This has to be one of my favourite recent pieces of animation. Adam Winnik’s thesis project animates an excerpt from Carl Sagan‘s book “Pale Blue Dot” read by the author himself.

I’ve been enrolled in illustration at Sheridan College for the the last 4 years and this is my final thesis project. I have always thought of Carl Sagan’s writings as “scientific poetry” since they lack the cold touch that science is often cursed for having. I think Sagan’s words resonate more than ever, and will continue with each generation until the human species “wakes up”. The first time I heard this excerpt from his book “Pale Blue Dot” it literally changed my life, and I hope it does for you too. Enjoy.

I think Adam has struck a fantastic balance between the Hans Zimmer soundtrack, the tone of Sagan’s voice and his own playful animation of the words. What do you think?

Since March I have been running this little survey that is a limited comparison between the current preferences between Apple iPads in the classroom or Android Tablets. It obviously doesn’t take into account the other platforms that are on offer such as Windows machines.

There has been a fantastic response with over 1000 responses submitted and counting!

From conversation with colleagues on Twitter it seems that many people are heading towards Apple products due to the maturity of the App store and the sheer range of Apps that is available.

It would seem from these results that most educators are opting for the iPads over tablets running Android operating systems.

If you took a moment to vote I am really grateful – it would also beneficial to all who are interested in investing in iPads for you to leave a comment explaining your current thinking about the two types of devices. Explaining the thinking behind your decision process could really help others in the same situation.

After the recent successes in Scotland by the SNP in using social media tools and the internet as part of their historic re-election, this lecture by Evgeny Morozov is an interesting exploration of the wider debate around society and the internet.

Does the internet actually inhibit, not encourage democracy? In this new RSA Animate adapted from a talk given in 2009, Evgeny Morozov presents an alternative take on ‘cyber-utopianism’ – the seductive idea that the internet plays a largely emancipatory role in global politics.

Exposing some idealistic myths about freedom and technology (during Iran’s ‘twitter revolution’ fewer than 20,000 Twitter users actually took part), Evgeny argues for some realism about the actual uses and abuses of the internet.

Morozov refers to the much debated distinction between the digital native and the immigrant, but suggests we should be focusing on the differences between digital renegades and digital captives. This is an interesting point that refers to the filtered and restricted use of digital tools in some countries compared to those more freely using the tools in others.

A healthy reminder of the relative openness we have in our digital lives compared to other parts of the world.

The inaugural Purpos/ed Summit for Instigators took place in Sheffield on the 30th April. Doug Belshaw and Andy Kemp did a really great job of gathering a bunch of enthusastic educators from all sorts of backgrounds to this, the first of many face-to-face gatherings.

We all had the chance to listen talks including short 3 x 3 sessions which were snappy and succinct and added further layers of opinion to the growing debate around the purpose of education.

I enjoyed attending and felt encouraged to see the group coming to together so coherently, Andy and Doug clearly have big plans for Purpos/ed and rightly so.

The only thing that disappointed me was the lack of direction we were given to put our efforts into action.

Read more over on the NoTosh site where I explain in more detail about the event.

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Pic by Learn4Life

What a beautiful line to start a song. Robin Pecknold’s lyrics (Fleet Foxes) from Helplessness Blues have been ringing in my ears during most of my recent car journeys. When I wrote about the purpose of education, the ongoing discussion made me recall them once again.

The opening two verses/stanzas seem to sum up what can happen in education in the course of about 10 years.

I was raised up believing
I was somehow unique
Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes
Unique in each way you can see

And now after some thinking
I’d say I’d rather be
A functioning cog in some great machinery
Serving something beyond me

Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues by subpop

The question I suppose is: do our education systems make children believe they are snowflakes or cogs?

I have been fortunate enough to see many resources created by the thousands of willing educators using Twitter. However in my opinion there is a strong case for using hashtagging more systematically, so that we better organise and structure the resources, ideas and thoughts we all have.

A Twitter hashtag uses this symbol # folllowed by a unique word, abbreviation, acronym or phrase that defines the subject or theme of the tweet it is included in. It is a great way to filter and organise tweets so they are easily found by your network.

Simply put, the more we use tagging the easier it will be to find the most relevant tweets that share resources and advice etc.

One example of a resource created using hashtags is the sentence starter tweets I began under the tags #sentstartdecisions and #sentstarttree. I wanted to gather together ideas for sentence starters that can be used in the classroom. Each tag is specific to a topic or theme that gives other teachers a little bit of a focus for their contributions.

They have proven really successful, with nearly 100 contributions for just these two tags – a great resource for the classroom, to inspire planning and to engage young writers. However the tweets are not that useful as they are – indeed there is also the retweets that use the hashtag, so it is mildly littered with less than useful tweets. I have taken all of the sentence starters and created separate Google Docs presentations with them, a sentence starter per slide. I suspect that in this form it is more useful and accessible to teachers and students.

(Please feel free to edit the above presentations and add your ideas)

In fact by using the Twitter hashtag I have in effect added a step in the process. The Interesting Ways series is so successful because when users contribute they archive and extend a version of the presentation itself – there is no middle man, well there is me and I often add ideas on behalf of people, but there is no middle step, you add your idea and that’s it. Using a hashtag and then having to generate a presentation from that tag before it’s Twitter lifespan runs out is time consuming. (Tweets will eventually not appear in a hashtag search)

On the other hand, adding a sentence starter idea via Twitter is less clicks for a teacher using Twitter – they don’t have to go to Google Docs, add the slide etc. So it is easier to do it there and then and add the hashtag. In fact some school children were contributing with their teachers this week.

I believe it is important we encourage the alacritous members of our network in some form of creation. Whichever way you gather the ideas engage them in creation as much as conversation.

One of the nice features of the Create-a-Graph site from the NCES is the ability to email the completed chart. In the past I have used this when working with Google Apps for Edu – the children handed their work in to me by sending it to my school email. We had my inbox open on the board so the children could see their submissions.

We have been using Posterous as our class blog platform since September. It is a fantastic site for school or class blogging due to it’s simplicity. I made the link with Create-a-Graph because Posterous is built around being able to email content to a specific address which will then post to the blog.

In a nutshell I have worked out a way for my children to post their charts and graphs from Create-a-Graph directly to the class blog.

Here is how to do it.

**Requirements - the following instructions are only for a Posterous blog, but the idea will work if you have a Blogger site. You can find the email you need in your Blogger “Settings” under “Email & Mobile”. If you have a post via email option for your blogging platform in theory this should also work**

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1. Send a graph from Create-a-Graph to your own email. Now locate the sender’s email address – it should be something like kidszone@ed.gov

2. By default a Posterous blog only allows agreed contributors to post – you need to make kidszone@ed.gov a contributor to your blog, basically saying content from that source is OK.

3. Go to the Settings of your Posterous account and click on Contributors, add a new contributor and paste the email address we have for Create-a-Graph: kidszone@ed.gov

4. Now you are ready to post from Create-a-Graph (worth testing this before the kids get a go) – the email you need is the one for contributors as the additional email you have added is not recognised as the primary one for the site. The email address you will need will be at the bottom of the Contributors page (see screenshot above)

5. Add this email into the Create-a-Graph “email this graph” box (leave it as html) and hit send.

6. Your graph should be posted – the nice thing about Posterous is that it will automatically resize the image to suit your blog, which saves a lot of fiddling around with multiple posts. Here is an example blog post we did this week from someone in my class, we were looking at the climate of Australia.

That is pretty much the top and bottom of it – for Blogger just use your unique email address in step 5. Over the period of time we have done this I have a few tips to share:

• Expect to have multiple posts, children click send numerous times as they are unsure it has been done – it takes a bit of tidying up. (I also take a few moments to add the children’s names as tags to the posts so that I am collating work on the class blog)
• Ask the children to add their name to the Graph Title in Create-a-Graph – this is under Data. The graph title will appear as the blog post title and will now include the child’s name for you to see who owns it easily.

• If you display the blog refreshing on the board you can check work quickly and children can have the reassurance their work has been submitted.
• Once submitted the children can still edit their graphs – if you see something you need them to change, delete the post and ask them to correct it and resend.

I hope you find that an interesting tip to perhaps try – good luck with it and let me know how you get on.

After a few tweets, my network have shared with me some fantastic and unique online drawing and paint tools. I thought the list was worthy of sharing properly in a blog post. Here goes:

ABCya! Paint – simple and easy to save as an image file.

Poisson Rouge Colouring Bugs – lovely early years tool within the amazing Poisson Rouge world.

Odosketch – I like the tones to the colours in this tool.

Shidonni – bring your drawings to life

Sketchpad – more complex toolset on this one

Flockdraw – allows you to draw on the same canvas as others online – nice collaborative tool.

Crayola Digi-Color – smooth online drawing tool from the company that know how.

Kerpoof Studio – simple and effective little online tool, to use other brushes you need to buy them though. Easy to save etc.

Sumo Paint – this was certainly recommended the most by people today.

Imagination Cubed – one of the first collaborative whiteboard tools I came across, been around for years.

Bomomo – I love the free abstract creativity of this one.

Brushter – from the National Gallery of Art for Kids.

Graffiti Playdo – spray your work on a wall.

PsykoPaint – convert your photos into artwork.

and here is a nice collection of links for Drawing tools as well.

Not a bad list I am sure you would agree and all from recommendations from my Twitter network in the space of a few hours – so a BIG thankyou to all of you who shared your ideas, links and recommendations.

(You can see all of these links on my delicious page)

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Pic

Blondie by Rufus Gefangenen
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

I have a new crowd-sourcing idea up my sleeve that needs your help and input. It is all based around the idea of a collaborative search engine that can be constructed together – Shared Search.

Elevator Pitch

• A community of educators work together on a Google custom search engine (CSE).
• The CSE can be for any specific topic taught in the classroom.
• A new CSE is created and collaborators are invited (like Google Docs) to add suitable sites.
• Labels are added to the sites to filter their relevance, this can be used in the search results too – which means it can be relevant to different age groups.
• Up to 100 collaborators can be invited to any one CSE.
• The broader the pool of contributions the richer the search experience for the pupil.
• The code will be shared to educators who want to embed it in their schools sites and blogs.
• The community generate a growing library of relevant search engines for different curriculum topics.

So what do you think? Are you interested in helping with the first one. I have set up a search engine about SEALIFE, as this is a common topic and one that has a huge amount of content.

The idea of a Shared Search is that we act as first filter to the children’s own experience of searching online content.

If you have some underwater web gems to share please sign up in the form below and look out for the email invite into the Custom Search Engine. I look forward to seeing your response and I hope that we can once again help create something valuable together.

Why not try out the “SEALIFE” Shared Search below. Remember as more people contribute sites the more useful it will become.

I have begun a new Maths Map in Adelaide focusing on addition ideas that can be seen or referred to on the map. It would be great to have your contributions it is very easy to do:

How can you contribute?

1. Explore the maps below for the ideas already added, follow the links to open them in a new window.
2. Click on EDIT in the left panel.
3. Zoom close to the city and it’s surroundings. (Don’t forget Streetview)
4. Find some TOPIC ideas you can see.
5. Add a placemark (use the right colour for the age group it is best for – see purple pin)
6. Explain the activity in the description.
7. Change the title to show how many ideas there are.
8. Send out a Tweet or write a blog post to highlight this resource and encourage others to contribute.

View 6 Addition Activities in Adelaide in a larger map
Make sure you explore the other maps in Nottingham, Madrid and Paris that are currently running, you can see all 4 on the Maths Maps page.