Adventures in Teaching and Learning

I’ve just found a new and interesting tool: Scribble Maps. Very geographical – but I am sure there are other uses too!

Two of my newest favourite sites to share with you today are …

SimplyBox

and

Free Photo Printing

With SimplyBox, you get a new toolbar on your browser window (Note to self and anyone that can help: I have 8 of these toolbars that are quickly using up too much space at the top of my browser – anyway I can minimise these all the top? Wasting too much space!), then when you see a picture, video or piece of text that you like, you simply box and save it. Then, when you look at your set of boxes on the internet, not only will you see the image that you liked, but it is still linked to the original website, so you can quickly find it and correctly attribute the image you are using. Works great with CompFight.

Free Photo Printing does what it say on the tin. It directs you to photo printing sites along with the codes that you need to get free or reduced photos. Fabulous! (Thanks to Sarah Fox for the tipoff!)

I’ve been trying to keep off the computer a bit more, and do other important things instead. However, while trying to find a great Flickr mashup website that I can’t remember the name of and am having trouble finding, I have found another very interesting site – The Multicolr Search Lab. Click on one or more colours, and this site will find photos from Flickr that contain that colour. I’ve tried a particular gold shade, and simply looking at the choice of images cheers me up! What is also great news is that they have looked at about 10 million Creative Commons images, so I can feel free to use and attribute the images I find. Do have a look!

Also, I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this one before – CompFight – another Flickr mashup tool. It’s fantastic – I’ve been using it loads. I’m trying to make my presentations more visual, and it’s important for me, particularly as an RE teacher!, that I use Creative Commons images. These days, there are so many tools to make it easy to do that that there’s no excuse not to. (Although I do admit, I am struggling to find one or two images that I think would be just right …). Anyway, this is great. Try it. Just remember to set the Creative Commons indicator to “only”, or else you will still need to check if you are allowed to use them.

It just has to be done … a post about the snow in London! However, I will try to add a few thoughts on Twitter as well, and its role in helping people what is going on with the weather. In terms of transport, as opposed to looking out the window and seeing that it’s still snowing.

As soon as I got “the call” at 7am, just before I left the house, but was already warmly wrapped up (”the call” being, of course, snow day: school’s closed!”), I decided to head out anyway but with my camera rather than my rucksack. The sky was still a bit brown-grey, just beginning to clear, the air was crisp, and the snow was (still is, in most cases, at the moment) clean, crisp, fluffy, white, light and airy. I wandered around the local area, and took quite a few photos, before heading back to my back yard, making a couple of snow angels, and building a snow-face (the snow was a bit too soft and fluffy to impact together to make a full sized snow person!). I then decided that, since I was still awake, to upload my photos before going back to catch up with my sleep (now at 81% uploaded, been going since about 9am and it’s now 2pm …) and see what was happening in the world of Twitter.

A lot. Also, a lot of people were twittering using “#uksnow” (this made me discover that I’ve no hash sign on my computer, which is a bit weird); there are sites dedicated to looking at these “hashtags” and how they are used on Twitter. Exploring these links helped me find a number of interesting pages: Broadstuff reflects on how Twitter has helped people find out what the transport arrangements have been like around the UK; there’s a great map mashup showing how much snow is falling in different parts of the UK; I’ve started using TwitPic because so many others have been showing off their snow photos, and Channel4News were wanting people to upload pics (and to get their 3000 follower – it could be you!).

Anyway, it’s all been fun, and later I’ll see about posting some of my favourite Flicker snow pics here!

http://www.pimpampum.net/phrasr/?id=13051

I wonder how this will show up … another Flickr mashup from PimPamPum.

This is an experiment in making a book using my Flickr photographs. However, I have also had a bit of a bizarre experience. When I clicked on PimPamPum, I was greeted by a song in Chichewa! Zikomo kwambiri, Mulungu … I then clicked on who, and PimPamPum, which has links to a variety of Flickr mashups, consists of two Barcelonians, so it’s a bit of a bizarre coincidence, but a nice one anyway!

NOTE: I suppose I should really take the above paragraph out, but it has really made me laugh, so instead I’ll update it. I have since discovered that the Chichewa singing was not coming from a Spanish website at all, but my friend Victor’s blog, which I had open at the same time! Since he is Malawian, that makes much more sense!!