Category: Images

This Morning at EBC

I’ll be updating this post throughout the day to alert you of things happening here at EBC San Antonio. The full list of sessions is here. I’ll be sharing information form the sessions that I’m attending. The session titles are in bold.

Social Networking for Professional Development

Scott Merrick is sitting next to me and streaming this discussion live.

  1. Should it be organized or self-forming?
    • Should the tool(s) be dictated?
  2. An atmosphere promoting risk-taking is imperative.
  3. Teachers know what they want to learn. Professional development should be tailored around them rather requiring them to attend PD in which they had no say.

Social Networking in the Classroom

Vicki Davis is sitting by me and is streaming this seession here.

  1. Teachers in the room are using Ning, Elgg, and several private online communities.
  2. Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis updated us about the Flat Classroom and the Horizon Project.
  3. How important are digital citizenship and pedagogy in these decisions?
  4. If someone says a curse word in the classroom do we close the school? If there’s a fight at recess do we quit having recess? Why do we over react to these problems in online spaces?

Notes from Clif

I’ve made some additions to the blog. Take a look and let me know what you think, please.

  • You can view the newly added photo album by clicking on the corresponding link in the Blog Navigation menu.
  • I’m currently developing my consulting and contact pages (HELP!).
  • Several new resources are available under the Clif’s Resources menu including: a free subscription to my educational technology email newsletter, access to my Google Reader Shared Items, and my Pageflakes and Twine profiles which are likely to become quite active during EduBloggerCon, NECC, and Teaching and Learning with Web 2.0.
  • A lot is happening at Clif’s Wiki, too.
  • Of course, the blog’s entire theme has been under development for about 3 weeks, now.

Wimbledon starts on Monday. I’ll post my predictions before it begins.

Suggested Reading

Diigo’s Psychotic No. 1 Fan – Miguel Ghulin

The Last Professors – Inside Higher Ed

Photo Journal: Trip to Airport

I think there is great potential in the use of digital images in the classroom. I realize that digital cameras began making their way into classrooms about 10 years ago and that this is not a groundbreaking idea. The tools are much more readily available these days and I frequently encourage teachers to consider the wide variety of strategies for integrating digital images with teaching and learning. A few possible classroom activities include photo scavenger hunts (examples of geometric concepts or states of matter), photo essays or journals (from a field trip, data collection, or tell an original story), and as post-reading exercises (demonstrate the main idea, the antagonist’s emotion, or your reflection).

I had to make a quick trip to the airport this weekend. I saw my camera as I was leaving the house and grabbed it. It was a great day and I thought I’d share some snapshots of my mini-adventure on the blog. I see a few people share glimpses into their lives in creative ways on their blogs and aspire to do so on mine. This also provides me a personal example (albeit a beginner’s attempt) to share during my classes and professional development workshops this summer. So…here, in photographs, is the story of my recent drive to the airport.

More Favorite Children’s Books

I enjoyed our recent discussion of favorite children’s books so much that I wanted write a follow-up. A lot of teachers have mentioned that they have already bookmarked it for future reference. This blog exists for exactly that reason – to be a resource for teachers.

My favorite genre of children’s literature is wordless picture books. It’s fun to see kids get swept away in these books. The artwork is usually stellar and the author’s/ illustrator’s work typically invokes our creative interpretations. Wordless picture books can be a great way to encourage higher order thinking, creativity, and self-expression. They can often be used to practice the elements of a story (setting, plot, character, etc.) or to initiate activities in creative writing, art, drama, multi-media, etc. It’s often a good way to level the playing field with regard to student reading levels. Here are a few of my very favorite wordless picture books.

The Silver Pony – One of the very first books I “read” from my elementary school library. This book has many elements that I have always enjoyed: horses, Greek mythology, art, imagination and creativity. I wish I knew how many times I checked out this book. I need to go buy a copy for our family library.

Animalia – Another outstanding work by Graeme Base.

Tuesday – Mostly a wordless picture book about frogs.

Photoshop Now Available Online for FREE

I’m glad to see Adobe venture into the online realm. There are many, many ways that teachers and students could use this FREE resource. Photoshop Express is a decent first attempt, but I hope that they will put more resources into it and make it the leader in online image applications.

Photoshop Express, the long-awaited free online image editor from Photoshop maker Adobe, [was] released as a public beta [today]. Unlike Adobe’s more powerful image editing tools for the desktop, Photoshop Express is aimed not at the professional photographer, but at the casual snapshot fan looking to polish up images before sharing them online at sites like Photobucket, Facebook and Flickr.

Photoshop Express, which will compete with other free image editors like Picnik and FotoFlexer, is tailored toward the casual user with easy-to-use, one-click editing tools….The service also integrates with a number of photo-sharing websites, enabling you to push and pull photos from Facebook, Photobucket and Picasa, though not, at least for now, Flickr. Adobe tells Wired.com that support for Flickr in the works, but won’t be available during the initial beta testing phase.

Photoshop Express offers two gigabytes of online storage space and requires Flash Player 9. The interface should be familiar to anyone who’s used Photoshop or Photoshop Elements and offers tools like cropping, red eye correction, sharpening, touchup and more, including a set of advanced effects for changing colors, distorting images and converting photos to black and white.

All editing is non-destructive, meaning you can add and remove changes on a whim using the checkboxes beside each tool, which allow you to easily turn edits and effects on and off.

Read the entire Wired.com review.

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSpO4iFPF88

Resources

Photoshop Express – Getting Started

The Geo-Images Project

Using Digital Images in Teaching and Learning

Teaching with Digital Content: Lesson Plans

Free Software: Camtasia and Snag It

Camtasia (Screen recording software for making video of computer use) and Snag It (Screen capturing software for making images of your computer screen) are currently available for free. These tools can be really useful when developing instruction, tutorials, job aids, etc. More information is available at mguhlin’s blog.

Jethro reminded me that Techsmith also has a new product out called Jing which is less technical than Camtasia, but still a great product, and it’s also free.