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.

We all know there’s good stuff in YouTube and Google Video. People have created some amazing videos, but sometimes it’s just a bit challenging finding the good stuff. You know, the stuff that’s actually… what’s the word I’m looking for? FACTUAL. I mean, I could make a video about what happened during the Civil War, but that doesn’t mean the stuff I include actually happened!

Enter ScienceHack.com. As it says right above the search bar, “Every science video on ScienceHack is screened by a scientist to verify its accuracy and quality.” I do have some reservations about how high the quality is on some of their videos (such as this one of somebody solving a Rubik’s Cube underwater). But they balance that one off with videos about Electronegativity, and the Ionic Bond. While high quality, these videos seem to emit a stench of copyright violation. They certainly don’t look user generated.

Then you finally get what looks to me like genuine user generated videos that are actually educational. For example, the video below is community created video that demonstrates how much sugar is actually in a can of soda. Very cool, and the type of video I’d like to see more of. And after watching the video, I think I may pass on that Diet Coke today.

On the personal side of life, I’m way into ChipIn for some fundraising I’m doing. But it really hit me that this could be a great little site for teachers and schools to use for a variety of purposes! Basically, ChipIn is a Web 2.0 site that lets you create a widget that people can use to send you money. I’m using it for fundraising right now, and you could easily do the same. Collecting money to send the 8th graders to Madagascar? Just create a campaign, say how much you want to raise and when the deadline is, and then pick your widget. Copy and paste it into your school website or class blog!

The feedback I’ve gotten so far is that people LOVE how easy it is for them to make a donation or send money. They just click “Chip In”, and it takes them to a page where they can either pay via PayPal or send money through a debit or credit card. For PayPal, some fees do apply. While the fees are relatively small, you do want to keep them in mind and adjust accordingly. For example, if you decided to let parents pay for an upcoming field trip via ChipIn, you’d want to bump the cost of the field trip up by a buck or two to cover the PayPal fees.

What else could it be good for? Well, the next time the staff is collecting to give a gift to Trudy, the school secretary to congratulate her on the birth of her 8th daughter! Or when the PTA wants to try to collect money to put in a new swingset. Or if you just want to have a tip jar where parents can donate money to be used to buy new books for the class library. The possibilities are endless! They’re easy to create, easy to embed, and easy to get money out of. It’s a win win win tool.

 I vividly remember creating family trees with my kindergarteners.  It wasn’t so much that it was a tough assignment, but sometimes it was tough for them to visiualize the connections and how to lay things out.  Of course, we never had Kindo!

Kindo is a Web 2.0 app for building out a family tree.  You can include photos, profile information, contact info, birthdays and more.  However, what I really dig about Kindo is NOT how much you can put in there, but it’s how little!  You don’t need to create an account, you can  use this just by typing in an email and rolling with it.  If you want to come back later and edit it, it’ll send you a password to do so.  Whenever you add someone else to your tree, you can put in their email address and choose to invite them to collaborate.  This makes it pretty interactive.  I’m thinking about trying this out with my own family tree and seeing if people will try to help build it out!

I wanted to put in my birthday (so I could get presents) but didn’t want to put in the year (because I lie about my age).  Kindo sez, “No problem.”  Under my profile now, I even have a handy calendar for reminders.   It took me just a couple of minutes to get rolling, but I could easily see this as being a great way to trace my lineage.

If you do any projects on ancestry or family trees, may be worth a look!

Hmm… I wonder how i can get my grandmother onto the web to help fill it out…

When I first heard about MoveableLife.net  I thought it had to be too good to be true.  I mean, Second Life in a browser?  C’mon… No way.  I mean, we all know that Second Life is pretty processor intensive.  Not as much as many games, but running it from within a web browser?  No way!

Well, it’s true!  BUT, not quite the way you think.  You can log in to Second Life, and you can take a few actions, but it’s hardly the full SL experience.  For example, you see who’s online, chat with friends (voice and text), see your inventory, and scroll around the overhead map.  You can’t actually see what’s going on in world at all, change your clothes or move objects around in your inventory.  So it’s pretty darn limited.

So while it may not be the full featured SL solution you’re  looking for, it is a nice step in the right direction.  And let’s face it, often the best part of SL is the conversation

If you haven’t seen this video yet, I think you’ll enjoy watching it.  While the message itself is pretty solid, the craftsmanship of the digital story is brilliant.

As you’re watching it, just imagine in your head the script and storyboards it must have taken to create this.

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=-4CV05HyAbM[/youtube]

As a former kindergarten teacher, it sometimes seemed like my life revolved around KidPix. And while it had a bazillion features packed into it, when you got right down to it we spent 90% of our time creating pictures and slide shows.

While there had been a few open source programs similar to Kid Pix (anyone remember Tux?), they don’t hold a candle to one of my new fave’s for lower elementary/early childhood, Kerpoof! You can make books, pictures or stories.

Just choose a background, and start dragging the clip art onto the page. Yes, you can resize, rotate, and move them all. What’s interesting is that they incorporate the concept of scale! Put a penguin on the picture. If you move him towards the back (farther away) he gets smaller. Bring him into the foreground (closer to you) he gets bigger! You can always resize them manually, but it does a pretty good job on its own. That’s not the only dynamic piece. In the arctic background, all the chunks of ice are live. You can move or delete them to your hearts content. Same thing with other backgrounds. When you drag a sun into your picture, it figures out automatically if it should be in front of the mountains or behind them. If the sun is low in the sky, you’ll get a beautiful sunset on your picture. Drag the sun up to the top and it’ll turn the sky to noontime! Drop the sun way down low and the picture turns to night with the sun invisible. VERY cool.

And what’s the cost of Kerpoof? Oh yeah… Free. They even have a teacher section with a few ideas for using it in the classroom. Only thing two criticisms from me. 1) I’d love to see some drawing tools in there so kids can add their own free hand stuff. And 2) They need code to embed the resulting projects into web pages and email them to friends. I had to do screenshots instead. Well worth checking out!

I gotta tell you, ever since I saw my first photomosaic, I’ve been in love with them. Stand back and you see an image. Zoom in and you see it’s actually made up of hundreds of teeny tiny related images. Incredibly cool.

I just found a new site called Mosaickr that let’s you create your own in just a few minutes! Couldn’t be easier, especially if you have Flickr. Just link it up to your Flickr account, choose your master image, choose what images you want it to be made up from and let it work its magic. I chose a photo of Aiden (no surprise there) and then picked out a few photosets of him for it to draw upon. To make a ‘large’ mosaic, it requested that I submit 300-500 photos. It’ll grab photos at random though if you don’t want to pick them all out by hand. After a few minutes of processing, voila! You have a photomosaic.

I started with this photo:

and got this mosaic of it!

It’s a little small, but every image in there is a photo of Aiden. Neat, eh? I could also order a high res copy for .99 Euros (about a buck) or order a poster of it. It’ll even give you a list of all the photos that it’s made up of.

Classroom idea: Let your students go nuts with the digital camera. Have each student take 20 photos of something. Then take all the collective photos, and make a photomosaic from it! Have your students take 400 photos of triangles, and create a mosaic of a giant triangle. If you’re studying colors or rainbows, assign kids to wear different colors for a day and then take pictures of them throughout the entire day. Then use those photos to create a mosaic color chart or rainbow!

Got any ideas of your own? Share a comment!