Showing posts with label sdutsj. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sdutsj. Show all posts

Thursday, May 06, 2010

Online safety basics

Just sharing here a presentation I created for collaborative online learning group led by Viljenka Šavli within the national project called e-Šolstvo, which promotes e-empowerment in schools across Slovenia. It's in Slovene.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Starting a graffiti project

Rita and I are launching a graffiti project called Listen to the Walls Talking. Anyone interested is warmly invited to join in. The project site, wiki and Flickr group have just come alive.

The idea behind the project is to collect and share graffiti. If other interested teachers, students, people spread across the cyberspace respond by posting graffiti photos and related info, this could turn into a nice project of the wall/s/talking in our schools, streets, towns, countries, world. Sketches, squiggles, doodles and other more sophisticated street art around us is the part of public spaces usually walked by, unnoticed by people.

Collecting graffiti from our walls, desks chairs and sharing them could provide us with a picturesque collection of expressions of wisdom/boredom/enthusiasm/dissatisfaction etc. from different places. This could perhaps be revealing in quite unexpected ways and could provide us with many interesting possibilities for further interpretations, explorations and manipulations.

This project is open to anyone interested, and will run for as long as there is interest. Anyone is invited to join in (individuals, teachers, classes, students...) and/or help spread the word.

There's not much to be seen yet, what is there is the result of the warm response of my friends (Rita, Kay, Vida and last but not least my Miha, who kindly created the site (said he needed an excuse for fooling around with some new toys... will need to give him more suggestions for excuses in the future ;-)).

Please have a look here and/or here, tell me what you think, and feel free to join in and help spread the word. The more, the merrier :-).

Think positive

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Week 3 Slideshows

This week's task was to explore BigHugeLabs slideshow, Animoto and Slideshare. So far I've used Slideshare, Flickr and Picassa slideshows. Animoto and BigHugeLabs are new to me. Here are my examples:

1. My BigHugeLabs 'Glimpses of Slovenia' slideshow:
View slideshow
I chose the topic because I already had a set in Flickr, and I wanted to compare the Flickr slideshow and the BigHugeLabs slideshow – kind of like better the Flickr one, because it has the full-screen option ( see http://www.flickr.com/photos/7920247@N04/sets/72157603036788662/show/)

2. My Animoto 'Circus in Town' slideshow:

http://animoto.com/play/tAvqx5ugdLbmNAgG9BotJQ?autostart=true
I had some problems to make the embed code from the site work here.
I chose this topic because I thought it would go well with the music and lively Animoto transitions… Was kind of surprised to see how quickly 30 seconds end – I uploaded 15 photos, set the timing at middle pace but only the first 5 or 6 photos are shown and the rest was cut off.
Since it took me awhile to reduced the number of photos from 30 to 15 I was kind of disappointed to see only a fraction of the photos shown, so I resorted to good old Flickr and created a flash badge using my 'circus' tag - but the embed code does not work here for some reason.



www.flickr.com


This is a Flickr badge showing public items from SasaSi tagged with circus. Make your own badge here.






Another option is to create a Flickr slideshow using the tag, but the down side of this is you can't arrange your photos, they are shown in the order they are uploaded. Creating another set unfortunately is not an option for me, because I have a free account and I've already reached the limit of 3 free sets.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/7920247@N04/tags/circus/show/

3. My Earth Day slideshare:

I did this slideshow to celebrate Earth Day last year and promote the Earthcast project. I used creative commons photos from Flickr together with quotes from here and there and posted it to my class blog.

My comments:
I like best Flickr slideshows. It's a pity they are limited to 3 sets. BigHugeLabs are nice and simple to create but I miss the whole screen view of photos.
Animoto is cool, but 30 seconds is very very little time. I had the feeling that the example videos shown in this group lasted longer… I guess this was a paid service. I like Animoto because it adds sound and movement, videos are dynamic and energetic… Good to use with a small number of photos.
Slideshare is nice for ppt viewed in landscape mode. When I used it for sharing photos, I hated the fact that the layout of the presentation does not follow the layout of the ppt – so if you use portrait layout a whole lot of space is wasted, which is a shame. I also like the fact that you can add audio here – haven't tried it yet, but it's cool.
For me it would be great if Flickr slideshow offered some more options for various transitions and also to upload audio. They look neat and it's cool to have everything in one place. I guess going Pro is the solution.

Monday, January 12, 2009

Electronic village online 2009 started


TESOL's wonderful EVO sessions started today. They bring together language teachers from all over the world. I can't resist coming back year after year. It's the place where I'm comfortable learning about technology. I'm not an expert, just an English teacher. So it often happened when I attended such sessions at home, in real life, that I returned empty, disappointed, confused....because in my country it is mostly techies giving workshops to teachers. They concentrate on various technical details and features, leaving out the most important part - the pedagogy, hands-on experience, practical use in class...
Well, EVO is different. It's from teachers to teachers. It's hands on. It's useful. It works. It's free. I love it. I can't help coming back year after year. This one is my 4th.
Together with Monica, a wonderful English teacher from Brasil, I moderate week 1 in Becoming a Webhead (there are more than 150 participants already). I also signed up for Images for Education and Digifolios and Personal Learning Spaces. We'll see how much of this I'll be able to keep up with. The mind is willing but the flesh is weak ;-).