TinEye is a reverse image search engine

Have you used an image from the internet and forgot to attach the source of the image? TinEye will help you locate the original source so you can acknowledge the origin of the image.

All you have to do is upload the image into TinEye and it will immediately locate where this image appears within the internet.

Having trouble watching the movie? Watch it directly here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGjlrzZBPRQ

Today we will have a look at a range of story telling tools that will allow your students to develop and showcase their understandings in a range of powerful ways. We will be exploring the following tools and I have placed them roughly in ease of use order.

Storybird – Tour

Storybird promotes imagination, literacy, and self-confidence. Its a simple writing and publishing tool that is quick, effective and powerful. Look here for the first attempt by a 5 year old. Drag and drop illustrations, text boxes and a quality product created quickly.

A very nice tool. Currently you are able to publish it to storybird, accept comments but not embed elsewhere. Students can collaborate on books.

Tikatok

Tikatok is an online creative community whose mission is to turn kids into published authors. Students can use their own illustrations and publish their book, even order real paperback and hardcover books.

Dvolver – Movie Maker

Create a text based, comic style movie with simple animation. Its very simple, quick and effective. No easy download at this stage or character voices but very easy to use.

Xtranormal | Text-to-Movie

A powerful cartoon/animation creation tool. Choose your characters, background and exercise full control over voices, languages, gestures and framing. Students can create powerful movies, role plays, presentations and debates, quickly and free

Need some more information on some of the things that we used today? This site will help you gain the skills to build your own personal learning network (PLN)!

Dont forget to join our Purposeful Learning Technologies Diigo group

We invite your feedback on today’s sessions. Some of the things you may include in your evaluations are as follows:

- What you found to be valuable

- What you found interesting

- What you would like to be included at our next session

- Please feel free to include any concerns or questions and we will respond to you individually.

Wordle is a tool that allows you to generate “word clouds” from text. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently. You can arrange  your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. You can take a screen shot of the ‘Wordle’ and use this for a variety of purposes.

Can you Guess the wordle?

Create wordles that are linked to any KLA and grouped according to particular to certain criteria or attributes.

Students could be divided up into teams and are encouraged search the internet for clues, and then come back as a team to decide on a final answer.

Tier the task by beginning with 1 common attribute – step it up to 3 or 4 for a more challenging task.

For example – the words below have 1 common attribute.

All  accessories

2 common attributes

All Australian Mammals

(Adding kangaroo and koala to the list would simplify this task)

3 common attributes

Australian athletes who all won gold at the 2008 Olympics

Advertise or promote your class Novel

Focus on Australian Geography

Western Australian Towns

Students could research to identify how many attributes they have in common eg all towns from Western Australia

Follow-up activities

-map the towns

-design their own wordle for each other eg all Australian towns that have a ‘Big’ …………..  banana, prawn etc  as a tourist attraction

A few schools have recently inquired about revising their Responsible and Acceptable Useage Policies.

Some school may refer to this as their ICT Policy, Ethical and Responsible Use Policy etc

Whatever name you want to give to this, it is important that your school has one and that it is up to date, relevant and reflect contemporary learning environments and issues.

A couple of our schools have kindly offered to share their policies for you to have a look through to get some ideas that may assist you when developing your own policy.

Thanks to St Paul’s Camden,  and St Joseph’s Bulli for sharing these with the group.

St Clares Narellan Vale has also offered to share their policies. As these are quite extensive I have attached these individually.

Cover Letter 4 Kinder Orientation

Cover letter 4 new students

Students contract for classroom

Students contract for general computer, internet and email …

Talk to students 3-6

ACCEPTABLE USE POLICY FOR STUDENTS COMPUTER, INTERNET AND E-MAIL

I have also created a dummy policy that is a combination of a couple of policies. This is just to prompt your thinking and to give you some idea of the sort of things you should include in your policy. Hopefully this will help.

Saint Examples Policy – NB: If you are going to use this or part of it, please ensure that it reflects the culture of your own school situation.

Toondoo is a great online comic creator with many great tools, Students can create cartoon characters, cartoons and books, all automatically published. Even better its free.

A new initative from Toondoo is the school domain, a chance to have a space just for your students work. More from Toondoo below.

‘Thanks to concerns (related to inappropriate content) from many educators, we will soon be offering exclusive school domains (such as schoolname.toondoo.com) Many schools have already signed up with us for this service. Here’s how it will work:

• We will provide a separate domain for each school (for example: http://www.schoolname.toondoo.com/).
• ONLY students of that school will be able to create toons at this domain but any one will be able to view them on the internet, embed them in blogs,wikis etc.
• We will let the teachers completely own the editorial rights in this case. That would mean they can monitor the content, block inappropriate toons and also do the editor picks.
• The domain will be free of charge during the beta testing phase of six months, post which there would be nominal annual charges for it.’

If you are interested, please contact Meera Sapra:meerasapra@toondoo.com.

Do you ever need to expand an image to create a huge, large impact poster for your classroom?
Blockposter will take your photo and create a large block poster. You pick the size and blockposter returns a PDF ready for printing.

Its free, quick and doesnt require a sign in. So next time you want to create a large display for your classroom you may like to give blockposter a try

This post is designed to provide participants with the opportunity to offer feedback on our Professional Learning days. Hopefully this will inform our planning for future sessions.

If you are stuck for ideas on what you may include in your comments, here are some basic suggestions:

- What you found to be valuable

- What you found interesting

- What you would like to be included at our next session

- Any concerns or questions

Professional learning Day 1 – 23rd February

Please add your comments