Room 3’s Blog

I came across this from Mr Jarrett at Welcome to NCS-Tech!

Came across Qlipboard (http://www.qlipmedia.com) recently, I forget where exactly, it’s a program you download and run (appears to be PC only) that provides a neat way to annotate photos with simple drawing tools and/or your own voice. The interface is pretty straightforward:

You import your photos into this workspace, then arrange them in the order you want, add your annotations, then publish!

I have downloaded it and will try and make time to ‘play’ with in the next two weeks. Someone else with broadband access might also like to try it out during the holidays.

I have seen both these two tools (Visual Mapping and Multimedia News) before but haven’t written about but after reading a post on Connecting Through Conversations I realised that these may actually be useful to some of you in the inquiry you are involved in at present. It’s worth taking a look at them to see if they can add to information you have already collected.

http://www.sasi.group.shef.ac.uk/worldmapper/index.html - Great visual mapping tool, collection of world maps where territories are resized according to subject of interest. 336 total maps, also available as PDF’s to download. Here is an example of from the web site. Worldmapper posters depicting nuclear waste, carbon emissions and HIV/AIDS were displayed at the recent Glastonbury festival. They were used as part of the ‘Give Geography its Place’ campaign. The photos were taken by Daniel Raven-Ellison, one of the campaign members.

http://www.daylife.com/highlights - Daylife is a multimedia news site which highligts news stories from around the world. Top of the page has tabs for content, main page is an image and along the bottom are thumbnails representing stories that are covered.

I might have found a site, AuthorStream, where you can upload your PowerPoint projects and be able to keep the audio. The FAQ say that audio can be embedded with the slide show but after a bit of browsing on the site I haven’t managed to find one that does have audio. But, I did find this cute slideshow which I thought some of you might enjoy.

BTW I have a feeling that the site may be blocked by our filter but you can upload files from home and embed them on your blog.

I have just discovered another interesting site, Flip Studio – you need to put your project together online but it is also worth investigating.

Here is a link to a NZ wiki site which has a lot of widgets that you could add to your blog. I don’t know if they all work on learnerblogs but you can try. I have also bookmarked this in our class del.icio.us account as ther are a lot of other useful links.

Check it out http://educationalsoftware.wikispaces.com/Widgets 

Just one example of the 500 that are available.
This site has ‘The web’s top 500 fonts!’ It may be useful for presentation work.

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This little piece of information comes from Rachel Boyd, My Journey in ICT & Blogging.

I have installed a new widget in my sidebar! It uses Google’s Translation Services and converts the whole page into the desired language. I have this fantastic blog to thank for my new gadget.I spent about 10 minutes “googling” a widget to put on my blog and this was one of the best that I found to translate the whole page without having to copy and paste the text over to a translation page.

• The State of The Live Web, April 2007 report showed that only 36% (down from 39%) of all blogs are in English – Japanese is currently the top blogging language @ 37%

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I have read quite a bit about Toon Doo in the last couple of weeks. After seeing what Paul Wilkinson, 24 Learning, has been doing with it I thought I’d post it here and someone might like to have a play with it during the holidays. Maybe you could post the results on this blog or your own.

Vicki Davis has been posting cartoons created in Toon Doo.
I thought I’d play around with it and I discovered you can also upload your own images. Now that is cool. You are not limited by the backgrounds available but you can use paint, kidpix, artrage etc or take your own photos and use them as backgrounds. Wow this is exciting. Anyone for a cartoon exchange?

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I found this at Google Blogoscoped. I recommend that you check out their blog as they have a lot of interesting stuff.

At the Flash-based Search Engine Smackdown game, you are entering a fight as one of the big figures in search – like Larry Page or Sergey Brin – and need to answer a series of search-related questions to score hits. A highscore table track the best winning times… [Via Barry Schwartz.]

I have discovered some more keyboarding programmes for you to try. You could even use keyboarding practice as a homework task!

Today I learned about TypeFaster Typing Tutor (a free, open-source typing program available for Windows) as well as Dance Mat Typing from the BBC, which is also free but web-based.

For those of you with your own blog you may want to have a look at this. It’s a sidebar tool called ‘NeoCounter’.

This comes from NeoWorx and provides a counter that will display the number of visitors and their flag. How cool is that? There are other options as well including NeoEarth, NeoFlags and NeoBoard. I customised the NeoCounter option and installed this feature into my blog template exactly a week ago and sat back to see what would happen. Well, my blog has had 213 visitors from 43 countries in one week!. I am amazed but not sure how all of these counters and statistical data collecting devices correlate Feedburner tonight has the figure 131 readers (is this per week?, subscription?). However I love seeing the colourful flags of NeoCounter and reading the growing list of country names each day.

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Online typing software. This may be great for those of you who need to practice your typing skills. You can type in what you want to practice also.

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