Flickr for low-level EFL students

Aaron Campbell has an excellent 6-paragraph article on using "Flickr for low level EFL students". Flickr is an online photo sharing tool. Aaron points out that setting up a gallery and profile is an authentic language activity that can, unlike in a closed traditional classroom, lead to conversations across the world.

Sandvox, a new web publishing tool

Sandvox is a new web publishing software tool for Macs (OS 10.4.3) \that's beta now but soon to be released. Alwin Hawkin's brief but enthuasistic review led me to download it, and, yes, it's beautiful! From the site:

Sandvox, for Mac OS X. "Dig in" and download our Beta today.

Sandvox: A powerful, playful new website creation tool, for Mac OS X (version 10.4.3 "Tiger" required). From Karelia Software — the developer of Watson®.

Instant Gratification. Sandvox makes website creation elegant, intuitive and fun. It's the Macintosh way — the way it should be: drag and drop content, watch your site take shape as you create it, and publish. Sandvox makes it easy to keep in touch via the Web with friends, family and customers.

Express Yourself. Sandvox will help you be more creative on the Web. Small business owners, show your customers your latest products and services. Authors, publish your stories. Photographers, share your libraries with the world. Families, keep your friends up to date with more than just a holiday letter.

There's More to Life than iLife. Sure, iWeb looks cool and similar to Sandvox in many ways, but it's just a toy. Can you afford to tie yourself to .mac? Not everybody wants, or needs, a .mac account — especially businesses who need their own domain name. iWeb has very limited choices for designs or pages; Sandvox will be extensible. iWeb provides no opportunity for custom HTML content when your needs demand it; Sandvox fits the bill. If iWeb isn't quite enough for you, then dig into the Sandvox.

Some of the features you can see at the website are drag-and-drop web assembly, pagelets, podcasts, video, and photo integration, and more.

The legality of taking and publishing pictures

For those interested in the legality of where you can take photos, what you can take them of, and whether you can publish them on the web, Andrew Cantor (Cyberspeak) has a good article: "New digital camera? Know how, where you can use it."

JAlbum: free web photo album

JAlbum (via Education Weblog) is a photo web album generator. From the site:

This gallery software makes web albums of your digital images. JAlbum aims to be the easiest to use and most powerful tool in this category - and free!

With JAlbum, no extra software is needed to view the albums, -just your web browser. Unlike "server side" album scripts, JAlbum albums can be served from a plain web server without scripting support. You can also share your albums on CD-ROM.

Online free photo sources

Photoshop Tutorials blog (via digg) has a list of online free photo resources.

Successful High Tech Charter School

Dale MezzaCappa (The Philadelphia Inquirer) writes about High Tech Hi, a charter school in San Diego that successfully integrates education and technology.

It is "high tech" not because it trains students to fix computers and write software, although some do, but because technology is infused throughout the curriculum. Students work on networked laptops and maintain digital portfolios.

Some travel; this year, 12 seniors went to Baja California for eight weeks to study marine life, including plankton, whale sharks and sea turtles, as well as the area's history and culture. They not only collected specimens but also created poetry, a documentary, a mural, and a novel.

In the last two years, Jay Vavra's junior biotechnology classes designed, wrote and photographed a field guide to wildlife in San Diego Bay, with a foreword by anthropologist Jane Goodall.

It's encouraging to see a school that engages the students in real "work" as opposed to "learning" alone.

Homeportals: a new extensible homepage

HomePortals (via TechCrunch) is a new personalized extensible homepage. TechCrunch has this to say:

HomePortals is really unique in that every module is customizable, and can interface with other web services. So you can create a new module (and allows others to copy it), and/or modify attributes of an existing one.

For instance, there is a pre-created module to show recent del.icio.us bookmarks for a given user, recent flickr pictures for a given user, etc. I have not seen this type of functionality in the other services I’ve reviewed.

HomePortals also has a very nice blogging tool module (see it in action on the HomePortals blog). Now this is getting interesting: I can see using the blogging tool, and adding in my flickr pictures and del.icio.us bookmarks to give visitors a really in depth overview of who I am and what’s going on in my life. It’s like SuprGlu, but the blogging tool is built in, not pulled in.

Handbook of Enquiry and Problem-based Learning

The All Ireland Society for Higher Education (via EduResources Weblog) has a free online book: Handbook of Enquiry and Problem-based Learning. From the foreword:

The purpose of this book is fourfold. F'irstly, drawing on Irish case studies and international perspectives, it seeks to encourage the enhancement of the student experience of learning, through the development of problem and Enquiry-based Learning. Secondly, it aims to share success stories while painting a realistic picture of the processes involved ...

It does this by discussing progress with initiatives and exploring difficulties, barriers, “mistakes,” improvements, alongside the strategies used to tackle these real emerging challenges. Thirdly, by drawing on many contributions from Ireland, it places Irish problem and enquiry-based practice in the international context. There are case studies from the seven Irish universities and the Dublin Institute of Technology.

Student blogs

My students have been posting to blogs for almost a month now. Some have personalized them in interesting ways. On "One Way Only," mickymice is incorporated images to complement the words, a picture of a birthday cake for, of course, a birthday, and an image of a young woman to indicate a state of contemplation (?) over leaking ceilings. JC uses a blue, italic font. These images seem to support VC's essay asserting that a blog "shows a little bit of the writer’s personality and life style."

Others (Francisco and Chiki) are incorporating quotations into their blogs, thus connecting to external sources. And the topics range widely from math to health to weather to attending a classical concert to relationships, and so on. The wide diversity of topics and approaches to posting is fascinating.

Technology in the classroom

Will Richardson reports on a teacher creatively using a tablet PC, photos, video, and Powerpoint in a Spanish language classroom:

it was clear what was happening. Students were creating and sharing and loving the process. The teacher was using the technology to connect their learning, and it was their learning, not his. They were in charge.

Technology in the classroom

Will Richardson reports on a teacher creatively using a tablet PC, photos, video, and Powerpoint in a Spanish language classroom:

it was clear what was happening. Students were creating and sharing and loving the process. The teacher was using the technology to connect their learning, and it was their learning, not his. They were in charge.

Isn't this what learning is all about?

More software tools

From Educational Weblogs:

schtuff.com: a free wiki service

Schtuff is a FREE Wiki service. A Wiki is a website that lets anyone easily create and edit pages, promoting group collaboration.

photon: another free software tool.

Smart, intuitive, and highly configurable, Daikini Photon gives you the power to manage your Movable Type™, TypePad™, Blojsom and WordPress photo-blogs in the familiar surrounds of Apple iPhoto.

It's the missing link between the world's greatest photo management software and the world's favorite blogging platforms.

FlickrExport for iPhoto

Download for free FlickrExport, an iPhoto plugin that lets you upload photos from iPhoto directly to Flickr.com. The software was created by Fraser Speirs, who has started a new company, Connected Flow, which has one other product, Xjournal, a client for the LiveJournal weblog (i.e., blog) service.

Life cache

From Will Richardson (via Jeff Davis), I learned a new phrase had been coined: Life cache. Life caching apparently means to tell stories of one's life, which has been made easy by electronic story-telling tools, such as Nokia's Lifeblog (to be used with its cell phones), which and HP's Storycast, a digital storytelling with photos and narration. See many more at trendwatching.com. A generation of storytellers is being born.

The photo touch

This weekend, I started to set up my new website, Second Language Writing, where I plan to move this blog. For starters, I used Yotophoto, a search engine for free photos, to collect pictures of writing in different languages, and then I put them into a Flickr badge. These software tools help to add a nice photo touch to one's website.

Putting photos online with Flickr

Flickr is a software tool for putting your photos up on the Internet. For tips on how to use it, read Giles Turnbull's article at MacDevCenter.com.

Find free pictures online

Anne Davis (Edublog Insights) posted about Yotophoto, the first search engine for finding free photos and images on the Internet.

Increase in malware

Louisa Hearn (in the Sydney Morning Herald via The Blog Herald) reports a large increase in malware targeting computer uses. Moreover, hackers are becoming more innovative by residing on blogs and community sites like wikis.

"Photo albums, scrapbooks, blogs, screensavers and free greeting cards are all becoming potentially dangerous destinations as hackers and cyber criminals take advantage of a lack of security features on many of the hosting sites where they reside."

Bookmarking software

There seems to be quite a bit of software available for tagging websites and images.

Furl stands for File URLs, and it's a web-based application for keeping track of interesting sites you've come across that you can access from any computer on the internet and also archive pages so you can read them later in your Furl account.

Mark Bernstein brought del.icio.us to my attention. It's a bookmarks manager and more. One neat application is the ability to paste snippets from another site onto yours. See the picture he does this with from the play "Amerika." Graham Stanley (via Will Richardson) has an entry on how to use del.icio.us with podcasts.

A manager for tagging just images is Wists.

Disposable PCs

According to a NY TImes article, PC owners are beginning to buy low-end computers rather than take the time to maintain and rid their machines of malware. As Bora Ozturk said, it took him 15 hours to learn how to transfer pictures and music from a paralyzed machine to another one before doing a clean re-install on the hard drive. I recommend buying a Mac.

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