Sartz’s Blog

Hey there all, I am sure that you have noticed that I have been… Well a “little” slack on my Blog posts, that’s because I now have a new job and have been pretty busy (No excuse I hear you all say). As part of my new job I am relocating my blog to http://shcict.globalteacher.org.au/ , so why not drop on over and take a look. The Blog will be written by myself and a brand spanking new author who shall remain a mystery for the moment.I have made an end of term resolution to post every two weeks, I can almost hear those of you who know me well sniggering and thinking sure you will, but I will I promise… In fact I am off to write a post right now…

Cya there Sartz

There have been many changes to the wide world of wiki since my earlier post on the relative merits of Wikispaces, Wetpaint and PBWiki. But PBWiki (Which stands for Peanut Butter Wiki) have just perhaps been the most prolific in their changes. I now find myself being lured back to PBWiki and might just have to change my earlier judgment on which wiki is best.

Since writing my earlier post on PBWiki they have made one major change which has prompted me to go back for a second look. PBWiki now allows you to add a whole class full of users to a wiki without the need for email addresses. This means that I can set up my class of users very quickly and walk into class armed with my list of usernames and passwords all ready for the students to get stuck into some good old collaboration, or poetry, or personal writing, or……..

This rather useful change to the wiki has prompted me to take another look at the options in PBWiki and the further I delve into the innards of the wiki the more great features I am finding. Little things like being able to create folders in which you can place pages which make navigating PBWiki a real breeze. Instead of having 50 pages listed down the side of the wiki, I can make a folder for Poetry and a folder for Science and I can give students a page in each of these folders, this is  a useful little feature for keeping everything seperate and nicely organised. Even better you can set who can edit/read each page if you want so you can have pages which students can change nestled amongst pages which only you can change.

PBWiki also allows the user to add Plugins to their page. These plugins are largely standard fare with YouTube, SlideShare, etc all making an appearance. But the one I love is the Google Gadgets. These useful little things are the same gadgets which you can add to your iGoogle page. ( Whats that you don’t have an iGoogle page… Click here to get one.) These gadgets allow you to add news feeds, horoscopes, weather, and so on and so on. You can even make it display your favourite “World of Warcraft” charactor if you are that way inclined.

So what does all this mean? Sorry WetPaint but PBWiki is the new king of the wiki’s. It’s easy to use, has lots of functionality and is set up in a way that a classroom can access it and get stuck into the good stuff quickly and easily…

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.