Digital Passports

I did a presentation today at IL-TCE in Illinois about Web 2.0 for the early childhood educator and classroom. It’s called Little Hands, Giant Reach and was a heckuva lot of fun to do. Nothing like a roomful of early childhood educators in comedy club to create the perfect atmosphere for a blitz of Web 2.0!

As promised, here’s a link to the powerpoint with video examples.

(simulblogged)
I don’t normally do too many meme’s. Most of them I feel perfectly happy passing on. But when Lee Kolbert tagged me with this one (called me out is more like it), I felt obligated to participate, in part due to the challenge of it. The 3 simple rules are:

• Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
• Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
• Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.

Yeah, like it’s an easy task trying to find an image that represents your passion. Something hi-tech, right? Web 2.0-ish? Something with the classroom of the future, right? Or maybe a group of teachers collaborating on some massive challenge?

In the end, I went with this.

Photo credit to shavirhung

Take away our computers, take away our whiteboards, take away our mobile devices, and unplug the power. Take away the books, take away our manipulatives, take away our art materials and take away the desks. What’s left?

Teachers and students. And I dare say every teacher I know would still feel perfectly comfortable stepping up in front of the students and getting right back to the business of learning. Regardless of where, when and who, we teach because we are passionate about preparing future generations to be as successful as they possibly can. And we’ll do it with or with technology.

SO, there’s my image. What’s yours?

I do hereby tag: Joyce Valenza, John Pederson, Doug Johnson, David Jakes and…

Well, for my last ‘tag’ I tag all STAR Discovery Educators who are just getting started on the DEN blogs. If you’ve never posted before, you have a reason to do so now! If you’d like to see what STARs are writing about, visit our STAR Directory. Most recently updated blogs are at the top.

Every once in a while you see a site and think to yourself, “THIS is what computers are all about.” Visible Body is one of those sites. When you load it up, it presents you with the human skeleton, every bone modeled in 3D with incredible attention to detail. You can zoom in on any part of it, rotate the model, change the axis and so on. You can move yourself into the rib cage and spin yourself around, getting the insiders view of things if you will.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. On the left side, they have expandable lists of each system in the human body. By clicking on the different parts, you can make them visible, invisible or semi-visible. You can drill down to an incredibly granular level, allowing you full control over every single bone in the body. Want to hide the teeth so you can get a better view of the mandible? One click and they’re gone. Isolate the spinal column? Piece of cake.

Of course, that’s just the skeleton. You can then start layering on the musculatory system, the circulatory system, digestive system, respiratory system and so on. Once again, the level of detail is astonishing. And by judiciously making other parts invisible or semi-visible, you can get a great view of any part of the body you want. Don’t know what a part of the body is called? Just click on the 3d model of it and it’ll highlight it in the list for you.

Remember how cool Google Earth was when you first experienced it? Adding layers, zooming in on different places, exploring just because it was so much fun to do so. Well, swap out the earth for the human body and that’s basically what Visible Body is. The YouTube video below shows you a glimpse of it, but you really need to try it out yourself to get see how interesting this really is. Personally, I got a real kick out of just starting off with a skeletal foot. Then I’d add on the circulatory layer, follow that up with the nervous system layer, add in the muscles and then add on the integumentary system (which I guess is scientific for ’skin’). End result is 5 little piggies that went to the market.

There’s only one down side to the site, and that’s that as of right now it will only work in Internet Explorer. So I’m pretty sure that’ll exclude all of our OSX friends that aren’t running VMware, Parallels or Boot Camp. Also, there’s no offline version yet (like Google Earth), which I think would be pretty darn handy to have available. Other than that though, I’m a huge fan of the site and have added it to my ‘must have in tool box’ list.

While this certainly isn’t the first 3d model of human anatomy, it’s certainly one of the easiest, most intuitive and most highly detailed that I can recall playing with. Check it out yourself and then share your impressions here!

Sometimes its the simplest sites that turn into your favorites. Certainly is that way with Blabberize. If you’ve ever seen Conan O’Brien, then you’re familiar with the idea. Take an image of a famous person, make their mouth move like a ventriloquist dummy, and then add your own soundtrack. Hilarity ensues.

I know, I’m a little late for Valentine’s Day, but hopefully you’ll forgive me!

The first thing I love about Blabberize is that you don’t even need to register to use it. You can just log in with Guest/Guest. Many classes balk at tools that require registration because of issues with student email accounts. So any site that doesn’t require you to log in is a winner in my book already.

Then you upload your image. What image? ANY image! George Washington? Sure! Bill Gates? Why not! Your principal? Do so at your own risk Suffice to say, you have thousands of images at your disposal in Discovery Education Streaming, or you can always go harvest your own from a variety of websites. The possibilities are endless.

Simply mark off where the lower jaw is in the image and then record your message. You’ve got about two minutes to do so. If you need more than two minutes, string several of them together! You can make each one a frame, like in a comic strip and use several images of the same person/object. Or if you’re using it for biographies, use images form different phases of the person’s life.

The end result is embeddable, linkable or if you want to capture it offline, you’ll need to get creative and use some screen capture software. But no reason you couldn’t do it. You could even take those final results and embed them into a digital story!

So what do you think? What could you use Blabberize for in YOUR classroom?

I’ve been so busy bouncing from one conference to another that blogging has been woefully neglected! However, I’ve got a great new site for you to check out and an incredibly practical reason for sharing it.

I spent the last few days in Missouri presenting three sessions at METC. Of course, I’m never quite satisfied with any presentation I create, so I was tweaking the slides all the way up to the very minute I began presenting. After the presentation, plenty of people asked if I was going to be posting a copy of the presentation online. Normally, I’d use Slideshare to do so, but these presentations made ample use of Powerpoints custom animations. If you don’t over do it, those animations can be great for calling attention to particular details in a slide. Unfortunately, Slideshare doesn’t support those animations at all.

So, after a little searching around I stumbled upon AuthorStream. It supports those animations and handles them rather well. It also supports narratives, like Slideshare does. You can embed presentations, watch them full screen, email them, comment on them all the usually goodies you’d expect. Oh yeah, there’s one more distinct advantage of AuthorStream tho… It has an application that you can download that will convert your powerpoints en masse to flash and then allow you to import them into the AuthorStream website or into WizIQ. So you can embed it into your site, link to a really nifty full window player, or just direct people to their site. And since you can save them offline, no worries about the site disappearing or anything.

SO, here are my presentations from METC! (Click the links to be taken to the AuthorStream page)

Your Passport to Educational Blogging

Dynamic Professional Development using RSS

Top 10 Free Web 2.0 Sites - This wiki has all the sites and examples that were mentioned during the presentation, as well as sites that have fallen out of the top 10.