Talking to the world

I am just listening to students talk person to person with someone in Antarctica - this was set up for the classes by my Australian friend Chris.  He has also shared his teacher podcast workshop here and I am about to work through that as I have still not published an actual podcast and that is one of my major goals for 11ESP students to do next year. Chris has also recommended the mac tool Audio Hijack which I will be adding as the clarity of this recording is very impressive, as are Chris's hosting skills!

Web 2.0 tools

A great collection of links to web 2.0 tools as well as ideas for their use in the classroom, thanks to yet another amazing educator for making this collection available to us.

Tag the world

A great blog post from Techcrunch that has reminded me once again of the value of tags - I try to do these pretty thoroughly but in the process of uploading a whole pile of pics to flickr I have been remiss.  A good wet day activity will be for me to go back and add tags and descriptions to these hundreds of photos.  An example of the value is that I recently received a comment from a Penwarden relation I had never heard of, when I tagged an old photograph of my dad's grandfather.  Another example was when I uploaded some of my mum's old school photos and a family of one of her classmates contacted me to say that was the first photo they had ever seen of their dad (who is now deceased) when he was young.  Connections like that are so exciting. 

15 Best freeware apps for Mac

Thanks to @guykawasaki for this link - when my new macbook pro arrives I'll be hooking up to most of these!  Meanwhile I have had a great weekend adding photos (once I upgraded my account) in flickr, twittering and skyping with a bunch of great educators around the world including my awesome friend Margit in Hawaii who is still really a kiwi girl at heart.  Today I am heading for Rotorua to attend a Digital Technology Guidelines meeting - prelude to next week's two day symposium, then tomorrow 1pm NZ time I am skyping in to a PD session in Buffalo with Mike Fisher, Angela Stockman and some other cool folks.

Flickr and other useful tools

Here is a link to another friend's wonderful collection of resources for educators - thanks HeyMilly for these awesome links - we love flickr too!

Newseum and teacher tech links

A great resource from a twitter friend

Splashup

Photo editing

clipped from www.splashup.com Splashup, formerly Fauxto, is a powerful editing tool and photo manager. With all the features professionals use and novices want, it's easy to use, works in real-time and allows you to edit many images at once. Splashup runs in all browsers, integrates seamlessly with top photosharing sites, and even has its own file format so you can save your work in progress. Photo sharing services all work the same in Splashup, including Splashup itself. Edit your images easily, from anywhere.