Hoeben’s Blog

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.

This program is unique in that you don’t need to enter your personal details to make print outs of comic strips. It allows you to write in foreign languages so could be effectively used in MFL. It has many links to other sites to support with translation and ideas on story telling. Overall a simple, but useful resource – despite the dodgy title.

Make Beliefs Comix

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.

To The End Of The Pencil And The Edge Of The Page from Green Thing on Vimeo.

A great way to encourage kids to use the whole page in their sketchbook! Some great doodles.

View Larger Map

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… “

Our year 12 photography students start their next unit of work on the theme of identity this week and I came across this video work/documentary on how we based our judgments on appearance. It might be a bit risky to do with students from the same school, leading to bullying, but it might work as a confidential exercise using videos of students from other schools. I imagine that most students would be very embarrassed at making such statements in public, and this might spark a debate about public and private opinion.

Perhaps, Oscar Wilde was right: “Always judge a book by its cover: Only the shallow judge by more than appearances.”

This will be particularly useful when I start explaining the principles of the camera to my Year 12 Photography students next half of term.

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: