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.

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.

I have been working in this school since the middle of last year and in that time some tremendous changes have started to happen.  E-learning is starting to put down some strong roots and is well on the way to being an integral part of a significant number of the classrooms there.  There is still plenty of work to do, but the images above demonstrate one of the techniques that I use to foster a climate of independence in students so that they can achieve their learning goals.  To manage the different rate at which students master different tools at their disposal, I encourage the development of a class experts system.

In this particular year 2 classroom the teacher has adopted this idea and  made a wall display where students can pin their own images against a range of skills that they have mastered, it is in effect a community bulletin board of the type that you see in a supermarket.  Look at the range of skills these students have mastered in the images above.  It is a visual guide for other students who need additional support, they know who to go to, other than the teacher, to seek help.   It is an e-learning equivalent of  the”See three before me” classroom management strategy.  The bulletin board process creates a conveyor belt of skills acquisition, so what happens when everyone in class can do the same skill?  The students take a photo of themselves with ‘thumbs up’ and pin that photo by the now redundant support service on the bulletin board, this particular solution was devised by the students in this class themselves.

Running in tandem with this in class initiative, other students within the school have created their own ‘Yellow Pages” adverts and have put them into a binder.  These adverts again advertise which e-learning skills an individual student is willing to offer support for.  The key difference here is that this binder is displayed prominently in the staffroom.  These adverts are aimed directly at the staff and staff are seeking help from their students.  The benefits of this role reversal can not be underestimated where learners become teachers and teachers become learners.

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.

Written offline - 7 April - Hotel has no Internet!

After a grueling day one at ACEC2010 with two keynote presentations and seven breakout sessions, a common theme has made itself abundantly clear.  The key to e-learning success is not based around increased capital outlay on the latest and greatest technology, rather successful integration should be based on a rather more mundane and fiscally more attainable target, sound pedagogy.  However, therein lies the problem.  Schools are finding it easier to purchase new technologies that promise to deliver the e-learning nirvana of integration rather than attack the pedagogical issues of delivery.  Alan November reminded us of this early in the day, saying that we need to ensure that the plan for teaching and learning that currently exists within schools is the right one, before we layer on the technologies, which can then mask the inappropriateness of the underlying pedagogy.

Whilst this message is not new to me, it has made me think all day long about the approach that I should be taking in a school as a facilitator.  I am working on a post as alluded to in a previous post based on a conversation that I had whilst flying over the Melbourne and reflects the kinds of conversations that I have regularly in schools as a facilitator.  The conversations are loosely based around the following kind of statement:  “Well we have purchased the equipment, now what? What is e-learning and how can I make it work in my class?

I am sure many of you already know about Tokbox, it is like Skype, but on steroids.  It is a great tool for collaboration if you are not in the same building, town, country etc.  Check it out.

TokBox - Free Video Chat and Video Messaging

I have just added a new resource to the resources page, the new resource is called Aviary.  You can check what I had to say here.

I have added two new resources to the list on the resources page of free utilities for teachers.  The list is now 83 tools long and growing, check them out.

I have found a new resource on the Internet, whilst not entirely free, the free option is very good.  I am talking about Widgetbox.  The two widgets at the side of the page here were created using Widgetbox.  There are four variants of widget that you can create and over time I will be experimenting with them all.  They are highly customisable and not only that, once you have shared it with the community you can then embed your widget into your chosen site.  The great thing is that the community has thousands of already created widgets for you to use.  All good stuff.

If you want to turn off the ads and remove the ‘add widget’ option then for a reasonable annual fee in US$ you can.  I may well explore that possibility over the coming days and weeks.  Great tool though.