Florida

Hope everyone’s first day back to school went well. I spent the second half of my day sitting in a district conference room with the district IT staff discussing Clean Sweep vs. Deep Freeze as well as the use of Altiris within the district in which I work. Nothing like a half day on your first day back! So no complaints from me!

I’m a little late in reading about this. Only found out about it from Miguel Guhlin via Twitter. (if you are NOT on twitter, then why not?) Leonard Low shared (see link above here) on how to obtain a free full version of Camtasia Studio (build 3.1.3). I don’t know about you, but being an educator and having the ability to have something for free is pretty nice.

I will make a disclaimer here…I’ve never used the software, so I do not really have a comparison to it’s ease of use, functionality and its features. The main point is that it’s FREE.

Happy Editing!

Tom.

Your Florida Blogger.

BTW, did I mention that it was FREE yet???

Needless to say, these last few weeks I’ve been, well, hectic-crazy! For the ones that are in my twitterfeed (tom_turner) or I skype/IM with on a regular basis (tom.turner19 for skype, mithrass19 on yahoo; feel free to add me and message me anytime) you know what I’m talking about. Over the next few weeks, it doesn’t look like it’s going to let up as the list just continues to pile up. One of the things that continues to grow and grow is my RSS aggregator. I think I’m up to about 500 articles that I need to get read. I get it down to about 350 and BOOM! It goes back up.

I was able to get through TechCrunch today and saw this article from the 27th of August. Andrew introduced to his readers FotoFlexer - another online photo editing site. As you know, and would agree, we teachers are all about FREE stuff. BigHugeLabs.com is one of my new favorite places to go to create stuff, because of it’s functionality with Flickr. I can see myself really liking FotoFlexer as well, as it integrates with Picasa, Flickr and Facebook (ok Yahoo and MySpace as well, but I don’t use those!)

I’ve only perfunctorily used the site so far, I will delve deeper once I get home. I will state the obvious to you Mac users that are out there. I KNOW that you can do this with the iPhoto suite. That was the first thing that I said when I looked at the original images on the TechCrunch website. Someone in the comments even posted to the same effect. Thing is, if your school or district is not 100% on board on the Mac OS platform, why not have any and all tools at your disposal?

Tom.

One of my favorite pieces of software is Inspiration, and I am absolutely thrilled to hear that Inspiration 8 has finally been released. 7.6 was a great version, but it gets better in 8. Now, instead of hyperlinking to a video, I can embed video and sound right into the diagram! I can embed Martin Luther King’s speech from unitedstreaming and then have my students brainstorm the key elements of his speech in time for Black History Month. Or how about downloading the videos on why we celebrate presidents day, embed the ones about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, then have the students take that information to do a compare and contrast of the two presidents. There is so much I cannot wait to try with my favorite on line service and software! I challenge you all to find some creative ways to integrate these two pieces together. You’ll have to go to the site to find out the rest of the enhancements made for version 8!

  Now let’s talk about another favorite topic, money. Are you a current user of Inspiration? Maybe you are new to visual learning and it’s powers and would like to learn more? Have you heard about the scholarship they offer each year to Inspired Teachers? There is not much time left to apply, but you still have a chance at the $750 they will offer to 25 current users and 5 rookies this year. Applications are due by February 13th. The scholarship is to be used towards professional development in enhancing your skills in visual literacy. This includes graduate classes, conferences or a course being offered sometime in the upcoming year.

I have won the scholarship 3 times in the past 4 years and am no longer eligible to win. You have to be a classroom teacher or educator directly involved in day to day activities in the classroom. I would love to hear that some of our Discovery Educator Network Members won the award and how they plan to use it.

Hurry up! Time is running out! You must apply now!