Video Conferencing with ooVoo

In 1920 the French illustrator, Léon Saussine, sketched a series of pictures where he imagined life in the year 2000 (Online collection). Of interest is; "Correspondance Cinéma - Phono - Télégraphique". The drawing depicts a gentleman comfortably sitting down in an armchair and holding a “microphone”. He is having a conversation with a young woman whose image is projected on screen.

Visionary or dreamer?
Well he wasn’t that far off! Two-way video conference is available and has been for some time. With the advent of the Internet you can now have a face to face discussion with others. There are several free applications that you can use, Skype, Windows Live Messenger, ooVoo and many others.
It’s easy as plugging and all you need is some basic equipment:

• A computer
• A digital video camera (if not built-in)
• An Internet connection (high speed)
• Microphone and speaker (if not built-in)

Lately I’ve been playing with ooVoo as it offers the chance to communicate with multiple users (up to six people can talk face-to-face). Its easy to use, has a slick interface, the quality is great and like so many others, it’s free!

View Your Pics using FastStone Image Viewer

Here is another great little application that will allow you to view and modify your pictures. FastStone Image Viewer, is a freeware program similar to IrfanView. It has a slicker interface and will allow you to do most of what IrfanView does (resize/resample, rotate, etc…). Some features worth noting are; the Draw Board which allows you to add, text, lines (arrows), shapes (rectangles, ellipses, full or empty), highlight areas and watermarks to the image.

One of the neat features is the portable version. “… Major advantage is that you can carry it around on a memory stick / USB flash drive, or copy / migrate from PC to PC via simple copying of files. No installation is necessary.”

So click away and have fun!

Sharing Your Favourites

In February 2007, the Netcraft Web Server Survey found 108,810,358 distinct websites. That’s 108 million different websites! And that’s not including Blogs. In July 2007 it was estimated that there were 70 million Blogs!
OK, so how do you find those sites that are relevant and useful to my needs?
First you will need to search the web, then bookmark or save and manage the information for later use and reference.
But…

• What happens if you are using a different computer and you don’t have access to your favorites?
• How many other educators are doing the same?
• Are you not re-inventing the wheel?
• Wouldn’t it be nice if you could tap in to the resources that others like you have book painfully bookmarked?

In this era of collaboration the answer is but one click away.
Wikipedia defines Social bookmarking as: “a way for Internet users to store, organize, share and search bookmarks of web pages.”
There are several Social Bookmarking Tools available but one of the most popular one is del.icio.us.

To learn more about Social Bookmarking and how to use them view the Commoncraft’s video on: “Social Bookmarking in Plain English” (YouTube) or (Blip.TV)

Now that you know how it’s done, why not use of one the many Social Bookmarking services and start sharing the gems you found while searching the Web.

Pod Casting

Well considering that a good number of learners are more than visual learners I guess its time to talk about Pod casting.

Pod casting is a "digital audio media recording" that is posted on the Internet. Users can can either listen to from there computer or even download to their player for later use. Thus, with Pod casting, listeners can determine the time and the place, meaning they decide what programming they want to receive and when they want to listen to it.

These wonderful clips that can be easily created and used by students and do not require much equipment.

What you need:

• A computer with recording software (such as Audacity, free and very powerful!)


• A mike


• A place to post your pod casts.


• Then, tell the world about your pod cast!

Before you star producing your own Pods please see this handy list of top 10 things to remember.

For more information on how to Podcast visit Jason Van Orden's; How to Podcast tutorials.

Have fun with "Audacity"

I found a great little application that allows you to digitally record and edit audio. Audacity is free, open source software that will run on multiple platforms. Audacity is quite powerful and allows you record, edit (cut, paste, duplicate) multiple tracks, thus you can mix music, voice etc.. Other features included are:

• Importing and exporting of different format (WAV, MP3)
• Multi-track mixing
• Digital effects and effect plug-ins.
• Noise removal
• And many other neat features that will allow the creative mind some flexibility.

As a recorder and editor you will be able to produce simple audio files to attach to your presentations (Photostory, Moviemaker, Corel presentations etc…). Use it to create your Podcast or using the multi tracks create a unique sound recording.

Wikis in the Classroom

If you know what a Wiki is and you know how it works, the next question will be; How do I use it in my in the classroom?

Depending on your comfort level you might explore different projects from:

• Basic presentations, where you can post conventional presentations such as PowerPoint
• Data Collection: Create a table and collect data from your class (favourite pet, foods, music etc...
• As the Wiki's moderator you will be able to track group work
• Creating Basic Websites: Consider Wikipedia, which by itself is a series of individual web pages, authored, edited by several contributors.
• Collaborative group work: Where students will create a document, add and edit to the work

To learn more about Wikis in the classroom, listen to a Podcast with Steve Hargadon (EdNet), Adam Frey,Co-Founder of Wikispaces and Vicky Davis, teacher at Westwood Schools : Hargadon Podcast on Wikis in Education

Vicky also presented at the "K12 Online Conference 2007" and you can view her online presentation. Her slideshow is also available and it's titled Wikis in the Classroom .

Wikis

The broader definition of a Wiki is: a site that allows multiple users to collaborate by adding, editing and sharing information to build knowledge. Wiki web sites are easy to use, but hard to describe, but here is a wonderful clip that explains how they evolve.

Wikis in plain English on YouTube

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Or on Blip.TV

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TeacherTube.com

Now imagine what collaborative group work could be achieved in the classroom!

Welcome to my Blog

Blogs have been around for quite some time and are a great platform to share with others.

For more info see Wikipedia.

The IT Academic Elementary Blog was created to assist elementary teachers in their quest for knowledge in the use and integration of technology in their classrooms. In an effort to help teachers and their students, regular "hints", thoughts, etc... in the use of technology will be posted.

If you have any thoughts that you would like to share please do so...

A View to IrfanView

If you look around you, it appears that everyone is taking pictures. Capturing images is very easy and you can use all kinds of devices, from the high end digital camera, your cell phone, to the KIDIZOOM camera (winner of the 2008 Canadian Toy Testing Council /Energizer Battery-Operated Toy of the Year).
But now that you have all of these pictures, what do you do with them?

• You could store them on some sort of media (CD, DVD, hard drive, Media cards etc…)
• You could print them.
• And in this era of social sharing you will probably want to share some of these with family and friends.

But before you share these you will probably want to modify them, resize/resample, crop, do some red eye corrections, add some effects like changing the colours, converting to black and white or sepia, maybe even flip them or rotate them.
To do this you could use a variety of different software but for ease of use and a LOW cost solution, I would recommend IrfanView

IrfanView (pronounce "EarfanView") is a freeware image viewer that was written by Irfan Skiljan from Jajce, Bosnia. The application is small and does all of the above modifications as well as other neat effects.
So before you post your large files, why not create thumbnails or even resize them to a more Web friendly format?

IrfanView is free and there are several wonderful online and downloadable tutorials (Google it)that will help you in you quest to become the next Yousuf Karsh!