Supposedly I shall be receiving an iPad to 'play' with shortly, prior to some trials in some of our schools. Am I excited? More curious (I have to support schools with Mac or PC so have no zealous affiliation either way) yet I'm excited about the possibilities in schools. However, in conversations, blogs and tweets I am hearing and reading lots of naysayers harping on about the iPad's shortfalls. Problems with school wireless, security breaches and not being able to edit in Wikispaces I'm sure will be sorted out in due course. A bigger issue for me is the problem with Flash (I'm a big user of Prezi for instance) but maybe such applications with migrate to HTML5? However, I can't buy the argument that is now almost a cliché: "its for consumption not knowledge creation". More and more we are moving to 'cloud computing'. We can create and collaborate on documents, audio edit, video edit and more all within the 'aether'. The iPad is a Cloud device. It is not a problem not having a USB port, use dropbox.com. The biggest problem, particularly in Australia, in the short-term is bandwidth. In a few years time we will look back and wonder what the fuss was about. Everything will be in the cloud and we won't need tonnes of ports. The one thing missing in all of the posturing by adults is the students' opinions. They will love using iPads and similar devices in the classroom and will find ways of achieving many of the outcomes we adults say are impossible.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Monday, May 17, 2010
Latest Research on the Impact of Technology on Student Performance
With the Australian Government giving every Year 9 student a laptop and some of these students now in Year 11, I am forever being asked how this 1:1 program will affect student performance in various subject areas. Accordingly, I'm about to embark on postgraduate studies to investigate this. As part of the preliminary Literature Review I have focused particularly on the Becta Harnessing Technology Review 2009, JTLA 2010 report One to One Computing:A Summary of the Quantitative Results from the Berkshire Wireless Learning Initiative and the OECD 2010 publication Are the New Millennium Learners Making the Grade?. My superiors were very impressed with the evidence, particularly from the Becta report. To this end I have made a Prezi (of course!) summarising the findings:
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Jing, swf and Prezi
I've been enjoying a lot of success recently with Prezi (as you can probably tell from my various Prezi posts). However, I've been wanting to jazz them up. Then I came across the following Prezi by Balázs Turai on 'Animations in Prezi'
This highlighted that Prezi loves .swf (Shockwave Flash) files, often simple, yet fun animations.
This started me looking for fun swf animations to put in my Prezis. The easiest thing to do is copy and paste from other Prezis (using ctrl C and ctrl V on your keyboard rather than right-clicking - Prezi works on Flash which doesn't like right-clicking) such as the one above e.g. the Scientist with the microscope. I then started looking further afield and came across a few problems:
1. Trying to insert swf files I already had from e.g. student projects didn't seem to work
2. Using swf files obtained via Firefox as explained in Lancelhoff.com didn't seem to find their way into Prezi
3. Doing an Advanced Google search for swf brought up pages that were totally Flash and I couldn't use Firefox as described in #2
4. So far I haven't found any decent creative commons banks of cool swf animations either.
If anyone knows the solutions to any of the above please let me know.
However, then I remembered Jing makes swf files in video mode. Fantastic! Jing will screen capture a particular area as an instant image (jpeg) or over time as an animation (swf). Now for example I was able to capture a Voki (animation not sound for some reason) as a swf and insert in my Prezi. (In my ineptness I can't seem to upload my swf into Blogger, so see final product at the end. Of course it would be easier if one could just embed a Voki (or anything else for that matter) in Prezi as you now can with YouTube). The great thing is swf animations play in a loop so they are great to have as introduction shots in Prezis (so not having sound via Jing for whatever reason is a good thing otherwise there would be various looping audio too).
So until I find a great bank of swf animations I'm making my own using my on screen action and Jing. Here is my latest example including swfs via Jing from Voki and a student sample of work:
This highlighted that Prezi loves .swf (Shockwave Flash) files, often simple, yet fun animations.
This started me looking for fun swf animations to put in my Prezis. The easiest thing to do is copy and paste from other Prezis (using ctrl C and ctrl V on your keyboard rather than right-clicking - Prezi works on Flash which doesn't like right-clicking) such as the one above e.g. the Scientist with the microscope. I then started looking further afield and came across a few problems:
1. Trying to insert swf files I already had from e.g. student projects didn't seem to work
2. Using swf files obtained via Firefox as explained in Lancelhoff.com didn't seem to find their way into Prezi
3. Doing an Advanced Google search for swf brought up pages that were totally Flash and I couldn't use Firefox as described in #2
4. So far I haven't found any decent creative commons banks of cool swf animations either.
If anyone knows the solutions to any of the above please let me know.
However, then I remembered Jing makes swf files in video mode. Fantastic! Jing will screen capture a particular area as an instant image (jpeg) or over time as an animation (swf). Now for example I was able to capture a Voki (animation not sound for some reason) as a swf and insert in my Prezi. (In my ineptness I can't seem to upload my swf into Blogger, so see final product at the end. Of course it would be easier if one could just embed a Voki (or anything else for that matter) in Prezi as you now can with YouTube). The great thing is swf animations play in a loop so they are great to have as introduction shots in Prezis (so not having sound via Jing for whatever reason is a good thing otherwise there would be various looping audio too).
So until I find a great bank of swf animations I'm making my own using my on screen action and Jing. Here is my latest example including swfs via Jing from Voki and a student sample of work:
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Prezi Templates
It occurred to me that we could make Prezi look really cool if we had some familiar, iconic templates. Could this be the start of 'Prezi Art'? I don't know if I'm the first person to do this but here is my attempt at a cool template - the classic iPod outline (what is particularly sweet is that you can embed a YouTube video into the screen!).
http://prezi.com/i67d4clx2m6w/
http://prezi.com/i67d4clx2m6w/
Friday, March 5, 2010
Mobile Trends 2020
Complied by Rudy De Waele http://www.slideshare.net/rudydw/mobile-trends-2020
Mobile Trends 2020
View more presentations from rudydw.
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