Today I was working for Lifeway College again. The venue today was Kingsway College in Orewa. I contintue to be delighted to see so many teachers willing to give up their weekends to make pedagogical shifts in their practice through integrating elearning into their planning.

I have long been a fan of time lapse photography and the addition of the time lapse app to my iPad has now enabled me to take simple time lapse footage. You can see the example taken from my office window below.

More importantly this app can be used in a classroom to enable students to demonstrate change over time, such as the effect that yeast has on dough as it proves or ice cubes melting etc.

However if you wish to see some truly beautiful time lapse photography, you should also look at the You Tube video below.

Time lapse from my office window:

Epic time lapse of Ruapehu and the Milky Way…

I had a great day working with the team at Lifeway College. They had invited me along to work with their delegates to learn how to use tumblr as a blogging platform. I worked with over 80 teachers throughout the day. Lifeway have put together an elearning package for schools and they either deliver it in school or as they did today at one of their venues. I have yet to se the entire programme details butnit appears that it runs over several months and is a cumulative skills process, looks good.

They have booked me for several more days this year and are looking to do the same with me next year too. I have suggested that I could also offer courses on how to use specific tools such as the ones that I build tutorials for, but related to the integration of the tools into class programmes. The main aim with any of these initiatives is to move beyond mere use of the tools and towards seamless integration and pedagogical shift by the teachers to ensure that the tools leverage deeper learning on behalf of the students.

I have also offered to the Lifeway team my social media course. Only time will tell what they would like me to deliver for them and where I fit into their programme. All in all a good day and one that will be repeated again next week in Orewa.

My second breakout of the day was my presentation on QR codes, how to use them in the classroom. In an earlier post I suggested that we as educators need to market learning to our students, using a marketing tool such as a QR code in a classroom can go some way to ‘market learning’ to students. At the point of publishing this presentation has had over 5000 views, I have no idea why it has become so popular so quickly, but for a short while it was on the slideshare home page as one of the trending presentations on Twitter, great stuff! Presentation is below:

Had a great day yesterday, two presentations to deliver and both went well.  I took a bit of a punt on my first breakout.  I have had poor experiences with the internet connectivity when I have presented in Rotorua before, admitedly this was at a Learning at Schools conference and not at a Ulearn.  However, it was still a punt, I invited Patrick from TalkWheel to Skype in from San Francisco to tell the audience about his product and to give a short demonstration.  It went really well.  I had wanted a small intimate room, but got the theatre and 110 delegates!  Apart from the lack of a working mic and the lack of round tables, it went well.  Presentation is below:

The annual Ulearn conference has started with pre-conference workshops happening today and the main conference starting tomorrow. I am presenting all day on Thursday and am looking forward to the networking opportunities that this conference always offers to delegates.  If you are not attending you can follow proceedings on twitter by using the #ulearn11 tag.  I will be updating regularly via Twitter, Facebook and here.  It is always fun, stimulating and exhausting in equal measure.  Due to the 2011 earthquakes in Christchurch the conference is being held in Rotorua for the first time.

I have just updated my Twitter badge for the duration of the Ulearn conference in Rotorua to the one above.  If you would like to add the Ulearn badge to your Twitter icon you can download the image from this link here You will need to be able to add it to your own image in an editing programme that allows you to add layers.  http://aviary.com would be a good online solutio, using the Raven Vector editing programme.  Let’s see how many avatars we can change at Ulearn this year.

I discovered from one of my various feeds yesterday about the new ‘Helicopter View’ option in Google Maps.  So I tweeted it out yesterday:

Today I have had a play with the feature, it is great especially when combined with Jing, so that you can capture the video of the virtual journey.  I would have uploaded an exmple, but the screen shot will have to suffice, the journey I captured with Jing was 916mb in size… To activate the Helicopter view is very simple.  All you have to do is to put in a start location and a destination point in the get directions option of Google Maps, once the route has been calculated, a small “3-D” graphic appears to the right of the first direction, simply click on that and the animation plays.  Depending on your internet connection it may take some time for the information to load, but it is worth the wait.

This is a great feature from Google and I can see so many practical uses for it on websites, in the classroom etc.

I have been working with Helen from Woodford Schools, Plymouth, UK for a number of years.  Back in 2007 we started to collaborate between our schools in New Zealand and England.  We used tools such as Skype, Dim Dim, Skrbl to collaborate and I spent many late evenings remote teaching her students in the UK from my desk via web cam here in New Zealand.  The students were not at all phased at being taught in this manner, it was the adults in the room in the UK observing this who had the hardest time!  The collaboration only worked because the two of us at either end of the asynchronous communication plan had energy, vision and drive to see it through.  We had never met, but decided to write and present a paper on our collaboration.  We presented at the VIASL IFIP3.5 conference at the Charles University, Prague in June 2008.  You can read about that here. We wanted to prove that remote teaching and asynchronous collaboration between students could work in a meaningful manner.  I have always been and remain fascinated by the potential of remote learning to reach out to students in remote locations to enable a rich, bespoke and meaningful curriculum for them.  I am currently working on a side project to facilitate such opportunities for students, I am currently dubbing it a school of passions.

I am now about to embark on another round of  remote collaboration with students.  Again I am working with Helen and this time Megan from Wakaaranga School in Auckland.  Our aim this time is to see if students can collaborate, negotiate, design and construct a game in Gamemaker.  They have already been organised into teams of four, two students from the UK and two from NZ.  This team of four will be designing and collaborating asynchronously.  A wiki has been created for them as a staging post for them to share their work.  It is from here that the students will collaborate.  The students will work on their Gamemaker program once they have agreed the objectives and plans for the game, locally on their computers, then usin tools such as Jing or Cam Studio they will take screen shots of the work they have done and submit those to the wiki.  They will then communicate with each other using Talkwheel to monitor what the other groups are struggling with, to share ideas and successes.  However, rather than typing their messages the students will be recording their messages using Audioboo so that they will in effect be leaving ansaphone messages for all to listen to via a hyperlink.  The project is all prepped and is about to commence.

I have to say a big thank you to Patrick at Talkwheel who has been very supportive in setting up student accounts for us and providing me with some training and also to Kate at Audioboo who has offered her help towards this project too.

I have been working with the Intermediate team at Waiau Pa School all year and in term 2 and 3 they have been building an epic marble run that runs around the entire class.  The class was split into four teams and each team had was responsible for the marble track on that wall.  They had to design a track that linked in with the other tracks on the adjoining walls.  This is their end product:

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