Scott McLeod shared this video:

Often teachers think digital stuff is better.  Quality stuff is better!  If it is crap learning, crap presentation, poor logic, or whatever then some flashy web2.0 tool will not make the difference and ramp it up to being quality.

We need to make sure teachers get this.

Sometimes a digital product is NOT the best way of doing something.  Spending hours teaching a piece of software SO the learning can be shared may be difficult to justify.  This is something I often think when seeing claymations, some video, etc.  Could the learning be shared in a way that adds something to the experience rather than being an experience in itself?

check out these!!  Way cool!!

1.  Some handy keyboard shortcuts HERE

2.  Screenshots directly to clipboard HERE

3.  Other screenshot variations HERE I do like the one to only take a particular window.  Wondered how to do that easily …

anyway handy hints

This is just incredible. The VERY scary bit is that if we are seeing this then the stuff that is happening in the back rooms and labs around the world will be leaving this in the dust. Like the fact that every piece of technology we have in our lives is out-of-date when we look at what is just about to come on stream. And even more so it you can get insight into the development labs.

What about an OS for a computer that worked like this?
A tablet/iPhone type product with this built in?
The potential for education? Massive.

LINK

Speed up Firefox – do this, it works!! LINK This has made a stunning difference to the speed of my browser.  It was hanging and beginning to drive me nuts.  YAY for a solution.

Phonics and phonological awareness activities – LINK.  Link from Jane

TextExpander has an update which solves some of the double insertions I was getting.  I love this software.  One of the few things I have paid for …. thg becomes ‘thanks Greg’; sig~ inserts my full signature into anything.  The list goes on.  Saves me a power of time.  Have it set up with my email address as well which is great for online things where I have to type it.  Also use it as an auto-correct for my common typo’s.  Got on to it via David Pogue from the TED Talks and NY Times column/blog.

I’m also loving the minimal mac blog at the moment.  Some really good ideas for workflow management, and the software/tricks to do the things I do all the time faster and in simpler ways on my laptop.

Setting up a small tab in Firefox to keep my GReader open all the time with less space.  Geeky but a useful idea I am loving.  LINK

Sharetabs - have a look and see what it does.  Very cool.

Love this!!  Someone has watched my problem solving technique with the last couple issues

Some great things I have found in the last few days that are worth sharing:

Live Binders – allows you to bring a lot of different web-based resources together into a single site/url.  Sort of like embedding pages into a wiki but much slicker.  Lots of classroom applications.

SimplyBox is similar but different.  Puts clippings all on one page.  Again has real potential for sharing resources with children.

Howpack – a wonderful collection of incredible nets.  Great maths extension activity potential.  Printable.

Rhyme Dictionary – neat we tool where you put in a word and it gives you rhymes sorted by number of syllables

Subject specific blog list - check out this rapidly expanding list of subject specific blogs.  Well worth a browse.

Using CoolIris as a presentation tool - great tutorial about how to use CoolIris as a neat presentation tool.

ad lastly with mildly tongue in cheek:

Followign from my post the other day it was interesting to see this from Jacqui Sharp yesterday outlining more creative uses of powerpoint in the classroom:

source
Jacqui has lots of resources on her site – it is worth a look

This video from TED by Jay Walker:

…. is worth watching at a couple of levels:

1. Fascinating ideas and information about the growth of English as the universal human language. And also the ‘language of problem-solving’.

2. His ability as a presenter. The use of video, sound and image to make his point is great. A huge amount of skill and practice has gone into making a 5minute talk.

The hardest thing to do is to be simple! This is a good example of the kind of presentation I was describing to staff this week who were presenting to parents about our Y7/8 programmes for 2010. There is intense marketing going on at the moment in our area from Intermediates and High Schools. As a full primary we have to make sure that our parents are making decisions based on knowing what it is we REALLY do. Not just the perception, the reality.

Blogs like Presentation Zen are fantastic places to start if you are doing any sort of presenting using powerpoint or keynote! Guy Kawasakis 10-20-30 rule is something to think about too …. (not sure about only 10 slides though). So you don’t end up like this:

Check out Dougs great ‘how-to’ explanation of how to tweak the Firefox search.
I have also set mine up so I can type ‘g’ into the url bit, a space and then my search terms and it automatically googles them as if all the words had a ‘+’ in front of them. Same for Wikipedia, Amazon, etc as you can seeVery quick and easy.

if you had the Grow and Mail conflict and followed my instructions to fix it …. now go to terminal and put in:

defaults write com.apple.mail GMSummaryMode -int 2

to get growl back to normal

http://www.html-pdf-converter.com/ is a  very handy tool. Worked for my blog except for the fact it stripped out the youtube and other videos – not even just a space, it is like they are not even there. Also seems to ignore some sidebar widgets. Is completely online and downloaded automatically to my desktop.

have a look here

For sites that are secure (https://……) it won’t work.  Which is actuallly good!  Means they are secure

Even kept links active.