Make your own newspaper clippings

Wikis and Blogs in Education

As well as presenting a professional development session on VoiceThread last week I also presented the following session:


The title was a bit of an 'in' joke. I was going to present on screencasting as well but it was just going to be toooo much.

As with the VoiceThread I wanted to focus on the why rather than the how of wikis and blogs. So much professional development is about how to put an image in or how to embed content but doesn't address the "show me the educational value" side of the equation.

I got good feedback, other than a couple of people who wanted more time to do the how. Oh well, I guess I will have to organise some follow-up sessions.

Picnik, minus the ants

I have come across an excellent online photo editing tool. Picnik offers all of the basic editing features that you would need for touching up photos. Resizing, cropping, rotating, colour manipulation plus added effects make this a very convenient application. There is an addon for Firefox and an extension for Explorer available so that with a click of the right-mouse button you can be editing any online image in Picnik.

Educational use:
Any time you have students working on wikis, blogs, VoiceThreads, Photostory, PowerPoints, you name it, there is a use for this application.

V is for VoiceThread

What an amazingly simple concept is VoiceThread:

- Upload images

- Comment via microphone or keyboard

Genius!

I am presenting the educational rationale for using VoiceThread to staff at my school tomorrow. Here is the slideshow: