Last assignments submitted today and I must say I have really enjoyed this unit so far…….only half way to go now. I will admit this unit has shown me how fast technology moves and has given me a great insight to all the tools available to teachers! It makes achieving unqiue pedagogy more available to teachers and attractive to the students. This unit has brought my attention to the fact that I am rather feeling out of touch with it all the changes in IT today  but one thing is for sure, student in today’s society seem to have a really good basic foundation for I.T and I feel this will only encourage me to not hesitate in the future and try new things.

All the best fellow bloggers

Audacity; This is like deja-vu !!! I was only reading someone’s blog two days ago and they were talking about Audacity and its many capabilities it provides……it sounded that interesting I went straight to download site and downloaded it to start creating something for myself……..and now here I am reading this week’s task and what do I see……… great head start J

I will admit I have had a little a little bit of trouble importing the music files that I wanted to use and could not finish the final project so I have just left it as is………audacity offers so much to the imagination and this little song I created has a story behind it.

I was discussing with my girlfriend what I should create and being the girl she is (bless her soul) she suggested I make a love song about her!  Well challenge excepted ! but it has a little twist…….as I was mucking around with the voice controls it started to sound way to funny so I left it as is and have named my song……….My Drunken Serenade …….just a little bit of fun.

 My Drunken Serenade

Ah this part was easy….I already had a yahoo account so signing up was a piece of cake. After looking through some of the other fellow blogger’s I had a rough idea of what to do sooooooo……here is a couple of picture that is fairly recent that I would like to share.

First here is a little youtube like that I found that may help people understand a little more about how the basics work when signing up, it can be a little over-whelming when you first open up an account.

 http://youtu.be/3R_MWGFvDEE

Ok I also registered on my account to use a really good editing program called picnic which you can access by clicking on the photo you wish to edit and in the top left corner click actions where a drop bar will appear and that’s where you select edit photo to picnic and the rest is easy just follow the instructions.

Click on the link below to see something interesting

Room with a view

After having lost everything once due to unforeseen circumstances I have finally put together a slideshow of selected photos and now officially have developed a better schema of using photo-story. I feel that this program is relatively user friendly and could be introduced to students from middle  years primary upwards because

After having lost everything once due to unforeseen circumstances I have finally put together a slideshow of selected photos and now officially have developed a better schema of using photo-story. I feel that this program is relatively user friendly and could be introduced to students from middle  years primary upwards because it easy to follow the instructions step by step.

Students could really allow their creative side to take over on an individual , group or class level and an example of this is if we allowed the students use photos to tell their story. Digital story telling takes you on a creative and engaging journey and through using this program they can personally tailor their stories.

If you would like to see an example of digital story telling then click on the link directly below otherwise how a quick look at my creation Something Small

http://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu/

Enjoy

Well so far you have signed up and have lots of cool pages stored in your “tags” section ready to share with your friends and anyone who might be interested. Delicious is a social bookmarking service where you can save all your bookmarks online and share with anyone, you can also see what the most popular bookmarks being saved are right now.  First you will sign in to your account and see the following home page appear with a tags section down the left side and tabs ontop…..

Secondly select a tag of your choice in the popular tags list on the left side of the page. There will be another page pop up allowing you to select another tab named people

Another drop bar will appeared once you hace clicked on the people tab that allows you to search for a particular person to search their collection of information………you will need that persons user name to find the information. Hope that helps 🙂

Well…… social bookmarking…… who would have thought there could be yet another useful tool for people who share an interest in collaborating a large amount of information together, like teachers for example. And really  social bookmarking makes so much sense! I have recently signed with both the most common bookmarking sites delicious and diiago and so far have used delicious a number of times.  You don’t have to sign with both sites like I did, it just happened to pan out like that for myself.  I would like to discuss how I went about signing with delicious.

To start with ‘Delicious’  is a great idea because it makes things a lot easier for the user. 

With a growing number of  people now using the internet as part of  daily living activities a program like delicious is beneficial to people as it makes it easier in terms of understanding how something works in the IT world and something that is time efficient. There are so many websites available now and it really is hard to keep track of all the information you discover and to keep it in an orderly fashion. When browsing in the past you could easliy either add something you liked to bookmarks or add to favorites in our web browser but after time things can get messy.

In the past I have used faviourites and bookmarks however a disadvantage of these is that  bookmarks are only saved in the 1 computer system stopping you from accessing this information from other computers.

There will be an option for you to add new buttons to your browser so you can click them later for instant bookmarking of your favorite pages, just follow the prompts once you have reached this section. Once on your desired page simply click your delicious icon and this page will be automatically saved for easy viewing later.

The great thing that delicious offers is finding your information easily, once you have found a website that interest you and you have clicked the tags icon on your browser, a little box will appear allowing you to enter a short description of your findings and allow you to place it under a heading……..This will  help later when you are looking to find that information and the search engine will automatically locate it using the key words you entered.

The whole reason for the social bookmarking is that others can now access your findings and they too can share information with you and this is something I would like to explore later with you.

Chow for now…..

Ok………. so I have done things a little backwards and finally sorted out the look of my blog’s appearance. When I say appearance I’m talking in terms of the options that Edublog allows you to select once you have made a choice in the available themes (basic template of main page)

Included in my options are also widgets, menus, premium themes, back ground, present background, header and cutline options ( which can all be found under the appearance header in the left column)  but I will only be discussing the options that I used to complete my appearance.

 Firstly I chose to use the Chris Pearson’s theme that is the basic appearance of my blog page. I chose to use his template because it reminded me of the appearance that I once used in a previous blog that I really liked, particularly because it allows you to have a nice bright picture splashed across the top of your page and also allows you to have side columns which display’s options  down both sides of your page.

Chris Pearson’s theme  inspired my choice of header which added visual stimulation to my blog  because it is so large and catching. My inspiration to using this header is drawn from my favorite passion in the whole wide world and that is surfing. In the picture you will see a lot of people forming a large circle holding hands in the air and all sitting on either a surfboard or a bodyboard. In this instance surfers do this because they are celebrating something, it could be a wedding, someone achieving something or maybe even a death in the surfing community. I like this because in actual fact a lot of these people in the ocean celebrating could be complete strangers bonded together because of a shared passion, a belief and/or a relationship that they all carry.

A lot of people can relate to this in all aspects of life, including the belief of one education and how when people can come together with a shared passion we can achieve greatness.  

I also then looked at my available widgets by clicking on the widget heading. This gave me a list of widgets that I could drag and drop into either side bar 1 or side bar 2. Widgets are free to either delete or add to at any stage. The widgets I chose to use are relevant to my blog at this point in time.

Adding a background to my main feature was a simple choice. I decided to play a little more on the water imagery that I chose to use for my header by selecting a water drop image that I googled and saved to my documents on my computer. By selecting background, the page then navigated to another option where I could upload my saved image by selecting the browse option, find my picture and then select the upload option. After a few moments this it gave me another option on imagery placement where I could adjust the final image if needed.

 Reference: wikipedia online dictonary 2001, widgets and how they work: sourced 8th August 2011 <www.wikipedia.org>

Fantastic !!! As someone who is continuously falling in and out of the tech world I am very excited about finding, learning and signing up for google reader. The problem is that everytime I log onto the net to find something new I get bored really easily because I just don’t know enough sites to go to that entertain or find interesting, but now after watching the the youtube introduction its a matter of signing up and simply listing new feeds directly to you. I have now listed some of my favorite twitter characters, surf checks and areas of interest like cooking and current worldly news events.

Introducing something like this in the class would be a great way to build enthusiasm because students would be encouraged to work as a social network filtering information for group assignments or tasks set by the teacher………

I feel that google reader reflects well on the V.E.L.S standards in personal learning and design, creativity and technology through-out the middle years onwards in the curriculum.  

 Standards (VELS) Personal learning http://vels.vcaa.vic.edu.au/vels/personal.html

                                       Design, creativity and technology http://vels.vcaa.vic.edu.au/vels/dct.html

I had no trouble signing up, all you needed was a current email address followed by creating a password for yourself. Just follow the steps and its as simple as that.

Go to www.google.com/reader

Enter current email address

Create a password

Happy reading !

OK I’m always down for something new and exciting in the IT world but like I have read in a lot of other posts it can be quite confusing which leads to frustration in a very short period of time. My thoughts on EDMODO are that’s its so far very user friendly (also with the help of Mr Pearce) and easily can be navigated through to build a repertoire of how it all works!

I like how EDMODO gives us the 4 options on the home page such as “note” alert”assignment”poll

I will break these options down for you starting with “note” that can be used for general matters and comments, most of us have been using this
option to introduce ourselves on EDMODO. When posting a note, you are able to attach either a file, Link of Library link to your post, which allows us to upload a visual cue  such as photos, screen shots of extra information.

The “Alert” post option is a feature that is used to notify our tutor/peers of something which is particularly urgent, i would imagine this option would be very handy when we have any important questions or concerns relating to this unit.

The”Assignment’ post option  is a useful option for when we want to distinguish an assignment
based post from a general post.
And last but not at all least  the ‘Poll’ post option allows fellow EDMODO’s to respond to assignments, thoughts relating to different topics and of course feedback to one another one……..there we go, done and dusted!

Apart from what I have already discussed about Edmodo I really don’t know a lot more about the site until explore further into the depths as time goes on in the unit but having a well organized site would benefit students in areas such as IT, social media discussions and sharing online work/discussions and research. I feel that introducing this to students would be create an engaging atmosphere in the classroom and I feel it is a great gateway to continue to dive deeper into the IT world.

Well blogging is addictive and fun!! and I can say that. I have had my own blog now for some time and when it was active I found it to be very very addictive. I started my blog in 2009 and it was based on my training and goals before I entered a World Tour bodyboarding event in Hawaii. I started blogging madly 3 months before the event and I wanted to share with people and my sponsors at the time my thoughts. This event was the biggest and well known event at the time in the world and it was a very important time of my life. I chose to to interact through blogging because I could documented my training showing pictures and uploading any footage, write about my goals, access information about the Hawaiian island and the event as it unfolded and update information immediately to the public that was interested.

The blogging site that I was using was called wordpress. It was not that user friendly and I found it very complicate to navigate through but saying that it still worked out.

Go to http://hawaiianvirgin.wordpress.com/ if you would like to have a sneaky peak.