Think of the times you’ve been home sick. Too sick to do any school work or even read, but you’ve slept for 14 hours and need to be awake for a while. You turn to TV and are amazed to find that despite have 70 channels, there’s nothing to watch.
Your salvation has arrived from an unlikely source… Blogger. They have released a feature they’ve had in-house for years. Go to
http://play.blogger.com/
and you can watch the photos being uploaded to Blogger blogs.
Now, you may be thinking this sounds like torture, a play on the old, “Come over and watch our travel slideshow.” However, you’d be wrong. What you see is an amazingly diverse stream of photos. In a few minutes of watching I saw teens mugging for the camera, the Sydney opera house, a wedding photo, a grinning dog lounging in a backyard, kids on a soccer field, scrapbooking papers, food, and of course, a few ads.
In our media-rich lives, it is almost refreshing that there is no sound track. Of course, I have iTunes streaming Radio Margaritaville through our AirTunes.
I wonder if you uploaded a photo to your Blog and had this sit in a different tag, if you’d see your own photo go by, or if it is just grabbing one as the previous one finishes showing. If you figure that out, let me know.
So, the next time you are home sick, or needing a break, a visual meditation, give it a try.
I need to work on our WASC report tonight and finish lesson planning, so no real time to blog. However, I did download the newest version of the Flock web browser and I am impressed.
From the start, Flock has tried to be a Web 2.0 web browser. This version takes a big leap in that direction. It has a My World tab that gives me one click access to my Flickr, YouTube, Blogger, WordPress and other online homes. It posts to my blogs. It uploads my photos to Flickr.
It has a decent RSS reader. I like that I can easily toggle between full posts and teasers. It also has a similar feature for different types of media. As always, it is blazing fast at loading pages– much faster than Firefox on my Mac or IE on my HP.
It has a blog post editor which has tabs to access the source code and a preview. No image upload in it that I can see, but otherwise it looks good. Strange that it won’t talk to my Flickr, but I suppose that is too controlled by the blogging platform of my host.
And unlike it’s early, early versions, it’s been stable all afternoon since I installed it. Hopefully that will continue.
Go ahead. Give it a look and let me know what you think.
Blogged with Flock
Tomorrow I’ll be meeting with our part time math coach. She is ending her first session on campus as she helps us implement our Everyday Math program adoption.
On her agenda for our meeting is our school’s Web-Ex set up. That part of the meeting should be short, since we don’t HAVE a Web-Ex set up.
Okay, maybe that answer won’t quite fly. I need one that will. We don’t have big online conferencing/training needs, don’t offer any courses online. Most of the time when a vendor wants to conference with us, they have Elluminate or some similar tool. Therefore, I’m not looking for something that requires a subscription.
For the past hour I’ve been poking around. Since I haven’t met with her yet, my best understanding is that the math coach want’s to run little training sessions online. At minimum, I’m expecting she wants participants to be able to see a Powerpoint-style presentation while being able to hear her. More likely, she wants them to be able to converse.
Zoho may partially meet our need. Part of their suite is Zoho Show, an online presentation tool. Within it you can imbed meeting slides that allow the participants to actually see the presenter’s desktop. I’m trying to test it right now and it isn’t loading, but that is likely due to half of Singapore being online right now.
Zoho may work for the visuals, but we’d need something like Skype going for the audio. It would work best in our IT conference room where we have a conferencing phone system. However, some of the telephones at work have a speaker feature as well.
Another option for the visuals may be Google Presentations. They were announced on Google’s blog yesterday. You can use it to co-create a presentation. She can also share it online. Like Zoho’s tool, you invite participants to come view it. It has a chat client in the sidebar, which might work better than audio Skype for the participants. Easier for everyone to follow the discussion and there would be a transcript to refer back to afterwards.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t test that one either. It crashed my computer at work a few hours ago. However, that may have been the result of huge numbers of people testing it, since it was just announced yesterday.
So, what other free options are out there? If you’ve used one I’d like to hear about it. I’d like recommendations of what to use, and what to avoid.
(BTW, a big THANKS to D’Arcy Norman and Chris Craft for Twittering about Google Presentations. That’s how I heard about it just as I was starting my online search for such a tool. How perfect is that?)
Okay, I admit it. I feel like a groupie. There on the stage, not more than 50 feet away, are Jamie McKenzie, Alan November, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, Wes Fryer, Will Richardson and Jeff Utect. Amazing. I get to spend this weekend learning from these educators. Doesn’t quite seem real to look up from my Thai green curry at dinner and see Will walk by. We are sitting next to the Brainpop rep.
I have such high hopes for this weekend. I am hoping it helps us all see the shift that Will is discussing tomorrow. (Yeah, I’m a lazy tech coordinator who is hoping this weekend can jump start the fire among my great staff. Rather than waiting for me to start it.)
And so it begins…
Just read in the T.H.E. SmartClassroom Newsletter…
ePals Delivers Free E-Mail, Blogging for Schools
Education technology provider ePals is making its formerly subscription-based services available to schools free of charge. These services, available to all schools around the world, include SchoolMail, SchoolBlog, and In2Books.
Read More:
http://www.1105newsletters.com/ppezoon_rlswaslr.html
I am surprised to be writing this. Last night when I tried to access Blogger, I received a “Page Not Found” error. I assumed it was because I am here in Shanghai and that Blogger is still a blocked site here. However, tonight I find I can get in.
Yesterday, the other technology coordinators, the director of technolgy, and I flew to Shanghai. Since each of the tech coordinators works in a different division, we rarely see each other outside of our weekly meeting. Having this time together, even the informal times over meals, is a real boon in terms of team building and new ideas. Spending time with all of them is a treat.
Spent a great day today seeing the sites. We bought knock-off goods in the morning, drank good Paulaner beer for lunch, and went up in the Orient Pearl Tower this evening. Now we are contemplating massages. Life is Good.
Eagerly anticipating the start of the conference tomorrow night. As a tech person, I’m used to attending the big EARCOS conference and trying to find a few worthwhile tech sessions. Being here at Learning 2.0 where the entire thing is tech feels to good to be true.
I feel especially fortunate that 10 teachers from my division are attending the conference. I hope it gets them excited and gives them ideas for how to bring Learning 2.0 to their classrooms.
It all starts tomorrow evening…
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