Education Technology 2011

Animoto for teachers

Christmas is coming and i had a great job to make Christmas calender for #CCglobal Schools. And we all know, that the original Santa lives in Finland, Lapland, so i need to find a Santa. Luckyly Santa was visiting in my Voionmaa upper secondary school and i had lots of pictures fro Santa and our Students.


I need a tool to a Christmas video and thanks for my Greek teacher friend George Panagiotakopoulos @Physiart, i understood, that Animoto is the one for the job. Also yesterday i had some advice from Liam Dunphy and Mr @physiart about taking Education account in Animoto. Instead of free 30 sec. video you get longer videos and password for 50 students. (Thanks for collaboration in Twitter guys!) There are also Animoto for iPhone, witch makes great new elements for mobile learning.
Just check the Animoto features and create a video with music, text, images and video. 


I dont want to present my Christmas calender yet and spoil the surprise, so im going to make from random pictures of my computer a 30 sec presentation starting now. Clock is ticking . . .5 minutes and Animoto is making the video, video embed here under total of 10 minutes. 


For Seasons by @ilotimo and Merry Christmas!

Guest post by Brian Kotts: How I Became a Pad Teacher

I asked Teacher at Linnaeus University Mr. Brian Kotts to be a make a guest post to my blog and i am really glad he did, so thanks for your effort Brian. We have 6 High school iPad project going on, so i enjoyed this information a lot. This is great collaboration which Twitter community makes possible. 

A recent study showed that the use of iPad in schools is expected to surpass computers in five years. This may seem inevitable considering that children have become more skilled in using computers than activities like riding bikes or swimming.

Noticing that most students owned iPads, it dawned on me that we put them to more productive use. The disruptive nature of the iPad has facilitated in the flipping my classrooms, which has transformed how the students approach their learning.

Here are the apps that we’ve been actively using in the past two months:

1. Penultimate

Turned my iPad into a smartboard allowing mirroring of the notes and sketches in multiple colors. These are then separated into topics or projects later emailed to students or posted to a blog in PDF format.

2. Apple’s iWork suite

Pages for word processing, Keynote for presentation and Numbers for spreadsheet. With the integration of iCloud, it’s now easier to move docs in and out of the apps. Apple’s Open In… feature works too if one uses DropBox or SugarSync.

3. Dropbox

Has been excellent for backup as it automatically syncs files across multiple devices, and offers remote file access and sharing. It has also doubled as a PDF- and document-reader,

4. Instapaper

Great for reseach and archiving. “Read Later” list, whilst has allowed for better scanning of titles, easy management with Archive and Delete buttons, and faster refresh times.

5. TED

TED talk has 900+ videos from some of the world’s most fascinating people: education radicals, tech geniuses, medical mavericks, business gurus and music legends. Students have been able to bookmark or download their favorite TEDTalk for playback later.

6. Evernote

After each student registered for an account, we created individual and collective notebooks for sharing and collaboration especially for research and group assignments.

7. Skype

This has mostly been used for podcasts, lectures with guest lecturers, video conferencing with other classrooms and virtual tours with experts in various fields.

8. Osfoora

The Perfect iPad Twitter App.

9. Goodreader

GoodReader has hundreds of functionalities and support for different file types. Not only has it been able to re-format files for easy reading on the iPad, but also access to documents stored online on services like MobileMe, Google Docs, Dropbox and more and downloading of files straight from URLs.

10. GarageBand

Using this tutorial made creating podcasts quite seamless. The coolest function is to uploading the podcasts to iTunes for students to subscribe.

11. Wikipanion

Wikipedia is the number one site that students go to when they begin researching a topic. It’s features are far better than the native wikipedia app. These include smart autocompletion, much like Google search, keeping track of the last one hundred pages, uses geolocation to detect where you are and suggests relevant articles based on that location.

12. Dictionary & Thesaurus

Some one million words and definitions based upon the Random House Unabridged Dictionary are included, while the Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus boasts more than 90,000 synonyms. 

Audioboo

My Twitter friend John putt @wjputt asked me yesterday, if i could do voice file with Audioboo to his Prezi. I havent used it before, so i was curious to know how long time it would take.


In the morning i get the Audioboo app to my iPhone, watched tutorial and then action. First take i had some trouble on voice (my hand was blogging the microphone:) but in second time it went well and i shared the file on Twitter. Total time about 30 minutes (great morning of learning to me. One reason why im blogging.)


First step is to take Audioboo tour and then just record.


My 2 minutes recording how social media helps me on professional learning

5 Visions about Future of Mobile Learning

My journey to understand different sides of mobile learning continues.  This third post presents some great visions of future of mobile learning. Previous mlearning post so far: Mobile Learning Resources and Definitions of Mobile Learning. Welcome to future!

Mobile Trends 2020

View more presentations from Rudy De Waele

The Future of Mobile Learning

View more presentations from g_snow

Future Mobile Learning (29 August 2011)

View more presentations from Judy Brown

The Future of Learning is Mobile

View more presentations from James Clay

New Technologies and the Future of Learning

View more presentations from Steve Wheeler

Top Mobile Learning Resources For Teachers

In my first mobile learning post i made couple of Definitions of mobile learning. This post presents some top resources which i have been using in learning more about mlearning. I was inspired to this post after watching this video about mobile learning: 21st Century Learning Mobile Learning Devices. Everything tells me that mobile learning is one of the key elements in future learning.  After that i found fantastic Prezi Welcome to the future . . .today by Simon Crook. If you like taste some learning flow, take this trip. If you are not done yet, check also this Prezi Mobile technology at innovations by George Engel.

(Image:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/wapster/2800545705/sizes/sq/in/photostream/)

Few more resources for journey to understand whole field of mobile learning.

Top 50 mLearning (Mobile Learning) Resources

View more presentations from Upside Learning

Top Mobile Learning Pages:

St. Marys City Schools:Mobile Learning Technology
Cybraryman mobile learning page
Mlearnopedia
Mobile Motivation: Mobile Learning Resources by Shelly Terrel
Learning in hand
50 mobile learning resources

Definitions of Mobile Learning

Summer is over and my school has started about 4 weeks ago. This semester we have a goal to start several pilots of different use of mobile learning devices like tablets and smart phones. My #finnedchat colleague Renkomaki school principal Jukka Manninen teach alphabets to 1. graders with mobile phones Letter A with mobile learning (look the video which is in Finnish but you get the point) and that really inspired me to go deep to my Diigo files. I found there about 300 mlearning tags, most of from real mobile learning teacher @snewco Scott Newcomb. Looks like im going to spent some time in my Diigo library.

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/notionscapital/869847216/ by Mike Licht)

Im going to post series of mobile learning posts and try to open the field for me and teachers who are not familiar practical and educational use of mobile learning devices. Im heading from theory towards practice and finally post also our school practical experiences of mlearning.

First there are couple of definitions (there are plenty of more) of mobile learning.  In Upside Learning blog: General Considerations for Mobile Learning (mLearning) i found many definitions on mobile learning:

Wikipedia defines mobile learning  as “Any sort of learning that happens when the learner is not at a fixed, predetermined location, or learning that happens when the learner takes advantage of the learning opportunities offered by mobile technologies”.
In other words, mLearning decreases limitation of learning location with the mobility of general portable devices¹.
Simply put, mobile learning is the acquisition or modification of any knowledge and skill through using mobile technology, anywhere, anytime and results in the modification of behavior

What is mobile learning?

The Advent Of Mobile Learning Technology

View more presentations from Upside Learning

Upper: Thoughts on the state of mobile learning

Mobile Learning 1 by TheSophiaLin

Wetoku for online interviews

I was interviewed by Vicky Loras today with help of online tool 
Wetoku which was very easy to use. Check our interview from Vicky Loras blog. My mic was little bit quiet, but you can hear if you put sounds full:) We are going to use this tool later in #finnedchat presentation channel, so thanks Vicky for introducing such a great tool for us to use.

WETOKU tutorial by anamariacult

All features of TweetDeck (part 2)

I had lots of feedback of my last post TweetDeck & 100s of Twitter tools for Teachers, what made me think, that I should go deeper in presentating features of TweetDeck. I tried to find all little details which future TweetDeck user would like to learn. 

How to use Tweetdeck (multiple accounts) with Amy Wood

How To Follow 15000+ People On Twitter Using These Tweetdeck Tips by Jesse Newhart

Video tutorials of special features of TweetDeck

Introducing Deck.ly

Global filters

Uploading videos

Scheduling updates

Editing a search column

Using the column navigator

Sending an update

Finding and following people

Searching in TweetDeck

Adding and removing columns

Replying in TweetDeck

What is new in TweetDeck v0.34

Introducing Chrome TweetDeck

Tweetdeck for journalists by newsblaze

TweetDeck Training 101 (Part One) by harrisonpainter 2011

TweetDeck Training 101 (Part Two) by harrisonpainter 2011

TweetDeck & 100s of Twitter tools for Teachers

I have posted about Twitter a few times before.  Twitter in Classroom part 1. ; Twitter in Classroom 2 ; Twitter in Classroom part 3; Updates: Facebook and Twitter in Classroom and Georgia Department of Defense: Tactical Guides of Social Media.
This post share some examples of other available Twitter tools  which gives extra boost on your tweeting.     

My top tool is TweetDeck. Best feature in TweetDeck is that i can see multible columns in one view, very quick look and i know whats happening, like example today i have 15 columns open. First all friends, my top list, my iPad list, mentions, #RSCON3, #finnedchat, favorites, direct messages, new followers, #edtech, #mlearning, #ipadchat, #ipaded, Facebook, Linkedin. 

I also open new columns for daily needs, like follow my new blog post retweeting (for thanking them), follow interesting hashtags, sometimes i follow one person, who has some spesific information, like Scott Newcomb @snewco from mlearning or @web20classroom Steven W. Anderson from everything related education technogy and many others.

Thats enough from my experiences, check out these tutorials, slides and links  from TweetDeck and other hundreds of Twitter tools.

Josh Stumpenhorst @Stumpteacher tutorial: Twitter 102 (using TweetDeck)

Twitter: Top Twitter tools exposed & explaned by lightning speed by Zebolsen

Twitter 102 by Amanda L. Sage

Twitter 102

View more presentations from Amanda L. Sage

Twitter tools for teachers

Top 100 Tools for the Twittering Teacher
150+ Ultimate Round-Up of Helpful Twitter Articles
99 Essential Twitter tools
Cybrarymans Twitter page
Tips, apps and resources for Twitter
Top 100 Twitter Tools
Top 50 tracking and analytics tools
Top 25 url shortener tools
10 Awesome Twitter Analytics and Visualization Tools
8 free tools visualize information on Twitter
18 best tools to analyze your Twitter hotness
Top 20 Sites to Improve Your Twitter Experience
18 Twitter Tools for Scheduling Future Tweets
27 Twitter Tools To Help You Find And Manage Followers

#RSCON3 Reflections and Finnish Education System in Tagxedo Word Cloud

I had my first time in The Reform Symposium in last weekend and what a great experience it was. Great presentations, skillfull speakers, global network for teachers and educators who passionately develop education. What more teacher who likes networking and enjoys Twitter conversations would ask. Had many new interesting contacts and great educators to follow in Twitter.  

Shelly Terrel and Salome Thomas-El presentations touched me deeply, i also enjoyed my good Twitter friend Vicky Loras enthusiastic presentation Multiculturalism in the Classroom and Steve Wheelers had really fireworks in ending Keynote. Great thing is that my Reform Symposium still continues when recordings are ready to watch and i can see all presentations i missed.

We, The Team Mates, Timo Ilomäki  and Aki Puustinen had huge honour to be the first Keynote speakers in conference. We are proud of possibility to be part of such inspiring community. We talk about elements about Finnish Education System. Audience was really active and supportive - thank you for that, relaxed us even little nervousness was in the air, thats why the team mate is so important support. Thanks also Muurame student Arttu for courage in presenting live. Thanks also for Finnish principals Esa Kukkasniemi and Jukka Manninen your expert knowledge in our presentation. In Vanessa Alanders blog post We Need A Trust Revolution had some mention about our presentation themes and i agree -

                        
                    Trust Is Everything

My last blog post was Word Clouds for Teachers so i continue that theme and made from our presentation words Tagxedo hand.


Finnish Education System In Global Eductors Hand

Our Presentation in Reform Symposium Conference 29.7.2011 (removed some pictures of presentation)

Reform symposium 2011 finland education system

View more presentations from Timo Ilomäki

Word Clouds for Teachers

This post is about using easy word clouds in classroom. Basicly they change words for beautiful clouds.There are video tutorials from using  Wordle and Tagxedo.

This example was created in minutes of words for above with Wordle.





Using technology in classroom: Tagxedo vs. Wordle by
Math Gillespie

Tagxedo by eduTeacher

Word clouds resouces

Update: 101 ways to use Tagxedo
Cybraryman`s word cloud page
10 sites for creating word clouds
Five ways to make word clouds from text
52 Interesting Ways and tips to use Wordle in the Classroom
Tagxedo or Wordle?
How to use Wordle in classroom
Fantastic word cloud creator - Tagxedo (video)
3 Ways to Use Wordle
ABCya - word clouds for kids
Livebinders: Wordle educational uses
Word cloud to integrate reading and writing

Prezi part 4 - cool ways to use Prezi

I have posted about Prezi three times before.  

1. How to make a Prezi - rookie to pro in 20 minutes
2. Prezi in Classroom
3. New features of Prezi and Prezi for iPad

This post present some couple of amazing award winning Prezi presentations and other cool ways to use Prezi.

Check this 6 hours (or some of it:) lasting Prezi presentation The Astronomy Masterclass by Andrew Jackson, a teacher who won British national award that celebrates the best in teaching. After that it is easy to understand what to do with your next presentation.

Second presentation won Prezi contest and its good example of Curriculum vitae, how to present yourself with Prezi, from Philippines, Charity Jayne Temple


Third a tutorial from Drawing Tool, new ways use Prezi 

Fourth: Grouping with frames

More video tutorials:

Update: Create shapes
Prezi meeting
Prezyfi Keynote or Powerpoint
Insert a Video
Insert images
Colour and fonts

Blogging in the Classroom

This post present some ways to blog with your students. In my school we have used Blogger, because it is so easy to create. In 10 minutes students are ready to post for the first time.
In my opinion there are many benefits blogging in school. Students work and skils become visible, students gets feedback from classmates and also other maybe international schools and also learn to give open good ctitics for each other, student can use mobile for images, shoot their own videos or embed videos from Youtube - so there are many good reasons to start blogging in the classroom.

First video is great tutorial how to create easy and quick Blogger blog. In Livebinders link end of this post there are other blogs like Wordpress and Kidblog. Slideshare presentations give good reasons and ideas to blog in classroom and blog resources links fulfill your hunger of information. There are more than you need to start blogging with your students.

How to Create a Blog on Blogger

Blogging in the Classroom by Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano

Blogging in the classroom

View more presentations from Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano

A classroom blog and classroom wiki by Fiona Beal

A classroom blog AND a classroom wiki? Show me!_beal

View more presentations from fionabeal

More great blog resources to get you started:


NEW: Reform Symposium Presentation on Student Blogging! by Alfonso Gonzales
Livebinders: Blogging with Students
Cybraryman students blogs 
Kidblog.org
Edublogs.org
100 classroom blogs for teaching ideas & inspiration
The Whiteboard blog: Starting a blog: a guide for teachers
7 reasons teachers should blog by Steve Wheeler
65 interesting ideas for class blog posts by Tom Barret
14 steps to meaningful student blogging
Blogging tactical guide
100 reasons why educators should use blogs
The ultimate guide to getting started with blogging! 
Blogging in Education: Prezi
Beginner Blogging

iPad Resources for Teachers

Last post topic was use of iPad in Classroom, iPad tutorials and goals for our iPad project in six Finnish upper secondary schools. There are lots of great examples of iPad use in school. In this post i present some fantastic iPad resources for teachers.  

Prezi: iPods and iPads in the Classroom

Ipods and Ipads in the Classroom on Prezi

iPad in Education

iPad Resources: Blogs, Pages and Slides


Apps in Education
Learning and Teaching with iPads
iPodsibilities blog
iPads in Education
iPads for Learning
iPad Academy
iPad in Education
St. Marys City Schools mobile learning technology 
62 interesting way to use an iPad in the classroomUser Guide (pdf)
Cybraryman iPad page
iPads in the Classroom
iPads in the Classroom by @mathevolve Adam Coccari
iPads in Education by Joe Evans, Scoop.it.
iPads 1:1 Initiative
Exploring iPad for Education (Slideshare)
How to use iPads in the Classroom (slideshare)
iPadschools
Elementary iPad (issuu)
iPad for Administrators
iPads and Mobile Media in Education
40 iPad Apps for Science Students
100 free iPad apps
Getting started with iPad
Using iPad as a teacher
iPad pilot on Virginia
iPod Touch & iPad Resources, LiveBinders
iPad Learner
Quick list of iPad resources
iPads in Classroom

iPad in Classroom

We are starting two year mobile, iPad and tablets project in six Finnish upper secondary schools in August. Project is funded by Finnish National Board of Education, learning enviroment development projects. 

Project goals are: 

• iPad use in history and economics class and language teaching
• iPad use in entrepreneurship project teams and all kind of project based learning
• iPad use in part of our school athletes learning and training.  

We will post lot of examples of this project during next two years, but before that I give some Youtube examples of iPad use in classroom.

If you have not used iPad before, check Apples guided tours.

Using the Ipad in Classroom

Kindergarden and second grade students use Ipad

Ipad for every Lakewood Park Student

Seton Hill students with Ipad

Skype in Classroom

Thanks to Twitter I have lots of new teacher colleagues around the world. Im starting next year cooperation project with one school from Australia and one from Greek. We try to do online projects with a help of  Skype. 

I hope this post help students and teachers use  Skype videocalls  collaboration with countries around the world.  First part of post presents basic use of Skype and second gives some  examples how to use Skype in Classroom.


Making easy Videocalls with Skype

How to use Skype

Skype Tutorial Guide Presentation

View more presentations from iamproudlypinoy2010

Skype in Classroom

After basic manual instructions check Skypes program Welcome to Skype in classroom. Video tutorial in Vimeo show  How to create a project on Skype in classroom.

Example of Skype in Classroom

Example of Skype in Classroom

Ways to use Skype in Classroom:


Educators guide using Skype in classroom
50 Awesome Ways to use Skype in Classroom
Boost your Skype
How to Use Skype at School
Virtual author visits in your library or classroom
Skype around the world project
LiveBinders: Skype in School
List of examples
Skyping in classroom (Slideshare)
Skype in the K-12 classroom (Slideshare)
Skype for Interviews - slidecast