enviable stuff

As a huge Google fan, I am disappointed that you will be closing Picnik. It has been a life saver for my creativity, since I don’t know, nor want to learn, Photoshop, to do the amazing things I can do in Picnik. It was simple. User friendly. And education-friendly.

As a middle school teacher, it’s sad to see such a service disappear. I don’t believe there are any other photo editing websites that exist with the ease and the options that students can use, and get professional-looking results.

One of the 1,474 comments (by Evan, no link)  on the announcement that picnik is closing and some of the features are being added to google plus.

All the comments I read were negative.

I found picnik useful a few years ago and build it into my flickr CC search toy.
I've used if occasionally in schools and build an online 'glow' task on its back. As I've never paid a penny for it I can't really complain but it will be missed.

The iTunes U app handles a lot of this. It’s half an LMS—the good half. It handles the distribution of information and course content but it makes no attempt to verify the learner’s progress. That’s rightly a teacher’s job, not a machine’s job. Education is not a production line and our children should not be reduced to Stakhanovite drones working through machine-driven education.

Historically, it has been difficult to get access to publishing through iTunes U. The system was set up to allow a small number of universities and other large institutions to publish content to the store. One of the biggest procedural changes to the system is that individual K-12 schools will now be able to publish courses to iTunes U. In a world where teachers have iBooks Author on their Macs and iPads in their classrooms, easy access to a publishing platform like iTunes U is the missing third leg of the stool.

With iTunes U, Apple has solved the problem of communicating the learning journey. It’s no longer “read this PDF, then watch these videos.” Courses can now contain audio, video, documents, links to iOS apps and iBooks. There’s deep integration between iBooks and iTunes U through which notes and highlights from a book can be reviewed in the iTunes U app. This may be an effective way for smaller schools to provide an LMS without having to subscribe to a commercial service like Blackboard or handle the installation of an open source LMS like Moodle.

Apple's announcements further iPad revolution in education | Macworld Fraser Speirs via Twitter / @gordonmckinlay: I agree with @fraserspeirs .... Scottish Primary schools are not textbook heavy, iTunes U might be a lot more useful than iBooks as a TextBook replacement.

The news ballad, like the pamphlet, was a relatively new form of media. It set a poetic and often exaggerated description of contemporary events to a familiar tune so that it could be easily learned, sung and taught to others. News ballads were often "contrafacta" that deliberately mashed up a pious melody with secular or even profane lyrics. They were distributed in the form of printed lyric sheets, with a note to indicate which tune they should be sung to. Once learned they could spread even among the illiterate through the practice of communal singing.

love the parallels with social networking.

But in a way they're making the same mistake as those who saw ICT as a way of preparing kids for the world of work by training them to use Microsoft Office – ie designing a curriculum by looking into a rear-view mirror. What we ought to be doing is giving the kids the ability to operate in – and perhaps help to create – industries that nobody has even dreamed of yet.

What governments don't seem to understand is that software is the nearest thing to magic that we've yet invented. It's pure "thought stuff" – which means that it enables ingenious or gifted people to create wonderful things out of thin air. All you need to change the world is imagination, programming ability and access to a cheap PC. You don't need capital or material resources or adult permission.

It is this nearest thing to magic that has attracted me to using computers. Even a wee bit of coding can be very exciting. Enthusing pupils is the challenge. I've noticed quite a few new, to me anyway, approaches to this;

Hackasaurus which I've blogged about and more recently:
Hackademy and
Hack To The Future on the Teach Computing blog by Alan O'Donohoe.

Alan contributed a couple of boos: Want to teach Python to Year 7 in 5 easy steps? Part 1, here's how...
and
Part 2, teaching Python to Year 7s. Lesson 4&5, pros&cons
to EDUtalk

But the problem, according to those campaigning for change, begins at school with ICT - a subject seen by its detractors as teaching clerical skills rather than any real understanding of computing.

And it seems school children are getting that message too because the numbers studying the subject are on the decline. The answer, according to the firms and organisations calling for change, is to put proper computer science in the form of coding on the curriculum.

Not sure the detractors are completely right, surely we have seen, in some places, a swing away from the clerical.

We have seen lots of games based stuff being written about although I am not sure how far it has penetrated into the mainstream. There is certainly a need for the more creative use of ict if not coding then the creation of media.

I wonder if there is a tension between a more creative use of ICT and the current drive to save money?

The idea of Edutalk Radio is twofold, first to live stream random selections of the existing bank of audio collected on the Edutalk site and secondly to offer educators the opportunity to call or Skype into a live phone in and chat about topics of their choice.

Joe Dale does a great job of describing the Edutalk, Edutalkr & Radio Edutalk projects. I've tried to do this a few time but Joe nails it. Much appreciated.

Your students with poor math achievement may be achieving poorly at something besides math. Like language.

Nice short post, I could have quoted it all, but you want to read it;-)

Jim Groom Jim Groom, Instructional Technology Specialist / Adjunct Professor, University of Mary Washington talking about the ds106 project. Some great ideas & quotes.

I love the example of the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. A decision was made in the 1990s to replace half the bridge, and rebuild the other half. And all this had to be done while the bridge, which is core to the flow of life in the Bay Area, continued to function. The human species is good at this kind of evolution. And when all is said and done, there will be a new bridge where the old one stood, and the people who travel over it will not remember that there was another bridge here, or care