Hoeben’s Blog

This is a beta application called 280 slides that has all the signs of being an excellent free online piece of software that acts like keynote or powerpoint allowing you to create presentations online and post them to sites such as slideshare. Microsoft are already working on a free online version of word – however, there are already a growing number of open source applications such as Google Docs that are already offering free online word processing that MS are a bit behind …for a change.

Thomas Tallis School is a specialist Arts status college in Kidbrooke, South East London, and have recently made the decision to set up YouTube throughout the school. They have set up a profile called Tallis Tube, where videos from all departments can be posted. I particularly like this video, which shows how mobiles might be used in lessons such as biology to explain processes – although this student needs to be taught how to hold the camera still…

It is inspiring to see a school prepared to adopt the use of web 2.0 applications so enthusiastically and, in particular at a Senior Management level. At Thomas Tallis college, Jon Nicholls, the Assistant Head, who I met for the first time at the BETT show in Olympia earlier this year, has been at the forefront of pushing the school towards the use of popular open-source applications such as Flickr and YouTube. Click here to visit his school blog.

This image has been simply manipulated using Tiltshift maker – this can also be achieved easily in Photoshop using a duplicated layer applied with a blur and the area of focus removed with the rubber tool, and then applied a high contrast/saturation using levels.

I am torn between migrating over to the new Picasa online photo sharing/management software, which has recently come out for the Mac, and maintaining Flickr as a default online photo sharing site for students. There are clear advantages to Flickr in terms of sharing through groups and the ability to categorise into collections and sets. However, I like the ease of Picasa in being able to sync albums from its desktop programme, making it easy to publish work from within your web album on your hard drive. Here is an example of an embedded album, which I have created in order to showcase different photographers that could be researched for a GCSE photography project called ‘Visual Noise’:

VISUAL NOISE Artist Research

So far, I have required students to have a Flickr account as an e-portfolio. This has worked well as an online showcase, but not enabled students to add more critical analysis of other photographers and interests to their site such as with a blog  like this one. Therefore, this year my GCSE Photography students have created their own blogs using Edublogs – see blog roll below:

These have been successful as each blog has an RSS feed and can easily be collated within Google Reader or on a learning platforms such as Moodle or the London MLE run by Fronter. This year, I have decided to formally submit the blog as evidence of analysis and use the sketchbook as evidence for visual development and the occasional annotations.

I have yet to play with Fronter’s Webfronter, which enables students to create a web page, but this might replace the Edublogs sites if it has enough capacity. It would be good to centralise these blogs within Fronter, but I doubt that there will be the same capacity of ease of use.

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Extract from STREET WITH A VIEW: “On May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more… “

I have been using slideshare for a while now, which I think is a great a Web 2.0 application, however, I was recently referred to ISSUU by Edlinks for Learning- Learning 2.0 for Pakistan. It allows you to create and share online magazines. Here’s a preview:

GoAnimate, the web 2.0 free animation software site, is excellent and very easy tool to edit with. I had a little play this morning and wasted the last two hours trying to tweak it. Here’s my result… albeit not the funniest of comic animations:

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