Technology | Al Upton

Cool Toy – A Visual Procedure August 26, 2007

Posted by Al Upton in miniLegends, technology, video.
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Apologies to other educators who have linked to this learning opportunity.

This 'unbelievable paper toy' video has been removed as it's educational value cannot be accessible to us. The site that hosts it displays other random videos which cannot be monitored but can easily be linked to. They may or may not be appropriate. Our chief priority still remains to equip our students with strategies to use when they come across inappropriate material. Keep safe and savvy. [Thanks to another of our astute parents for pointing out this possibility for our students to so easily surf the internet.]

Now create your own. Hint: use the pause button to follow the steps more closely.

SSO Week and Josh August 20, 2007

Posted by Al Upton in Madeline, miniLegends, technology.
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This week we get to be extra nice to a SSO person. We wrote a card to Josh saying thankyou.

After we gave Josh his SSO present he came to say thankyou for the present it has made my day. Josh said that yellow is my favourite colour. The present was a dog with a webcam nose and the USB cable came out of its bottom!

By Kelly, Neve, Maddie, Sandra and Sarah.

A cool new way to search Google! July 22, 2007

Posted by Al Upton in safe and savvy, search, technology.
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Download Video: Posted by rbunn83815 at TeacherTube.com.

“The Visual Search Firefox Extension allows you to search visually in all of your favorite search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, and countless others). Simply double-click on any word (or highlight any phrase) then plus and minus buttons will be displayed. You can press either button for the term to be added (or -added) to your current search and then it returns a new set of results based on your updated search string. This extension really does save you vast amounts of time and is a great usability increase. To get this extension go to: http://www.visual-search.net/”

Worth checking out for using Firefox (rather than IE) and of course the speed and ease of searching.
Note: This blog is a dual educator and classroom blog experiment. Cheers, Al

Test podcast using box.net July 20, 2007

Posted by Al Upton in Edublogs, Telling Our Stories, animation, connect, filtered sites, global, groups, learning, literacy, miniLegends, other countries, podcasts, safe and savvy, search, technology, video.
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Download

Why is Web 2 Important to Education? Al Upton 2 MB Nov, 2006
[this file has now been 'embedded' into this blog]

Stored on box.net – a free storage site http://www.box.net/
Upload your mp3 (sound file) – perhaps use audacity

To get the link, click the file in box.net and copy the url (address at the top of the player)

You can also paste in the public link
(IE visitors to your blog can link across to box.net to listen to recording/podcast)
http://www.box.net/shared/qd1kz42r6g
BUT this technique is likely to be blocked/filtered in SA government schools. This means you will need to upload and embed the files away from your site. It is possible for a site administrator to unblock sites at the local level but I do not promote this.

In the editor (when you write a post or a page) there is an icon with an ‘A’ on it. This is for embedding (copy and paste) the URL of different media files such as You Tube, Google, Metacafe, iFilm etc – not all are recognised but it’s worth a try – very quick, easy and powerful. NB You do this in the Visual editor (not Code) but will see code until you save the post or page.

Nova Organisation March 14, 2007

Posted by Al Upton in NOVA5000, Room 16, routines, technology.
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To begin with we decided how we could make it fair with five NOVAs and our 6 groups of 5 students. Once again the class has come up with brilliant ideas and a great solution.

Wonderful group ideas were discussed at great length. They included … all 5 NOVAs at one table for the day … the days of the week follow around the colour groups (at tables or on the board) and one person from purple join in for each day … all five NOVAs go to the colour group on the board (it would be easier with 25 kids to make this work) Great ideas but I think we have decided on the fairest solution.

Follow the magnet names on our whiteboard. This won and when we next use the NOVAs it will be Alex, Sarah, Myxuan, Jack and Jessica K. This way if the NOVAs aren’t used at a certain time or day when it is your turn you don’t miss out. It is just the next lot of five names each time the NOVAs are used. Good thinking.

Maps – Latitude and Longitude March 8, 2007

Posted by Al Upton in learning, miniLegends, networks, technology.
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We’ve been looking at maps and our inside windows are covered in them.

Very exciting news!
In a comment on our post Networking, John Johnstone showed us a map of some of his classes network using http://earth.google.com/
He also asked for a photo to put us on his network map. We voted on this one.

Click to enlarge. Right click for more options.