Sartz’s Blog

Isn’t it funny how how sometimes the most meaningful bits of a lesson happen outside of the lesson. This happened to me last night where after a session on Blogs with teachers at a local Primary School we started talking about, of all things ClipArt. As quick as a wink I said “Have you seen this?” and fired up Taggalaxy. Taggalaxy is one on many tools that are now on the web which is a search engine for Flickr. The way it works is that you type in your key word and Taggalaxy finds all of the photos on Flickr which has that key word in its Tags and then presents in using Flash in a globe which you can manipulate with the mouse.

I have seen Taggalaxy used in a few classes but has been particularly useful for senior classes. The classes I have watched have typed in a keyword, “conflict” in this case and then spun the globe to pick a random photo. The students then use that photo as a starting point for their writing. This is great practice for their English exam later in the year. At the very least though Taggalaxy is a great resource for photo’s.

The great thing about this discussion though was that it started an avalanche of other Flickr based sites for the others in the room. Flickrcc is another Flickr search site. The nice thing about Flickrcc is that is is a lot quicker to load than Taggalaxy, but then it doesnt look quite as pretty. Enough of these Search engines what about something a little different.

PhotoSoup by Yahoo is an useful example of some of the tools which are now being made for the web. PhotoSoup lets you search according to a keywork or Flickr username and then presents it as a wordfind which you can do online or you can download the puzzle for printing or for use on your Intranet. Just be warned though some of the wordfinds are very hard.

Want something a little easier to come to grips with how about Bubblr, which allows you to search for key words and then create acomic strip from them, complete with Speech and thought bubbles. A whole lot of fun.

A more serious web site is 10by10 which uses photos taken from News Services and presents them on a timeline. So you can find photos which were in the news which were taken on July 29, 2005. Hmmm that could be useful in a senior History class .

The great thing is that this is just the tip of the iceberg, a quick google search for Flickr returns lots of Flickr based web sites. A good place to start is Big Huge Labs which allows you to make jigsaws and much much more.

If you know of any other Flickr sites which are useful, please leave me a comment with a link to the site…

Further to the last post, I thought you might like to know which of the wiki’s I eventually settled on to use. Wetpaint removed the ad’s off my wiki site after about 36 hours of my requesting an educational wiki site. Once this was done I was hooked. I must be more than a little superficial as it was the eye candy that eventually sold me on wetpaint, that and the fact that all the widgets and things I wanted to use worked like a charm. Mind you I still have a wikispaces site just in case. Drop by and check out sartz.wetpaint.com, I am busily trying to add some tutorials on web2.0 tools.

A question which I get asked a lot is what’s the difference between a Wiki and a Blog. The answer as is often the case with these Web 2.0 tools not particularly clear cut. However the definition which I always fall back to is that a Blog is one person publishing to many. A blog is the Web 2.0 equiavalent of a journal, except that people can access it easily and involve themselves in a dialogue with the author. A blog then is a “one to many” document and is a great way to encourage students (and adults) to write. A wiki is a very similar sort of beast. However a wiki allows a group of people to work on a task collaboratively. When you use a wiki you can still add similar content as you would in your blog, but you have the added advantage of allowing others to contribute to the wiki as well.

So does this mean that a wiki is a better tool to use in the classroom than a blog? No I don’t think so, although some might disagree, both tools have their uses. For me at least I have discovered a new found freedom in being able to post to my blog. I think of this blog is mine it’s quite personal and as such creates ownership for the blogger. A wiki on the other hand is a collaborative tool and belongs to the group. The wiki however has its place in the classroom and can be used a variety of ways to encourage collaboration. Not only that but there is quite an array of free wiki’s out there which we can use.

Now that I am comfortable in my blog, I have started to probe the surrounding cyberspace to find a wiki to call my own. After a quick Google search, I narrowed my list of hopefuls down to three wiki’s wikispaces, wetpaint and pbwiki. All of these wiki sites provide a decent wiki and have varied features.
 

Wikispaces provides a solid platform for wiki’s it has plenty of storage space for files (2Gb) and is very easy to use. When you first join wikispaces you will notice that ad’s appear on your page, you will have to click on the upgrade link to notify wikispaces that you are an educator and they will remove all of the ad’s and enable a couple of other features for your wiki. The page editing tools are pretty standard but there is a huge array of widgets that you can add to your page that range from calendars to movies or flash interactives. My one gripe about wikispaces is that you are very limited in the way the page looks with only a limited range of features being available to change the look and feel of the page.

It is only fair to mention that pbwiki is still in beta which means that they are still adding features to it. But I have to say I was a little disappointed with the lack of ways in which I could change the look and feel of the page, with only one style and 10 color combinations I felt a little limited in how I could personalise the page. Having said that I really liked the design of the page, it was easy to navigate and looked good. pbwiki also places the discussion threads on the bottom of the wiki page (much like a blog), a feature that I didn’t like but may suit others better. pbwiki is ad free without upgradeing which was nice and had 10 Mb of file space which was a little on the small side, but I guess people could use Google Docs or Xdrive to store the files and then just link across to them from pbwiki. pbwiki did have a great security system though and enabled a myriad of security settings.

I only set up my wetpaint account last night but have been impressed by the features which it has. Each page in Wetpaint has several built in tabs including a Photo Gallery, To Do List, Discussion Forum, etc. The actual pages look great with enough eye candy to keep anyone happy. The security features on the site are pretty standard but has enough flexabilty to set it up the way you want. My biggest gripe about wetpaint is that you can only send a maximum of 40 files to the wiki. This doesn’t include images but is still somewhat limiting. Wetpaint also has a lot of ad’s on the pages, but these can be removed if you are an educator and apply to wetpaint for the ad’s to be removed.

So which one should you use? It depends on what you want to do. If you don’t have a lot of dccuments to send up, I think Wetpaint might just fit the bill nicely. If you are looking at placing lots of files on your wiki but don’t need the eye candy then wikispaces is for you. It might also be worth visiting pbwiki over the next few months, I suspect that they will be making a lot of changes and may well be a player in the future.

I have just finished listening to the Ed Tech Crew’s latest podcast where they interviewed Chris Betcher. The Interview was on Interactive Whiteboards, but thats not what I wanted to write about. For me Chris always interviews well and has a common sense approach to ICT for “real” teachers that I find refreshing. The interview got me thinking about how we use ICT as educators, and then I surprised myself by having an irresistible urge to write about it on my Blog. Now being a bit of a Newb to Blogs this came as a bit of a revelation. How does a Science teacher who has always hated English make the transition from “I don’t wanna write” to “Hmm think I might publish this on my blog”.

Now normally I would just remind myself that I am a Geek and thats what Geeks do. BUT, during the last few weeks, I have been working with Year 7 students and now whenever I see them they tell me something new about their blogs, they are accessing each others blogs from home, their parents are leaving comments, the principal is leaving comments for the kids and 7D is a buzz in “Blogdom” as they put it. So I might be a Geek and terribly uncool but surely this group of Year 7 students can’t all be Geeks surely some of them are cool. Maybe Blogs are the “Killer App”, the Holy Grail, the tool which teachers, students and parents can all use, common ground for all.

Is it really common ground for all though? The answer at least IMHO is yes, Yes, YES. We can all participate in blogs at least once we have conquered our initial fear of “what if someone reads this?” Having the confidence to actually post on a Blog is a big thing. In fact this is probably my first real Blog entry where I have just, well rambled on really. But now that I am in the groove theres no stopping me. I have moved on from the “Jeez I hope no-one reads this” to “WooHoo 3 people read my post”, who knows maybe this post could even get 4 readers. Make sure you leave a comment so I know you visited.

We often talk about Web 2.0 engaging students, but I think that there is at least as much engagement on the part of the teacher. Admittedly I have only really worked closely with one teacher so far (will be expanding my empire soon though) and admittedly she was pretty engaged to start with but the journey which she has taken over the past 2 months has been incredible. She started as a self confessed ICT “noob”and in a very short period of time has progressed to running 3 Blogs and moderating 25 student blogs. From someone who didn’t know the difference between a widget and an RSS feed, to someone who just talks about Twitter as if its the communication tool of choice for everyone (It is isn’t it!)

Blogs Rock, no discussion needed, I just “luv’s em to pieces”.