding a value for the intercept of a straight line graph when the scale of the graph made it difficult to have an X axis that started at zero – we were setting up and solving a simple equation within a context.

This second whiteboard processed using ScanR was taken in [...]

The photo above shows one of today’s whiteboards as imaged using my Olympus Camedia point and shoot – the images are 1600 by 1200 pixels. I resized the image above using Photoshop Elements with bi-cubic resampling. No other adjustments have been made, the flat image is typical of this camera. A quick e-mail to ScanR.com [...]

Scanr is a Web service that claims to “convert photos of whiteboards and documents into searchable PDF files”. The ‘searchable’ bit applies to pictures of documents with typed text (see later). The service certainly makes converting fuzzy badly lit images of (ordinary) whiteboards more readable. The ‘whiteboard’ function can also be used to convert [...]

Moodle 1.53 and 1.6 can be ‘installed’ on a USB stick. Just make sure the drive letter assigned to the stick stays the same on each machine

Yotophoto is a search engine for copyright free or free use images

Anyone got recommendations for simple digital sound recorders?

Re-installed Moodle 1.53 stable

Anyone going?

Inspiration now does Buzan style mind maps in addition to the more flexible free symbol maps provided previously.

Open Office 2.0 can export PowerPoint presentations as rudimentary flash animations

Script and MP3 of a short talk on blogs in education

Blog about presentations

Preview allows you to cut diagrams out of PDF files and save them as PNG or JPG files

Spreadsheet shows effect of adding two phase shifted sine waves

Pop some graphs on the gcse blog and ask for the equations by e-mail?

Google Earth and data handling activities

Google Earth for Mac OS X

To remove blank lines from a text file in Textwrangler, you have to run search and replace, tick the ‘use Grep’ option and then search on the pattern ^r. Replace with nowt and the effect is magic. A boon to the ‘everything in one big text file’ advocates.

The pattern < /?[^>]> can be used to [...]

Put the whole of GCSE Maths where you can see it

Netscape 8 for Windows has a spyware/adware scanner built in

OpenOffice is an Open Source office application produced with a large amount of support from Sun Microsystems. Because the application is open source, you can burn CDs and pass copies to students (or anyone!). Students have downloaded the package and used the Impress presentation component to produce presentations – laptops are often sold with [...]

The demonstration version of Reduce for Windows (scroll down page when it loads) – a computer algebra package – can be used to factorise large prime numbers (and polynomials!) as a way of demonstrating the properties of large numbers. Interactive sessions on a projector (the fonts are a bit small but there is no [...]

Note added 6 March 2006 :: It looks as if security update 2006-001 addresses these two issues, at least as regards Safari and Mail. I picked this one up through software update some days ago.

Its hassle Apple week, with a ‘drive by download’ exploit appearing and being reported on the front page of the BBC [...]

Quiz suite written by esol teacher is at version 6 and getting seriously useful

Excel on projector helps provide rapidly updated charts to trigger discussion

MeatBall wiki page about educational uses of wikis and other links

The transit time of a planet can help you find the planet in the sky and can help plan observing trips

MS Excel or any spreadsheet on a projector with whole class questions

Some projects in Southern Africa aim to reduce the impact of the digital divide

Minimal instant on keyboard usable on trains and allows capture of text in meetings and in odd corners of time.

MS PowerPoint can help you plan writing – forces focus on structure

A simple blog can act as a diary for a class.

Moodle runs OK under Mac OS X apache with MySQL 4.0.2x- just needs graphics library

Gossamer-Threads forum is free to non-profit organisations and has good user management but without bulk upload. Discus Pro costs about 70 but has user creation by spreadsheet.

Temperature records kept from 1659 to present day allow trends to be identified

Tinderbox allows a quick and dirty HTML export template and the construction of a course web site in a very short time

Industrial archaeology in the cyber age? We need to preserve the appearance of the older user interfaces and this site does it well.

Some links on learning theory

Use the ‘forms’ toolbar in MS Excel to link a slider control with a cell. Then you can make ‘dynamic graphs’. Projected onto a screen, you can ask students to predict what the result of a change is going to be.

Download a spreadsheet that simulates breeding 60 fruit flies
The spreadsheet simulates the results of breeding fruit flies (F2 Generation – Second Filial?) where the expected outcome is a simple 1:3 Mendelian ratio of vestigial winged flies to winged flies
The screen shot above shows an anomalous result – a chi-squared statistic well above 3.84, the critical [...]

Try using 4 colours to colour in some maps – harder than it looks

Java applets and some DHTML Javascript can be used for educational purposes- and you don’t have to code a line

Analogue synthesisers – a hoot with op amps and noise

Nicholas Negroponte’s latest idea for improving education

Some differences between blogs and forums – blogs might encourage student involvement more by being less of a ‘performance’ but forums might be better for a structured activity

That ‘no entry’ sign causes lots of trouble

LaTiS Centre Image Archive from Essex University

Thanks for this resource – about 400 free pictures. Mostly .jpegs and around 400 to 600 pixels wide with white backgrounds.

The original Online Map Creator Web site provides an online interface to the GMT package
Planiglobe is the new simplified interface – faster but currently has few options

The original OMC has been around for years and will plot contours of ocean depth and continental height. You can pull the plots down as PS files or [...]