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Do Not Go Quietly into the Classroom

Do not Go Quietly into the Classroom: David Truss

A thought provoking look at the benefits of using technology in the classroom - for your own personal and professional growth. Why do you use technology and web 2.0 tools in your teaching and learning?

Tags: teaching web 2.0 learning ict
Posted at 12:31PM Oct 28, 2008 by Alison Hall  |  Comments[0]

Libraries taking on web2.0

I have noticed a bit of a Library theme happening in my life recently. It all started at the movies...

I was fortunately enough to a special screening of Hollywood Librarian, a full length documentary focusing on the depiction of Librarians on the big screen. The film also highlights how libraries have reinvented their image, how they have adapted to the explosion of technology, how they are important centres of community engagement, how much some libraries have to fight funding and how undervalued the role of a librarian can be. The message which I got the most out of the film was how libraries are often a measuring stick for the health of a community, as they are the way in which those who have the least can own something for free = knowledge.

photo: library books by brungrrl

Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike

The National Library of Australia has released the The Australian Newspapers Beta service. It allows access to historic Australian newspapers digitised as part of the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program. It's a very cool little research tool, and the best thing is that users can be part of the process! You can create your own tags for articles, edit scanning mistakes and keep track of the articles you have tagged. Wonderful stuff and a great way for libraries and their hidden treasures to reach a new 21st Century audience!

And finally Librarian Gems has something to say about the great tool Libraries are using to embrace the web2.0 world...

photo: books of knowledge by SpacePotato
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative

Tags: national library web 2.0 libraries nl hollywood library libraria australian
Posted at 09:26PM Sep 29, 2008 by Alison Hall  |  Comments[2]

Cool Tools

This week I have found a few really cool tools that I feel will be HUGE timesavers for teachers!

The first is a handy little tool called Screenhunter. Screenhunter is a screen capture tool that you can use to capture anything you see on your computer screen, instantly and only the bit that you want.

Let me explain: The old way to take a screen shot would be to press the "Print Screen" key on your keyboard, then paste into an image editing program where you would need to crop, resize it, and then save it so you could then use it. The new way with Screenhunter simply involves hitting a 'hotkey' and bypassing all that messy editing. Yes that's it!

The basic Screenhunter tool is free to download and once you have it installed you can start grabbing only the bits of your screen you want, and using them straight away, very very quickly. You hit your 'hotkey' and then just drag your mouse over the section you want to capture and it captures it in a BMP, JPEG or a GIF format and saves it straight to your desktop. You can then upload it straight away, move the image to a folder to keep, or simple delete it when you are done. Simplicty at its best.

The second cool tool is called Quizlet. As the sites author states "Quizlet eats flashcards for breakfast!". Oh BTW he only graduated from high school a few weeks ago!

Quizlet is a vocabulary learning tool. You can make a list of words, add definitions and then learn the words in a number of different formats including a few familiarising flashcard like activities, a test with mulitple choice and true and false answers, a space race and a mix and match game. You can make as many sets as you like and the best part is that you can embed the code from the scatter activity into a html block. have a play with one created for the Human Skeleton below.

You can see a few examples of what I was able to do with quizlet in the Languages Matter project in OzProjects.

Tags: cooltools snapshot timesavers quizlet screenhunter web 2.0
Posted at 03:11PM Jul 09, 2008 by Alison Hall  |  Comments[0]