This image size is 1.3MB taken on my mobile phone when we visited the Bundaberg factory

This image is the resized copy of the one above and is now 600 x 800 pixels and only 123kb

This image has been put into word and had the background removed
The image would be less grainy if I had started again with the original sized image.  The more images are manipulated with and changed the more quality you lose from the image.  Best to start with the biggest and best picture you can! 

This image is a mixed up photo collage with some iArt additions 

Etiquette on the Net - Netiquette!

http://www.bridge.edu.au/en/collaborations/etiquette,_netiquette_and_cyber_safety.html

http://www.cybersmart.gov.au/Kids/Tips%20to%20stay%20safe%20and%20cybersmart/Netiquette.aspx

Some great sites when considering our student's safety on the net!

Netiquette takes one a wider focus for me now as a pre-service teacher.  Prior to E-learning, it was about NOT PUTTING THINGS IN CAPS AND SHOUTING, adding a :) to your email to show some emotions and putting a great deal of consideration into how you worded your online comments considering no one can tell your tone.

My consideration has definitely taken a wider scope to consider my professional digital footprint, those of my future students and their safety and wellbeing.  I look forward to educating my students about taking the security of their identity seriously and that they can still have fun and remain safe online.

It also includes some serious education of my own regarding use and copyright issues.  How and when we can use students' work, how to show it and where we can show it.  I believe I will be doing some further research into these matters so that I don't put myself or my students in jeopardy with copyright laws and intellectual property.

Uses for ICTS in the classroom

use EdStudio (the learning place) to create a class webpage and put up homework, spelling, challenge activities, links to mathletics, educational simulations, topical/subject information (create hard copies for those students who don't have access or encourage them to come into the classroom prior to school) 

use ipods to take photos of science experiments and create a journal with a blogger account

interactive whiteboard for playing spelling games/math games integrated into literacy/numeracy lessons

use school/classroom computers for research projects

teacher could use wix, weebly or webs to make webquests for students to follow

and could make use of such widgets and accessories like Voki to provide instructions

nintendo DSis (education games only) could be used as a reward system for students 

audio centre (headphones and hi-fi/computer) could be utilised for comprehension activities (students who may be more auditory learners)

teacher may use a 'wand scanner' to quickly access documents or items to put on an interactive whiteboard to show students 

blurb.com might be used by small groups of students to communicate their learning of certain topics by creating a book 

video recording equipment/digital cameras may be used to capture still or video regarding steps to take in an experiment or communicate how something works and then... 

place a slideshow or edited video on youtube 

use a blog program such as wordpress or google blogger to create free digital student portfolios for their work and class contributions throughout the year

I shall keep adding to this as I think of more things.... 

iPhone app active!!!

Wahoo!

Finally got the iPhone blogger app so I can blog all day and night! Ppffttt.

Yup. Typical gen y I hear! Twitch speed all the way

AHUH moment!

How to add a blog to your reading list (when they don't have a follow me widget)

On the desktop for blogger, the left hand side there is a 'reading list'
Under that is an 'add' button
you can put the url of the blog you wish to follow and manually add them to your 'watch list'

Yyiippeeeee

Rock N a Hard Place!

Hey all, 

Whether its because I'm dehydrated and not thinking straight or whether i've had a brain wave... I feel I need to share this... 

Those of you who know me well, know how much I enjoy helping others so what i'm about to type will be taken in the correct context.  Those of you who aren't as familiar with me, please don't be offended. 

OOoohh I'm getting a bit D&M on myself LOL! 

Ok, sitting here reading through my blog and the entries on other people's blogs I realise that I sometimes am at war with myself when it comes to helping others.  

1) to understand the problem and find a solution I initially sit and go through options and possible solutions to the issue until I find something that works - this comes naturally to me (being a digital native - Prensky)

2) if i'm doing this to assist someone else, I try to undo anything I've done and explain what I'm doing and why so that they grasp the concept and steps behind why it wasn't working or couldn't do it in the first place

3) sometimes I wonder whether saying yes to assisting or stepping in with solutions for people is the right thing to do; I have only learned what I know by going through my own frustration, a little bit of growing up with ICT all my life and pure trial and error.  If I decline to assist someone, am I teaching them more than what I could if I helped???? 

So sometimes I wonder whether I should "get back in my box" rather than jump in or be so willing to help but then again if i have the knowledge I'm more than willing to share what I know.  This is the dilemma I come to... 

COMMENTS WELCOMED!  :)  to help me at my cross roads  ;)

www.nationalgeographic.com 

Cheers

Kat

Fodey

Now that I know where to go to put in the html, these types of sites all have the same process... its great


Hehehe... happy blogging!!!

Spell with Flickr

hhrmm, fairly straight forward



Didn't like the aesthetics of the spell with flickr website.  The blue writing on a black background mades things difficult to read and the sizing of the text was particularly small.  I think this is a great entertainment application however possibly needs more thought to the presentation of the overall site.

Having used the regular size and changed it to square size, the images are still too big.  I wonder if there is another way of resizing... mmmm something to look into.

I think having used Fodey, I realise that I'm starting to access higher levels of blooms taxonomy.

 

Retrieved from: http://taspd.edublogs.org/2007/04/23/revised-blooms-taxonomy/

Having the knowledge of where to go and what site to use, I was able to understand and re-tell myself the steps needed.  I then applied this and created a Spell with Flickr image and analyzed the website and the image itself.  With the final product, I evaluated the image and was quite critical regarding the flexibility and application of it to my blog.  Using my prior knowledge I was able to apply my skills to this new situation where I took a screen grab/dump, placed the clipboard image into a photo image application and was able to crop out the letters of my name from the picture of my blog screen.  I then created, (the final level of higher order thinking in the bloom's taxonomy triangle) and re-saved the cropped portion of my name as a jpeg image. 

and... 

Tah Dah!

ATTN: Iphone users - Want to save battery power???

Hi all,

Just thought i'd communicate this on my blog.  Something I was told about by a friend today.

WANT TO SAVE BATTERY ON YOUR iPHONE?

Double press your home button ( [ ] )
When the icons come up at the bottom of the screen> press on them until there is a red ( - ) button that comes up>
Press the red ( - ) to close them down

These apps and items are running in the background and draining battery power even though you've gone back to your home screen, they're not CLOSED.

If you do this with apps regularly throughout the day you'll save yourself some battery power!


Cheers
Kat

YouTube - this is what i do!

When people ask me what I love doing, its all about music and dance for me...

I love getting down to old style music dancing swing jive or lindy hop.  Now you may be familiar with these or maybe not so... Check this couple out doing some lindy hop.  I love putting the same style and performance into my dances but haven't had a partner for a while now to do it with.  Miss it very much.

Wix - WYSIWYG website builder

http://www.wix.com/s0207204/digital-task-cards

This is a link to a previously constructed CQUni assignment.

I have used Wix and Weebly which are both WYSIWYG website builders and both of them have plus and minus points.

With this particular assignment myself and the class mate I was working with wanted to design the website with a student area and a separate teacher area that wasn't obvious to the students.  We didn't want students being distracted by other text and information only relevant to the teacher.  Having considered the features of Wix, I was able to create our main homepage with 4 activities.  For each of the 4 activities we wanted a teacher area.  On each of those pages we made a teacher link and we had created completely separate webpages to which the user was taken when they clicked them, meaning that they went totally away from the main student activity website.  The teacher area didn't need to be locked down so this wasn't a concern when considering the design concept.

Wix Plus: straight forward, not html coding, free, visual, provides variations for design and layouts, good templates, multiple pages within one account

Wix Minus: certain extra features and special add on gadgets are difficult to embed, personally not as aesthetically appealing to use

Wix Interesting: templates and layouts already had gifs and movement built into them.


As a learning manager using this assessing tool would help students to examine the program and over time with comparisons made against similar products, they could discern which program/s would be best suited to particular contexts and situations.  Also, when making recommendations, students need to be able to communicate issues or limitations to a peer or cohort.

Prezi OVER Powerpoint

Check out my prezi I started almost a year ago... lol

http://prezi.com/user/ewyqi5vncjcv/ 

It will give you a taste for what you can do and below is my venn diagram for comparing the two software products.

Click on the image below to enlarge.

Voki - Take TWO!

Last week in the lecture when we were shown how to embed 'html' and that it was difficult, I must say I felt really silly.  As soon as it was bought up on the large screen, I immediately noticed the 'html' button.  Before it was fully explained I said to a class mate; "OMG there's a button!" and for a GenY who does almost EVERYTHING at twitch speed, it taught me that I should slow down and look more thoroughly next time.

Anyways - take two on embedding the voki now that i know there is a html BUTTON! 

 

Design Design Design

Well tonight I had a play just with the basics of my blog rather than stewing over not being able to embed my Voki.

Since setting up my blog initially, I hadn't really played with the accessories and settings of the blog itself.  Tonight I ventured through the 'Design' tab and in particular the 'Layout' area.  What FUN!
I put in a heap of new widgets and gadgets.  Some of them needed the width changed in order for them to display property and some didn't fit at all with my page.  They threw out my aesthetics and skewed the layout of my other postings and items.

Overall it was a great success and I had a load of fun doing it!

Voki Kat

Hrrrmmm... still working on this... its very frustrating 


If you can copy this into your browser it works 

http://www.voki.com/pickup.php?scid=6382329&height=400&width=300 

HOWEVER!!!! I'd much prefer to get some assistance perhaps from someone else if possible... 

It seems that when I'm on Voki and I click the blogger button to embed it into my blog, I put my username, password and change my blog name to be correct but it keeps saying failed.   I think the problem may exist with what details i'm putting where - perhaps my email that i'm putting in as username should be my name rather than email address... ?????

Who ya guna call? KAT! :)

Today I went to uni for my lectures not know what was in store for me today.

On of my class mates sat down beside me and asked me if I was able to have a look at their blog as the text was not staying formatted.  I know the way I work best.  This is to have a play with it myself so that I can find out what the problem is and then ensure that I explain it to the person with the problem.

The problem was with the font size and the font format options.  Once these were all manually changed to 'normal', all looked the same once these settings were adjusted.

The same class mate then asked if I could help with Wordle.  Unfortunately at the time I was unable to get this to work and suspected that the issues were to do with a firewall or file block and with time restraints I was unable to resolve the issue completely.

I am a very determined person and not being able to solve these problems was very frustrating to me.
The other day I created a Voki however again, due to some blocks, I was and still am unable to upload this to my blog but I WILL keep trying to put it on... I'm NOT giving up!

Then... my class mate said she was having problems connecting to the CQU wifi.  After several minutes I was able to ascertain that the firewall on the laptop was blocking the access for the wifi connection.  Once this was changed, I explained this to my class mate and she was able to log in and access the wifi connection.

What a morning, but it was a good feeling knowing that I was able to help someone else.

My Wordle creation... stuff about me

Managing E-learning Blog - Why Unique-icle???

Hi all,

This is the start of my managing e-learning blog for CQuni.

I'm sure that you're wondering why this blog is called 'Unique-icle'.  In my first year of CQuni I started a Prezi project for my teaching dream.  The basis of my vision is that every child is like a snowflake.  Each snowflake is unique and different in many ways.  As snowflakes are made of water that is ice, icicles fitted nicely.  Therefore my blog is called 'Unique-icle'.

Hope you enjoy!
Cheers
Kat