Information Overloaded

Communication is changing; it is and will have a huge effect on the ways we learn, teach, and communicate!

I took a photography course last fall from Noel Chenier and wondered how I could motivate myself to keep taking pictures to practice what I learned.

Well, folks, my lovely network on Twitter came through again.  Someone wrote about a site called blipfoto.

Blipfoto allows a person to post one photo each day.  The catch is that the photo posted must be taken on that same day.  You can include a description of the shot or even add random comments like a regular blog.

Here is what I love about this site:

• simplicity
• friendly, welcoming members
• beautifully captured images

I am carrying my camera with me everywhere now…trying to capture the perfect blip!  Here is a link to my blipfoto site.

Here is a night photo of the pending storm.

And here it is the next day.  Beautiful!

Some great folks at the University of Nottingham have created a site called The Periodic Table of Videos.

When you arrive at the site, you see a periodic table.  Click on your favorite element and bam…you get to watch a video all about it.  And the videos are good!

Here’s an example of the helium video.

This site makes me want to be a chemistry teacher!

I love this simple site.  It allows you to generate quick math worksheets. You can print them off, but I think it would also work well projected on the Smartboard.

Thanks to Tim Clarke who posted this link on Plurk.

Yesterday was the 60th anniversary of adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  Pope John Paul II called it “the conscience of mankind”. 

A man by the name of John Humphrey, a fellow New Brunswicker from Hampton, penned the first draft.  So, I thought I would celebrate by showing this beautiful video about the Universal Declaration created by the Human Rights Action Center.  

Over the last few months,  Jeff [Technology Mentor] and I have been traveling to the 18 schools in our District with a supply teacher to offer technology pd sessions.   The teachers in that school are able to sign up for one hour of technology PD while the supply teacher covers the class.

Teachers love this approach to professional development as they can work with us individually and don’t have the stress of preparing lessons for a full day of being away from their students in order to learn something new.

I put the results of the teachers’ requests into Wordle.  Wordle is a word cloud generator.  If words are repeated, then wordle makes the size of that word larger.

Its not hard to tell what teachers in our District are interested in!

My daughter, who is in the 8th grade, was making an autobiographical poster of herself as a part of an English assignment.  As she hacked up her magazines and printed pictures off the computer to paste on her project, I couldn’t help wondering if what I was watching would someday be a lost art.

Tonight, as I was reading comments posting on a social networking site, a lady from the US posted a link about a site called Glogster where you can make online interactive posters that can incorporate sound, video and lots of cool design features.

It is worth taking a moment to view some of the compelling student examples that are listed!  I especially love the Itzak Stern one.

And I can’t help thinking that if my daughter’s poster was digital, I would not still be vacuuming bits of Tiger Beat.

I love this video put out by the Ontario College of Art and Design on creativity.

Creativity is one of the most important things we can foster in students.  Maybe that is why I enjoy technology so much….it really lets people be creative in so many ways.

Well, I’m back and blogging again after a wonderful and busy start.  I could not resist opening this term of blogging with a website that I think is absolutely brilliant called Yearbook Yourself.

You upload a picture of yourself, move it around, and the site gives  you images of yourself over the various years.

I especially love the Stepford Wives shot of me!  Try it out.  I think students would love it too!

Or what about me in 1980?  This one kills me!!