Flickr is a great tool for backing up your photo’s and sharing them with your friends and family. It also integrates with Facebook, so you can upload your photo’s to Flickr and facebook at the same time (just in case your mates don’t have a facebook). If you use iPhoto, you’re even luckier because you can yupload to both sites from within your iPhoto application… If not, get yourself a Mac!

Check out the great instructional material on the NSW e-Learning Innovations wiki. You’ll also find the following video….

If you use Flickr, please leave a comment here with your Flickr address so we can add you as a contact in Flickr. That way when we next visit Flickr, we can see your latest photo’s.

I twitter, do you?  Have you seen the video below from Common Craft about Twitter?

http://www.commoncraft.com/Twitter

Not sure what Twitter is?

“Twitter is on its way to becoming the next killer app.” Time Magazine

Heard of micro-blogging? It’s a brief form of blogging, short blog posts, there’s usually a character limit of 200 or less, like Twitter’s limit of 140 characters.

It’s a bit like Reality TV on the net. Your network of ‘friends’ tell you how long they’ve been waiting for the train, what they are listening to on their iPod, what they are eating and what they are wearing to bed. It’s short and it’s sharp.

You’ll read what they are presenting and at what forum, you’ll read what happened in their class that day or what amazing discovery they have made.

How does my network use Twitter?

I’ll invite them to comment on why they like Twitter, but mostly, I see them sharing educational resources, asking each other for support and advice, and making friends. They notify each other of the latest educational news and happenings, not just locally but internationally. It’s a fantastic way to keep your collaborative networks real, alive, dynamic.

Twitter is a great and convenient way to interact, you can post ‘Tweets’ from your mobile, on the Twitter website, from twitter widgets inside Facebook, edublogs, wiki’s and even from within Second Life. I can put a Twitter widget just about anywhere so I can keep an eye on the conversation. I can even add a Twitter widget to my netvibes/ RSS feed reader so that I can read and communicate with educators, friends and family all over the country.

What cool things have I discovered about Twitter?

A little secret I’ll share with all of you, you can actually add a Twitter application into your Facebook profile that updates your Facebook profile everytime to post a Twitter. So you don’t need to go into Facebook to update your profile.

Try it! It’s fast and it’s fun!

Okay, it’s time for me to come clean about the reason I haven’t been blogging a couple of weeks.

On my way home from work last week, I tripped and fell into a tub of radioactive waste… (not really, I’ve had a bad cold… almost as painful) and have since developed Super Support Powers!

Thanks to JoKay, who also visited this website, I am now Super Spinner, with super strength and penetrating x-ray vision.

Once my transformation was complete, I was able to download my very own Super Hero kit with appropriate cut-outs (sig, mask, undies) and other goodies.

Do you want to be Superhero? Come on, Transform yourself… it’s easy!

You can even use it in your ToonDoo!

Well, the survey results are in!

As you know, I used a web tool called WuFoo to create a poll to determine times that would be best for you, for the Technolog-e Sessions. Once the form is created, a step-by-step process, WuFoo provides the code to embed the form into your blog (it’s just like adding media [slide.com] into your wikispace).

WuFoo tool also allows you to create basic, graphic reports for you to easily view the results.

I have taken a screen print of the results, as you can see, but, you’ll need to click the image below to view the graph;

So it looks like our sessions for Phase 2 will now be:

4.00pm on Wednesday and 9.30am on Thursday.

Thanks everyone for participating.

Watch this movie now!

*Special thanks to Des Osborn for pointing out this movie after a recent Elluminate Session… e-Tools ‘n Tips

There a few more of these “in Plain English” videos by Lee LeFever at CommonCraft

• Social Networking in Plain English
• Wiki’s in Plain English
• Social Bookmarking in Plain English

There has been a lot of interest in RSS lately. What is RSS, how can it help you and save you time? If the movie above wasn’t enough, then check out some of the links below…

Looking at my blog statistics and reader clicks, the RSS information seems to be the most popular, so here is a list of posts and resources from the archives;

• Netvibes Vs Google Reader – Aug 14th
• Alex’s demonstration of netvibes – August 13th
  
• Netvibes ‘How To’ – June 14th
• RSS in education - April 18th

Other good RSS feed readers;

• netvibes – this site is really cool. Your feeds are loaded into pods that you can click and drag around your homepage. You can also add To-Do lists, weather, search engines, calendars (very Mac friendly), video searches, and more…
• pageflakes - here’s another site you can personalise with your favorite news, weather, sports, entertainment, photos, videos, music, email…and much more, all in one place!
• bloglines – another useful site that once you have an account, you can add RSS feeds… I find this hard to use in comparison to netvibes and pageflakes

ask your readers to do some self promotion.

So… “I’d like to get to know you well…” (sing it)

As well as giving you the opportunity to promote yourself on this blog, I’d like to take the opportunity to get to know you, on a more… personal level. Yes, I’m going to ask you to share something personal with me.

If you’re not comfortable with that, then share something that you use to strengthen your networks, encourage collaboration and, or resource sharing. I’d love you to post a comment, include a link to your Flickr/Facebook or other social networking site…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/flairandsquare

If you use Flickr, I’d like to know more about how.

• Do you really utilise all the tools that this site offers?
• Do you use it for teaching and learning?
• How can we get the most out of this tool?

Thanks to JoKay, I recently discovered MOO. Moo loves to print beautifully designed products with the photos in your Flickr stream. For just $25 I got 100 funky little business cards printed using the images of my choice. I used five images of my avatar, Spinner Mills. Click below to see them on my Flickr space.

www.flickr.com More of millerspin’s photos tagged with closeup

Every time I check my netvibes (RSS Aggregator), I am astounded that there is one or two new posts from Sue Waters. I’ve mentioned Sue a few times throughout this blog and her content often inspires me to write a post in response. Like this post I wrote in response to Sue’s article about innovation being challenged by all the constraints currently on us, like blocked sites within DET.

Sue is a Aquaculture teacher at Challenger TAFE in Perth. She trials a lot of new technology with her classes, on her blog she provides useful examples, guidelines, tips and much more. If you are interested in m-Learning, PDA’s, mobile phones, spy glasses, etc, and you don’t already read or subscribe to Sues blog, you’re missing out on loads of good tips and advice.

As a busy blogger myself, I know how hard it is when you have limited time and it can be so rewarding when someone leaves you a positive or constructive comment. It seems to make all that work worthwhile. This was highlighted by the Day 21 Blog Challenge – Make a Reader famous, which is what this post is all about. So here’s to you Sue!

Think about this – Do you like recognition for good work? Of course you do. So why not pick one of Sues posts listed below, have a read and leave her a comment, and tell her I sent you!

A few good posts worth reading;

• How to Read Blog posts on a Phone Using Mobile Friendly Google Reader
• SlideShare Needs Our Support — Lets Help Them Out
• STOP, LOOK, THINK – What Is Material Really Going To Look Like on A Mobile Device
• How are we going to effectively use the mobile devices in our student’s pockets?
• For all the lovers of creating comics ToonDoo has added ability to make ToonBooks
• You Need Spyglasses – Are you Serious?
• Mobile Web Usage is Increasing – How Will You Use It With Students?

Thanks for all your efforts Sue, there are some great resources on your site that I’m sure many teachers will find useful. I certainly have!

Do you get the vibe?

First of all, thanks to Sue Waters for posting an introduction of everyone that’s participating in the 31 Day Blogging Challenge created by Darren Rowse. It’s a great way to find out about everyone involved.

Sue, I think you’ve really started something with this netvibes Vs GoogleReader thing with the comments on your post;

“Alex from Miller’s Spin (Australia) may well cause me to be banned from Google forever. Her great screencast of how she uses Netvibes to subscribe to blogs has convinced a lot of bloggers not only to try Netvibes but also to give Jing a go. Which I did – and here is my quick screecast of how I use Google Reader to subscribe to blogs!” Sue Waters

I liked the jing movie you created and have linked to above, it was very informative. I love that GoogleReader let’s you view the blog posts on that one page, that makes life easy! As RSS feed readers go, both netvibes and Google Reader actually do very similar things (I also use iGoogle), but I do find netvibes a little prettier (much like Mac vs Windows) and has more ‘theme’ customisation options. I also love that you can drag pods over the tabs to drop them into different pages.

It’s also good to see everyone getting into jing.

Also, thanks to Kate Quinn from Waxlyrical (Australia) (also loving Netvibes) for setting up a netvibes page to follow our 31 Day Blog challenges. I updated this yesterday – click the button to add this to your Netvibes page.

Facebook Meet Netvibes: Netvibes Introduces the Facebook Widget

With Jing , you can create effective media-rich learning material, provide instruction, demonstrate how to use a web site or a software application, record everything you do and pass it along AND it couldn’t be easier to use!

Capture audio and screen movements easily with Jing!

Thanks to Joanna Kay from the Illawara Institute, I have been playing with a really cool, free Web2.0 tool called Jing.

So what exactly is Jing?

Jing is a free program that allows you to capture what’s on your screen (for all the visual learners out there). You can very easily add arrows and text boxes to highlight points of interest and provide instruction to learners. You can even capture screen movements and audio, which are outputted as a little video/ flash files (you’ll need a microphone/ headset), you can then save these to your computer, or if you sign up for an account, it will automatically upload to their server and give you the URL (link), which you can then email or IM to learners.

Sound like Adobe Captivate?

Yes, it’s a bit like Adobe Captivate, but it’s free. It doesn’t have as many features as Captivate, nor does it offer you the same level of editing ability. It does keep a history of the files you create and it allows you to store them somewhere else (which is great if you’re using the same account at home and at work) AND if that’s not enough, Jing has a Mac OSX version, yay Jing!

What does Jing look like?

Well, it’s a cute little yellow program that sites on your desktop like in the image below.

It’s easy to use. – Just watch this video tour.

Have a look at my first attempt – My first attempt was pretty ordinary, you can take a peek here.

Hints & Tips
* Keep your recordings short and sweet
* Script what you are going to say because you can’t edit it
* Keep your screen to a minimum size so everyone can see it!

Here are a few of the tools and sites listed on – Librarian Chick that I thought were good:

Resources

• LearnOutLoud.com – offers the Internet’s largest directory of audio and video learning resources. Browse the catalogue of over 10,000 available titles including audio books, MP3 downloads, podcasts, and free educational audio & video…
• FreeLoadPress – Free online textbooks
• 4Teachers – Integrate technology into your classroom with free online tools and resources
• PlanetPDF – Huge archive of free PDF books
• SuTree – An index of free video lessons, video tutorials, lectures and how to guides

Tools

• Awesome Powerpoint Tutorials – Tutorials on how to create text-FX, transparencies, DVD’s etc.
• Create A Graph – Quickly create graphs and charts
• PowerPoint Templates for Teachers – PowerPoint resources for educators
• Thumbstacks – Create and share presentations on the web
• i-Lighter – The yellow highlighter for the web
• GroupLoop – Simple web-based software to organize your group
• MindMeister Basic – Hold online real-time brainstorming sessions with friends and colleagues

And one tool that isn’t listed;

Tiny URL – Have you noticed a lot of the links that come via the Australian Flexible Learning Framework start with http://tinyurl.com? This web tool allows you to transform lengthy URL’s that often get broken up during a copy and paste, into a shorter more manageable URL. Check it out.  There’s also a Firefox extension for this.

There are many great extensions (I’ll list my favourite ones at the bottom of this post), but for now I’d like to show you Twitterbar.

Have you seen twitter? Here’s my twitter page.

The twitterbar extension allows you to post a ‘tweet’ (message) to twitter from the firefox address bar.

Just type your message where you would usually type a URL and click the twitter button.

A small unobtrusive grey icon sits to the right of your addressbar, clicking on it will then post your ‘tweet’, mouseover will tell you how many characters you have left.

You can also post by typing ‘ –post’ or hit the grey arrow when visiting a webpage to carry out a URL tweet (i.e it adds ‘Currently Browsing: ‘ in front of the url).

I am currently trialling this tool at the moment, so Tweet me. Surely I’m not the only one that has noticed that a high percentage of students have and use mobile phones, in fact more so than computers! I have also had some feedback from a TAFE (trades) teacher at the North Coast Institute who says that using mobile phones with a class of young guys has not only engaged his class, but opened the door for improved communication….

…think about that!

A couple of my favourite Firefox Extensions:

• deli.icio.us – add websites to your online bookmarks/favourites
• netvibes- (track updates to CLI/LRR resources this way!) add rss feeds to your personal netvibes page (please see this post)
• twitterbar- send sms/ messages from your address bar
• ForecastFox- have three days of weather at the bottom of your browser
• Foxmarks- sync your bookmarks from EVERY computer you work at
• Copy Plain Text- select text on a website and click this button to copy plain text (avoids taking all the web formatting with you)

I use a few more, but that’s a good start.

Get Firefox!

Mac Users: Twitteriffic!

Click to Vote for this Article – My StumbleUpon Page

I know I’ve mentioned netvibes before, but the new features really are amazing!

New to RSS?
For those of you who need a primer, have a look at this post about RSS. After that, you can have a look at the RSS Session in my wikispace.

The best thing about the new features?
Apart from the new themes, wallpapers and cool customisation choices, you can really extend the capability of the Tabs by sharing them. You can now set up a page of links/ feeds/ resource that is conten/ topic specific and share it with your students/ colleagues. A VERY HANDY way to share links & resources from one spot!

What?
If you’ve created an account and explored netvibes before now, you will know that you can sort and place all of the information/ RSS feeds you subscribe to on the Internet (that is, all those blogs, wiki’s, news and resource sites) into the one spot. Let’s investigate…

Cool New Feature 1. Share Your Tabs!
Imagine setting up a page of RSS feeds to a selection of resources for a special class… sounds good huh? Well not only can you set it up very easily, you can share that page with an entire class. Have a look at the images below for an example of what you can do.

Cool New Feature 2. Customisation Heaven! Have a look at the new galleries of wallpapers and themes that are available. One of the most beautiful blogs I read now has a netvibes theme (This is the blog – Veerle if you’re interested)!

Click below to view larger images

Cool Old Features:

• Drag ‘n Drop pods – click and drag the pods around , AND drag them to anoter Tab!
• Colour schemes
• Add content from your favourite sites
• Add content from their feed directory
• Add a To-Do List pod
• Add a local weather pod
• Add a web-note pod (place notes & web links here)
• Add your del.icio.us bookmarks
• Add a Web Search pod
• Add an Image Search pod
• Add a Video Search pod

Get netvibed today!

netvibes blog/ help/ gallery

Share my Technology in Education netvibes tab –