Visual Literacy

I'm leading a staff meeting soon on ways to improve literacy without producing pages and pages of writing. I'm going to be looking at two - possibly three - ways of achieving this.

(1) Comic Life - once upon a time  available only for the mac - is a simple way to take photos and add graphic comments / speech. For the boys this is something that they'll take to. Here's a short comic about a literacy task on writing instructions...

(2) Moviemaker story telling using photos / audio / transitions and titles. Using the "add title on the selected clip" and selecting a "video inset with news banner title" a short sentence can be added to each image that appears. Increasing the time an image stays on screen means two/three sentences can be shown. Take a look at the example I quickly made below;

(3) There is also stop motion animation - although I'm struggling to find a simple looking program. If worst comes to it, I'll have to use QuickTime Pro to show a sequence of photos made using lego (that favourite for stop motion movies!!)

K.I.S.S.

The motto for anyone trying something new. Keep it simple, stupid (KISS).

Well, audio is a perfect example of this. For example -  you want to get the children to record themselves talking about a topic they've been working on?
Well, take a voice recorder, record the conversation, hook up the voice recorder to the computer, attempt to copy the sound across to the computer, save it, forget what it was called, have to search for it, copy it into audacity, save it again and convert it into an mp3, post it onto the website, change the coding so that it will appear embedded instead of as a download (phew)

OR....

try Vocoroo - visit the website, hit record, speak into your microphone. Stop, copy the code, post and hey presto it's done.

So simple. Brilliant.

iPhone, Apps and non-apps

So, I'm getting used to the new phone now. I'm starting to wonder how I got on without it - it reads my email, sends mail, lets me check up on my twitterings, catch up on TV through iPlayer, view the school website, post to it on the go, check on posted comments and approve them and more!

I've also been looking through the iPhone app store - some great things in there such as the ocarina - simply blow into the microphone and touch the four circles on the touchscreen to make various notes and tunes.

What I can't find though is the new google mobile app with voice recognition. I read all about it last week, watched the video that google posted online showing how it works, and checked out the apps store but no sign. It's disappeared from view completely.

I guess this is evidence of why google should never advertise something before they know it has been published by another company!

Taken for granted

Sometimes it takes the most basic task to make you realise that what you know is not always the same as what everyone else knows.
Take loading an image into a program (like word / powerpoint / etc). I was showing another member of staff where I had loaded some images to use within a lesson and telling them what the pupils should do. I clicked on the little icon that lets you change the folder display to show thumbnails, and was asked "Wow - what did you do?"

I showed it again, and realised that this was a new idea for the member of staff. It seemed like such a simple thing to do, yet has had a great impact on another member of staff.

Still waiting

The Typepad blogging platform has a new post on their "Everything Typepad" blog about new features that they have released. However, there is also this paragraph at the end of the post....

There is a small group of you whose blogs are still in the process of being migrated to the new platform (we want to make sure we make the transition as smooth as possible for you) but we should be on track, as Ben predicted, to have everyone on the new platform by the end of the year.

Guess who is in that "small" group that is still waiting. Yep - you guessed it right. I am!! I'll be the last to be upgraded, at 11.59 on December 31st. Just you wait and see.

iPhone email no-no

So, the iPhone is now set up and working. I can now...

• call,
• receive calls,
• get onto the web through my home wi-fi, 3G connection and the school wi-fi network (bit of proxy fiddling needed to get sorted!)
• Receive email

but I cannot send mail from my 1and1 accounts.

That was a bit of a downer. So lots of fiddling with server settings, smtp values and SSL details later and it was still not sending mail. Until, that is, I disabled all the smtp values, apart from my googlemail account, and routed all mail through google.

Now everything is working properly. Hurrah!!