Remember Wordle?  The following site is like Wordle only pumped.  You can add words or link to sites or RSS feeds and you can arrange your tag cloud into a range of masks.  The example here is has been created from the resources page of my blog.  Simply go to http://www.tagxedo.com/app.html Once you have created your tag cloud you can then save your work as either a .jpg or .png for downloading and saving.  No bothersome screen dumps and image editing as was the case in Wordle.  Thanks to http://digitalgoonies.com for the link.

If you have been inspired to have a go at changing the layout of your class in time for the start of the new term/academic year, as a result of the slideshow I highlighted in my last post then this tool might be just what you need.  Using this tool you can play with your space and the furniture within it, from the comfort of your computer and not have to get all hot bothered moving furniture until your design is just right.  http://classroom.4teachers.org/ allows you to do this.  You can create a scale model of your room (imperial units only) and once you have arrived at a design you are happy with, save it and print it off.  Let me know how you get on and share images of your new design layout and the impact it has.

In a shameless attempt to share the ever growing list of free e-learning tools on my resources page, I thought that I would create an occasional ‘Delicious moments’ post.  The purpose of my post is to remind us all of the myriad of wonderful tools that are available for us to use.  It is also a plea to not continually follow the new, there is so much great stuff that already exists, that we could probably spend several lifetimes using all that does already.  This occasional post is also aimed at bringing awareness to my delicious account and the links that I place there, not all of those links are on my resources page, so you need to visit both.  Finally, the ‘Delicious moments’ posts are a chance for me to trawl through a range of the tools I have collected and collate them into similar groups.  This first post is music, not a strength of mine, but I am sure that there are many of you out there who will be able to make more of these tools than I ever could.

Freeplay music:  this site has thousands of tracks from different genre’s that are free for school use.  Please take the time to read their licensing page, as you can not publish their music in any capacity other than for school based activities.  Despite this, this is a great resource for schools and students to use.

Listen music:  This tool allows you to search thousands of music artists, even really obscure stuff, find their back catalogues, sample some tracks from albums and even listen to whole albums in some cases.  The site links you to the appropriate download sites to purchase the music and also has links to the biographies of the artists, album art and lyrics for every song.  A great site.

Mynah:  This is one of the suite of tools in the Aviary collection.  This tool is rather like Garageband in look and feel with pre-recorded loops for you to experiment with, multi track recording and mixing capabilities, except that this tool is on the net, enabling anywhere working and entirely platform independent.

Audiotool:  This tool must  be the best music creation tool on the net.  It allows you to create and mix your own music, generated from a range of tools that you select and plug in, complete with cables.  Each tool looks and operates like its real life counterpart, enabling great levels of control and creativity for your students.

There are many other tools for music creation and recording in my various repositories of data, I hope that this has whetted your appetite for more and to take some time to look through the lists and in the first instance spend some time with the four above.

A couple of websites have come out recently that when combined with each other make a perfect storm of potential outcomes for geographers and historians alike.  Whilst some of them are not that old, they may be well known, but it is the combination of all three that has the greatest potential.  The first of these tools that I became aware of was http://dipity.com a grate time line tool that enables a user to create a linear set of events from pretty much any resource at their disposal on the internet.  Then came http://scribblemaps.com which enabled a user to overlay their own content onto a Google Maps page. Here the user can create shapes that might illustrate the phases of development, the alignment of troops on the battlefield overlaid on the modern topography.  In addition the user can then add their own text and images to the map.  The final tool in the triumvirate of tools is the newly launched http://historypin.com this tool encourages users to upload, link historic images of locations and places into a map and pin them to their actual location on the map.  These images can then be compared against the current Google Street view image (where possible) in order that a comparison or an evolution of images can be compared against the present.

Now using the different tools a user can not only put objects in a 2D space of a map but represent that same data in a linear time line and embed all of that information into one source such as a wiki.  Great for cause and effect and making links between information in space and time.  A perfect storm of tools.

As July approaches and New Zealand can finally get its hands on an iPad, videos like the following allow us to plan just how we might use it.  Just think of the classroom applications too!

iPad + Velcro from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

Today I had my first play with an iPad.  I have been building up reservations about it in the days prior.  Comments from Fiona in the last post pointed out that the unit is a content reciever and not a content creator.  Content creation and publishing  is what we want for education.  The chatter seems to be more about what it can not do and what it is lacking, rather than what it can do. Today I tried to use tools such as http://vocaroo.com and http://fotobabble.com and the lack of an Adobe Flash facility on the iPad rendered these sites useless.  However, on the fotobabble page I was prompted to download the fotobabble app from the app store.   Online tools such as Vocaroo and Fotobabble are brilliant  for students to create and publish content quickly and would be the kind of utilities that I would want to use with a tool so mobile as the iPad.

It is the locked in nature of it that worries me, all programs to be installed on the iPad will either be created or vetted by Apple.  Today as part of the discussions about its functionality for education purposes, or lack of it, we were developing workarounds using Drop Box etc.  These solutions are clunky at best.  The iPad can not surf freely due to the Flash embargo, maybe I am missing the functionality point here and am wanting to bend the device to meet a need it was never intended to meet, but still, not supporting Flash?  I have heard that Google docs can be viewed but not edited, what is the reasoning behind this?  I had hoped that this tool would prove to be a boon for education, but in this first iteration it is too locked down, why I am not sure, other than pandering to my dark Orwellian marketing theories that I could entertain on behalf of Apple.

If the machine can enable content creation, if the installation of third party software via the Internet is enabled,  if open surfing to Flash enabled sites occurs, if it gets a camera and a USB port, the iPad still has the potential to be a real winner.  As you can see from my images it is smaller than an average NZ school exercise book and almost as thick, it is light and very intuitive to use the tools and apps we have been allowed to install were fun, but not educationally significant, early days I know.  I liked it.  I liked its feel, weight and interface.  It lacks the educational substance, and freedom that I personally desire.  But who knows by the time the 3rd black sweatered and overly orchestrated launch comes round it might be a tool that has education potential without clunky work arounds.

Written offline on 6 April. Uploaded when WiFi at conference allows. Uneventful trip via Sydney only negative point was sharing my seat volume with a guy whose shoulders spilled over three seats! Made negotiating meals a tad tricky, but as this was only on the Sydney to Melbourne leg, it was not too bad, if this had been a long haul flight I would not have been too pleased at the prospect of sharing my allocated volume of space with someone. Despite the physical detractions however I was free to think more about my ‘Augmented Reality” project and how I can adapt the already existing apps for an educational purpose. I have a clear vision of the how it would work in the classroom, I am now just joining up the dots with the various free tools that are available for this to happen and mashing them together into an easy to use end product for teachers and students alike.

There has been a crop of really interesting new tools and utilities that I have become aware of in the last couple of weeks.  As I discovered them I put them onto my delicious account and have just updated my resources page too.  Take time to read through the entire list, it is pushing 100 free tools now and I suspect that there will be one or two in that list that all of you will find new and useful to you.  You can find the new resources all listed in alpha order on my resources page http://dakinane.com/blog/resources.

I have just run my 90 tools in 90 minutes presentation again, with added tools.  This is the second time that I have done this presentation.  I had a couple of moments of brain freeze where I muddled up tools.  It is such a high energy presentation it leaves me exhausted!  I actually delivered 94 tools in 84 minutes.  The response from the delegates was overwhelmingly positive, the gratifying thing is that 55 people completed their forms and submitted them.  I will run it again if there is interest in me doing so.  I am currently working on a presentation for Ulearn in Christchurch, but this one is more aimed at school leadership and systems analysis.  I am now working on tomorrows far more practical session.

I departed the supertanker in August of 2009 and joined Team Solutions on 6 month contract.  That short but happy and productive contract has now ended and I am now out on my own as in independent facilitator.  Next year is already looking to be a full and productive year.  I will be working in many schools and also for some commercial clients too. I am spending the summer organising my computers and resources to meet the needs of the many different schools that I am scheduled to be working in.  I am blocked out for specific schools on specific days for all but a few days of the entire academic year.

I will be at Learning @ Schools 10 and have submitted a couple of proposals to the organisers and am waiting to hear if I have been successful again.  I am also intending to go to Ulearn10 in Christchurch, but that is much later in the year.

I am looking back at the last year and am very pleased with the journey that has brought me this far.  As the year closes, I am now eagerly anticipating the challenges of the coming weeks and months.