The Plane organisation in Australia have just posted this.  In the post is a video by our very own Mark Tredwell.  In the video Mark argues again that as educators we are at the confluence of three major global shifts and that it is our duty to prepare students for this paradigm shift.  Mark says that there has never been a better time to be an educator, I agree.  As we go into the summer vacation this video should be something that we should all watch and reflect on.  Then we should consider what changes we need to make to our pedagogies to ensure that our classrooms provide the environment where we create the life long learners that Mark talks about.  Make 2012 the start of your transition.

I have spent the day with the students of Upper Harbour Primary. We have been looking at using tools such as the iPad to capture change over time using apps such as those highlighted here.  They will be using their iPad or iPod’s next year to capture this kind of change over time.  The web cams in their computers can also be used to record time lapse videos really easily by downloading and installing the free version of Sam Animation from Tufts University.

The following site has some good examples of time lapse in the wild, to get students thinking about what they could make the focus of their time lapse work.  However, speeding up the world of the slow in the class or the school environment is made easy with the techniques I demonstrated to the students today.  Once I got home  I set up my camera and took the following study of the clouds.

I came across a post on the Upside Down Education blog today that discusses the effect that furniture can have upon elearning pedagogy in a classroom http://upsidedown.edublogs.org/2011/11/06/learning-spaces/ In my Building a 5th Wall in Your Classroom  I suggest how this can be done by simply moving furniture around.  The presentation is below:

I was inspired to make this conclusion having seen the excellent presentation by David Jakes who describes how the layout of furniture in a classroom has a direct impact upon the learning that it can facilitate, it is well worth a look. http://www.slideshare.net/djakes/would-you-want-to-learn-here-3015221

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.

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.