79. Animations in PowerPoint on a PC

This only works on a PC, even though both platforms run Powerpoint.
The secret of making animations is having lots of photos and having them run quite quickly eg 6 or 10 frames per second. NZ films/animations are shown at 24 frames per second, so I do appreciate 10 frames allows you to have a lot less photos.
Standard software on a PC only allows you to run your animation at a speed of 1 frame per second. However sometimes that's just fast enough and the students do get the animation effect.
Take stacks of photos and save to your normal place. Open up PowerPoint, go to Format and Slide layout and choose a blank layout.
Scroll down Insert, to Picture and then down to New Photo Album. Sometimes New Picture Album is hidden below the arrow, so keep scrolling down.Highlight your pictures, Ctrl A allows you to select them all. Insert your photos and click create.
Go to Slide show in the pull down menu, and scroll down to Slide transition. Click the tick off On mouse click. Click into Automatically after box and change time to 1 sec which is 00:01. Click Apply to all

Now play, Slideshow, view your slideshow and admire. The limitation is the 1 sec delay

80. Keepvid

Yesterday I was working with some teachers, talking about web tools and I showed them Tubesock and Vixy.
Tony then showed me Keepvid which allows you to download video from the web, places like Youtube and keep them as stand alone files. They download as mp4's and you can choose the quality, either high or low. So I downloaded Wikis in plain English. Doing so was easy as, 3 steps, and I was impressed with the speed and the quality. I chose high quality and yes the quality was pretty good.
The good thing about KeepVid... its free.
Thanks Tony, this is a great tool.

81. Tubesock

Tubesock is an interesting in that useful but not creative
Tubesock is available for both platforms at a cost of approx $10 US around $30 NZ. Tubesock allows you to download videos from sites like You Tube as an MP4 and keep them as a stand alone file on your computer. This is really useful in my job. I can show a video clip at any point in my presentation and I am not dependent on having good and reliable www access, so I'm self contained. Of course once I have the clip downloaded I'm not concerned about the links being deleting, shifted, lost or I forgot what they were called. As if I would do that!
Quick and easy to use. Copy the url of the clip, open and paste it into Tubesock window and the save in the appropriate place when downloaded. And it downloads about as quick as it tool me to write this.
Scroll to the bottom of the Tubsock site and have a play with the trial, to see how it works before investing your hard earned cash.

82. Library Thing

LibraryThing.com is a free online application that allows you to catalogue your books, list your current reading, search for books around the same theme, genre, topic, search for authors, titles, dust jackets etc and share your reading interests with others in the global community through social networking. You may enter 200 titles for free. There is a $10 US a year fee to add more than 200 titles, and a life membership of $25 US to add as many titles as you like. I have a free membership, but credit cards do work well here.

Library Thing operates like a conventional library and is networked to Amazon and world-wide libraries. This application becomes a book club and a search feature rolled in to one, through the social networking, RSS feature included.When you tag your books you also contribute to a cloud. From the cloud I enjoy looking at the keywords others have used, and their thinking around the themes they have taken from the book.
Library Thing allows you to have multiple users, in the same account concurrently. This is a really useful attribute allowing you to have a group / class contributing at the same time.
So how have I used LibraryThing in my professional life.

Establishing a class reading list.
Books around an Inquiry learning topic
Class read texts / shared stories
New books added to your school library. (You can change the number of texts shown on a blog wiki etc on the left hand side under Blog widgets.
A recommended reading list for children and teachers.
Books of same genre.
Reviews
Literature circles, eg Dan Browne,
• reviews of his books
• writing styles
• genres
• themes
• malapropisms

Across school/ syndicate/ cluster collaboration
Buddy classes
And there is a widget available that updates onto your blog or wiki. I add it onto the right hand side navigation bar where you can springboard to LibraryThing. Happy reading.

83 Comic Life and literacy links

The lovely people at Plasq.com have now made this application cross platform. Comic Life is one of my favourites for it's durability and it's flexibility to support learning, especially literacy. I have worked with reluctant writers who were only too keen to create cartoon captions. (The wee sweethearts told me that wasn't really writing.) It takes quite a lot of thinking to construct a caption that is going to convey your meaning in less than about 10 words with out loosing the key information or message. Using language, symbols and text, with photos and the drawings support your caption and help tell the story. Personally, I believe one of the biggest advantages in using Comic Life is that students have to reprocess information in order to change it from a text platform to a visual platform. This requires considerable thought and also removes the ‘cut and paste’ option especially form the www for presenting work. Obviously, for visual learners, graphical representations of the work may be more effective method of learning than using straight text. I mentioned Comic life was flexible. You don't have to use photos, students can use their drawings, as shown by the bears. Completed comics can be inserted into other programme, inserted into movies, blogs wikis etc or just run as a stand alone web page or QuickTime. How's that for flexibility!

Maths

How to - instructions

Goal setting

Science

learning a language

letter sound recognition

Add Digital story telling

IPC Adventurers and explorers

I wrote way back then about the flexibility of Comic Life. Last week I had a WOW moment when a colleague shared with me some new learning.
Rather than using a template for Comiclife, stay with the blank page. Pull over a series of photos and arrange them like a montage. Use angles, over lapping etc. Save this as an image (jpg) onto your desk top. However this does make a huge file. Compress compress compress. Now upload the image to become your screen saver. Really powerful and so so much easier than using Photoshop. Now the implications for learning.......I've used images like this in Photoshop to represent a word, eg compassion, making those links and connections in literacy.
In the meantime I'm sharing my son's recent graduation as the montage.