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Posts Tagged ‘YouTube’

Hands-on with the Dell Streak.

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So yes, I bought it, took it back and bought it again. But I’m keeping my Dell Streak now. It’s great. And this is my last post on mobile phones – well, this month anyway… :-D

Usually new mobile phones are known about well in advance of their launch. Everything from specs to early reviews are made available in order to create a buzz around the product. For example, a couple of years ago I was sent an LG Shine and encouraged (although not instructed) to take photos of it and blog about it. With the Dell Streak, however, apart from a great video at jkkmobile I stumbled across on the night before it was released in the UK, I’d heard nothing about it!

Full specs of the device can be found here, but the highlights are that it’s an Android tablet/smartphone hybrid with a 5″ screen. Yes, five inch! :-p

Let’s just get past the two (related) questions I’ve been asked most frequently over the last couple of weeks:

  1. Is it too big?
  2. Don’t you feel a bit stupid putting it to your ear to, you know, make phone calls?

My responses:

  1. It’s certainly on the upper limit of what counts as a phone size wise. Some, undoubtedly, will find it too big. But given that I tended to use my iPhone more for Twitter and other internet based activities than for phone calls, I don’t!
  2. It’s not Dom Joly size and I don’t really suffer from self esteem issues anyway. As for people who think that phones should only be able to make phone calls, get back in your cave please… ;-)

Things I really like:

  • The whole experience and speed of the device makes it über-slick
  • Spotify, Dropbox and other official apps are better (to my mind) than their iPhone counterparts
  • The size of the screen makes everything… just better
  • It’s really quite thin
  • Several virtual desktops means you can organize your stuff
  • I don’t have to jail break it to set it up the way I want it
  • Widgets provide real-time updates
  • The camera is legendary and the in-phone editing functions are actually useful
  • It’s got a ‘gorilla glass’ screen – check out this video showing it being torture-tested!

Things I’m not so keen on:

  • The placement of headphone socket
  • Volume buttons alter up or down depending on orientation (confusing!)
  • You can’t delete things (e.g. emails) by swiping
  • It’s not running the latest version of Android (v1.6)
  • Proprietary power/ sync cable
  • Current lack of third party support (eg cases, speakers, other add ons)
  • The quality of sound recording when shooting video isn’t gerat

Stuff other reviews might not tell you:

  • As with the iPhone, music stops playing when you remove the headphones
  • Sometimes tasks don’t shut by themselves and drain your battery (a force close app is pretty much essential)
  • It’s not really possible to use the Streak with one hand whilst walking for texting, etc.
  • With Android apps you’ve got 24 hours to get a refund if you don’t like it or it didn’t perform as you expected
  • The power cable is similar to the iPhone’s in that the USB end plugs into the power cable

10 apps that are awesome on the Streak:

  1. Dropbox
  2. Fring (for Skype & instant messaging apps)
  3. Google Listen (podcasts through Google Reader)
  4. Handcent SMS (iPhone-like text messages)
  5. Opera Mini (web browser)
  6. Profiles (change between ‘Normal’, ‘Night’, ‘Outdoor’, etc.)
  7. Quick Addroid (add stuff to your Google Calendar quickly)
  8. Realplayer
  9. SlideScreen (really classy home screen replacement)
  10. Spotify

I’m happy to answer any questions you’ve got – including making another video, so ask away! :-)

Posted: June 22nd, 2010
Categories: Technology
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Apply for Google Teacher Academy UK!

Introduction

The first ever Google Teacher Academy UK is coming to London on Thursday 29th July 2010! The only reason I’m accepting for YOU not applying is if you’ve already booked your summer holiday for that date. And even then, it had better be somewhere nice… :-p

If you’re an educator (especially if you’re in the UK) this is a great opportunity to be part of something that we’ve called (and especially Tom Barrett) has called for over the last few years. In addition, you could get to become a Google Certified Teacher!

Application Process

There’s two parts to the application process: an online form and a 1-minute video.

You can apply for Google Teacher Academy UK here:

http://www.google.com/educators/gta.html

(closing date: 17 June 2010)

Advice

Here’s 10 bits of advice from me if you’re thinking of applying:

  1. Read what’s required of you. Seriously. For example, don’t submit a video that’s longer than 1 minute in length!
  2. It’s not how much you know about Google and use their tools already. You are allowed to show proficiency in other tools and processes.
  3. The video needs to address one (or both) of the these themes: a) Motivation and Learning, b) Classroom Innovation. You don’t have to feature physically in the video, but these themes do.
  4. Don’t whinge. Show yourself in a positive light.
  5. There’s no point in ticking every box for a question. It’s as if you didn’t tick any of them if you do that.
  6. In the ‘technology skills’ section, don’t do yourself down. If you’re not a newbie, there’s no reason to tick the newbie box!
  7. Read up on what Google Certified Teachers do and who they are. It will make your answers more informed.
  8. Post your video on YouTube. Not elsewhere. And make it publicly viewable (double-check!)
  9. Fill in your answers in a word processor (Google Docs!) and then copy-and-paste the answers in to the form. This will give you chance to reflect on them and run a word count.
  10. Some people have added the one-minute application video to their Google Certified Teacher page (e.g. Chris Craft). Check these out for inspiration – as well a YouTube search for ‘Google Teacher Academy’.

Conclusion

I’m firmly of the opinion that it’s worth giving up not only some of your summer holiday for Google Teacher Academy but also the time it takes to apply. You don’t need to be a current teacher to apply (I’m not!) but you do need to work with educators in some way. Cite your online as well as offline work.

This isn’t a time to be shy, it’s a time to step up and apply for something potentially life-changing. I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to the end of July! :-D

Image based on originals CC BY dannysullivan

Posted: June 9th, 2010
Categories: Education
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Using a Sony Reader PRS-600 to make notes on academic articles.

I’ve been very impressed with my Sony Reader PRS-600 since I got it last week. It’s a great device for reading, highlighting and taking notes on academic articles. Since before I couldn’t find much useful video on how the highlighting and note-taking functionality works, I’ve quickly put together the above two minutes by way of demonstration.

Hope it helps. :-)

Note: those reading via RSS/email may need to click through to see the video – or view it on YouTube!

Tenori-on, Little Boots and Melodica

This is another one of those blog posts best told through images and videos than text. Watch this:

That’s a Tenori-On. They’re expensive and perhaps not-quite-worth-it.

Fortunately, there’s an app for that:

There’s the official video on YouTube here. Version 1.2 of Melodica is $0.99 (£0.59) and Version 1.0.2 is free. The video above shows v1.2. :-D

Posted: February 12th, 2010
Categories: Education
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Learning Score

Just to mix things up a bit, I thought I’d do this as a series of videos – it seemed appropriate to the subject matter. Learning Score is a visual planning tool for educators. And. It. Rocks. :-p

  1. Official promotional video
  2. My quick overview
  3. Planning a lesson from scratch in 10 mins

1. Official promotional video

2. My quick overview

3. Planning a lesson from scratch in 10 mins

You can get a 14-day free trial at http://www.learningscore.org/trial, but if you’re quick you can get a longer trial at http://www.learningscore.org/bett! :-D

Posted: January 19th, 2010
Categories: Education, Technology
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Things I learned this week – #2

The most significant things I’ve learned this week have been snow-related. Have a quick look at the above YouTube video of me building an igloo. That took me 7 hours! Instead of getting all philosophical and talking about how good it felt to create something out of nothing and how I started to feel ‘at one’ with the snow, I’ll reflect on some practical considerations:

  1. I should estimate how long things are likely to take before they start
  2. The size of an igloo depends on the angle of the walls – easy to forget!
  3. There are lots of different types of snow.
  4. Igloos are actually quite warm!

I considered sleeping in it, but having worked on it for 7 hours straight every single muscle in my body hurt. I went in the bath, read my book and went to bed… :-p

Here’s a brief overview of other stuff I’ve learned this week, broken down by category.

Tech

Productivity & Inspiration

Academic

Data, Design & Infographics

Misc.

This made me laugh! (via Mashable)

This resonated with me – via Jennifer Hagy @ indexed

  • The ever-relevant and insightful Harold Jarche looks back at Seth Godin’s predictions for 2009 from 5 years ago (startlingly accurate) and his own from 2007, as well as looking forward to new and emerging business models.
  • I love mashups and Best of Bootie 2009 absolutely rocks. Especially DJ Earworm’s United State of Pop 2009 (top 25 Billboard songs, mashed up!).
  • Mashable reflects on ways social media has changed us. This post makes a lot of sense and I’m going to start to use the term ‘ambient intimacy’ to explain a lot of what goes on, online. It makes sense. :-)

Frozen Britain seen from above

BBC News posted a great satellite photo of what Britain looked like without the Gulf Stream last week.

  • There are some places in the world you’re just not allowed to go. This post on listverse (via @dougpete) highlights the ‘Top 10′ of these.
  • Vicki Davis (aka Cool Cat Teacher) in a reflective and revealing post entitled Sojourner Truth outlines her recent struggles with blogging and celebrity.

Quotations

You’re only given a little spark of madness. You musn’t lose it. (Robin Williams)

A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you don’t need it. (Bob Hope)

(both via @gbmiii)

Things I learned this week – #1

This is the first of a planned weekly series in which I reflect on what I’ve learned during the previous 7 days. As I explained in My digital reading workflow these links are culled from blogs and tweets I read.

Happy New Year! Feeling guilty because you haven’t made a New Year’s Resolution? Perhaps you could try the New Year’s Resolution Generator! (via swissmiss) It came up with ‘This year I will… declutter’ which seemed most prescient for me. :-)  I’ve already made my Commitments for 2010 but for those who need things broken down step-by-step, they could do worse I suppose than try out mySomeday (via Mashable). Oh, and Zen Habits claims to have The Definitive Guide to Sticking to Your New Year’s Resolutions. :-D

Before I go any further I must point you in the direction of this eye-candy:

The Known Universe by the American Museum of Natural History zooms from the Himalayas to deep space (via FlowingData)

100 Extraordinary Examples of Paper Art (via BoingBoing)

While we’re on the subject of design, swissmiss had a useful blog post on Japanese design principles. There are seven basic principles:

  1. Fukinsei (imbalanced)
  2. Kanso (simple)
  3. Kokou (austere)
  4. Shizen (natural)
  5. Yugen (subtle profound)
  6. Datsuzoko (unworldly)
  7. Seijaku (calm)

I’d like to think that this blog has elements of 2, 5 and 7. ;-)

Not that I write much any more, but I was interested to (re-)discover that some people claim to be able to tell whether a person’s handwriting is ‘male’ or ‘female’. To be fair, if they managed to decipher mine they would only be able to tell that it was ‘messy’… In other quirky news (for which BoingBoing is an excellent source), it turns out that “there are more people currently alive in Asia, Africa and Latin America than the total number of people who died—anywhere, and for any reason—during the entire 20th century.” Wow. More at Census of the dead, in infographic form.

It’s been 5 years, apparently, since Google first started blogging. They’ve no got so many blogs that it’s difficult to keep up with them all. If you, like me, are becoming overwhelmed by the unread items in your RSS reader, why not get everything delivered by email? If you’ve got a decent system (see my How I deal with email) it can be a very efficient way of keeping up-to-date. The trouble is, of course, that some blogs don’t have an subscribe-by-email option. That’s where FeedMyInbox is useful. Enter website URL and your email address and, hey presto! If you want a quick-and-easy way of getting all of the links from your Twitter followers, try ReadTwit. It creates an RSS feed of tweets that contain links from people you follow. You can put that through FeedMyInbox too. And if all that sounds like too much effort, why not try LazyFeed? (via @heyjudeonline) :-p

Talking of productivity, Hans de Zwart (who has recently been promoted to the cool-sounding Innovation Manager: Learning Technology) has a great post on The Influence of a Workspace on Performance. In it, Hans cites a book by Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness of which I wasn’t aware. His main thrust is highlighting the discrepancy between the exquisitely designed office space he works in, designed by David Leon, and the stupidity (his word) of being locked down to Windows 2000 and Internet Explorer 6. As Hans quotes David Leon as saying,

Innovation depends on bright people. These people cost more and are far more valuable than the buildings they occupy… but it is a proven fact that the environment in which they work has a major impact on their effectiveness.

For that reason we design workplaces and buildings round the needs of people and the business aims of their organisations.

He contends – and I agree – that should go for digital surroundings as well as physical surroundings. I recently reorganized my study, including building my own desk, to get things just right. :-)

Motivation and productivity can be affected by surroundings, but a great deal of it comes from within. As Chris Guillebeau notes, there will always be people who say that you “can’t” do something. His reply (or rather, that of one of his readers) is:

Reading a lot of books is definitely a worthwhile thing to do, but one that takes dedication and motivation. How To Read a Book a Week in 2010 (via @chrisbrogan) is a useful reminder as to why setting yourself a definite target (e.g. one per week) is more useful than a hazy one (e.g. read more books).

And finally, some quotations I came across that I warmed to immediately. The first comes from a blog post on The Innovative Educator entitled My Top 20 Education Quotes from 2009:

Many of the most brilliant and creative people didn’t really discover what they could do and who they were until they’d left school and recovered from their education.

Minds are like parachutes – they only function when open. Thomas Dewar (via @timekord)

If you can find something everyone agrees on, it’s wrong – Mo Udall (via @russeltarr)

The only one thing I can change is myself, but sometimes that makes all of the difference. (via @Vincent_Ang)

Stuff to which I didn’t find a segue:

Can’t wait until next week? See the tweets I favourite in real-time at http://twitter.com/dajbelshaw/favorites

A proposal to get more high-quality explanatory videos to learners.

Storyboarding

Image BY-NC-SA Kaeru @ Flickr

I’ve got an idea. Educators need high-quality videos explaining key concepts and processes. There are some great providers of these out there (notably BrainPOP) but these cost $$$. On the flip side, there’s graphic artists, illustrators and animators who are starting out and need examples to add to their portfolio.

The quality of visuals in a video makes a great deal of difference to its overall impact. An example of this is the Shift Happens video, originally created by Karl Fisch. You can view the changes and improvements it has been through on this wiki. Whilst v1.0 was powerful, you’d have to agree that v4.0 has a lot more impact! :-)

My idea, then, is this:

  1. Educator comes up with idea for short explanatory video (e.g. how Google and other search engines work)
  2. Educator (with help of their Twitter/Facebook/whatever network) comes up with storyboard for idea including a script.*
  3. Storyboard and script are put in a central repository under a Creative Commons BY-SA license.
  4. Graphic designer comes along and chooses one they believe they can produce to a high quality and cost-effectively.
  5. Graphic designer produces video and shares on video-sharing site (e.g. YouTube). They are free to monetize this through Google Adsense and the like.
  6. Repository updated showing video has been created.

The great thing about this model is that everyone would win.

So… is this a good idea?

I’m up for creating the repository (with help from others) if enough people think it’s a goer. :-D

* Details of graphics required for this wouldn’t be as important as the script itself.

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Sign up for TeachMeet ETRU edition 09!

I’m delighted to announce on behalf of EdTechRoundUp that we’ll be having a (completely online) ‘TeachMeet’ on Sunday 6th December 2009. It’s called TeachMeet ETRU edition 09 and will hopefully be the first of many!

If you’re not too sure what a TeachMeet is, watch the excellent explanatory video by the BrainPOP team below:

Please do sign up to do a 7-minute ‘micro’ presentation, a 2-minute ‘nano’ presentation or to be an ‘enthusiastic lurker’. The idea is that we’ll be using Adobe Connect Pro for the TeachMeet. Presentations can be done live, but I for one will be pre-recording mine! :-)

I noticed that TeachMeet Falkirk had a QR code* to make life a bit easier for those publicising the event. Here’s one containing the URL of TeachMeet ETRU edition 09

qrcode

Finally, please remember to include the tag TMETRU09 when discussing the TeachMeet on Twitter, uploading Flickr photos, YouTube videos or blogging about it! :-D

* A QR code, for those who don’t know, is kind of a barcode that stores information – in this case the URL of the wiki page (more at Wikipedia). Try it by downloading the software from qrcode.kaywa.com.

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Posted: October 5th, 2009
Categories: ETRU, Education, Technology
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Finally! a video that explains what I’m aiming for as a teacher.

This video was originally created by Wendy Drexler and uploaded to YouTube. I’ve transferred this to Edublogs.tv as YouTube is blocked on most school networks in the UK. I came across it after reading Clint Lalonde’s post about it, and I discovered Clint’s blog after an incoming link from his blog to this one!

This text will be replaced

A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog post entitled The kind of school in which I want to work… In that post I outlined a different role for teachers using the analogy of the teacher as lifeguard:

I don’t think I’d come across the theory of Connectivism at this point which explains really well my pedagogical stance. We can’t consider each learner in isolation. Their ‘network’, both physical and digital is extremely important in the learning process. As a teacher, I’m effectively aiming for redundancy: I want students to leave me at the end of the time at school with the ability to learn independently and play an active role in learning communities. If I can contribute towards that, then I’ve done my job effectively.

The trouble is, I can’t do this alone – it’s a whole-school issue. Wendy’s video will hopefully help explain myself a little better in future. :-D

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