Picasa Photo Manager

I recently rediscovered a program that I use to love and recommend, Picasa. I had Picasa recommend to me by a friend long long before they were acquired by Google. However Google knows a good product when they see it, and they snapped up in 2004. I used it to manage my images from my first digital camera, Kodak's mc3.

It goes to show how far (and how fast) we have come - I clearly remember the amazement of people in 2002 as I turned the camera around to show them the picture I had just taken... even more amazement when they saw and heard a video of themselves! Now I don't think many children in secondary school can remember a world without digital cameras.
Digital cameras are an underutilised device in science classrooms, use them for

• taking photos of experimental set ups
• excursion reports
• constructing a taxonomy
• constructing a food chain
• creating a virtual tour of your science facilities
• a digital photography science competition.

Here is an example of how the Victorian AIP used blogger to showcase a digital physics photo competition.

My students' leaf disc experiment, year 12 biology, 2010.

Why use Picasa? It trawls through your drives and locates photos AND videos. It creates thumbnails for the videos so you can easily locate them. With one click you can upload a whole folder to the cloud to make sharing pictures and videos with anyone easy.



I am going to test out the geotag feature on my recent road trip along the Great Ocean Road.

Cassiopeia Project

The Casseopia Project have a motto "No science teacher left behind." Their videos are free to use ... download, remix (like I did in my google teacher application - see previous post) and have some really excellent explanations. I used the video about complexity theory in my google teacher application. Their videos cover all areas of science.

Google Teacher Academy

I have just finished my application for Google Teacher Academy - the day it was due in. The main part of the application contained a 1 minute video on "Motivation and Learning" The hardest thing was to squeeze my message into sixty seconds! 

Statistics

Most people find statistics are boring I hear you say? There is probably a statistic for that. As a student pointed out to me once, 56.7% of statistics are completely fabricated. If you want to know how boring students find school the numbers are all there on NationMaster.com.

Perhaps you want to find some interesting education facts. Not as animated as Gap Minder, but fascinating reading.

Quizlet has audio!

Quizlet have just implemented several new functions- audio and embed will be very useful. With audio you can choose the language of pronounciation, so if you teach a language, quizlet will help your students pronounce the words. The embed function means that students can have your flash cards right away in your site or blog, without having to naviagate away.
Try my scientific terms Quizlet.

Choose a Study ModeScatterLearnFlashcards

Study these flash cards | Study science flash cards

Out of existing features I love the "most missed word" feature.

Year 12 Biology Video Resources

Last year I took a different tack with my year 12 class to stimulate them to choose their own topics in the Human Awareness Essay. I gave them a series of films to view in their own time, to give them some insight into current issues in Biology. This gave them the confidence to choose topics that we had not yet covered.

The World According to Monsanto (Macromolecules/Cells)

GATTACA (Macromolecules- no longer available on youtube :-(

Supersize me (Organisms)

Home (Ecology)

Essential viewing in my class during the genetics section is the PBS documentary “Cracking the Code”. The streaming video would never work at school, so I would “load” each chapter in multiple browser tabs at home, hibernate my computer and it would all be there when I got to school. This is a way a teacher with a laptop can get around all a sorts of ridiculous blocking!!!

International Year of Chemistry 2011

2011 is the International Year of Chemistry. Go to the site, register and get involved.

An example of an activity a school can get involved in  "Water–A Chemical Solution: A Global Experiment" which you can register to particpate in, fully resourced with worksheets -Water: No Dirt, No Germs and pH of the Planet, which gives classes the opportunity to share their results in a truly global experiment.

Visit the Australian site to see what events are happening locally.

Have a look at the teachers page that contains some great worksheets.

Teachers' Domain

Teachers in the US would be well aware of the resources on Teachers' Domain, lesson plans, flash animations and video clips, but local teachers may not be aware. Registration is free! The short clips (mainly PBS) provide an excellent resource. 

A tiny sample of the clips I have used:

Yr10 Forces: Neil Armstrong dropping a hammer and feather on the moon. (also available on youtube)

Yr 10 Genetics: One Letter Wrong (about Tay Sachs disease – quite emotionally charged)

Yr 9 Earth Rocks: Dating Lava Flows.

The videos are both quicktime and mp4 format, both play in VLC. However you have the added benefit of subtitles if played in quicktime, helpful for hearing impaired students. A significant portion of their video resources are downloadable and the mp4s embed well into powerpoints.

Searchable and well sorted, although their obscure filenames when downloaded are extremely annoying eg  ess05_vid_solarwind_300-raw OR tdc02_vid_singlecell_300.

Embedding Youtubes into Powerpoints

Once again a pleasure to present at the SASTA Psychology Conference. This year I discussed the benefits of integrating Psychology into year 10 science, the task sheets and resources are all available on the psychologySA site (made with Google Sites). Make sure that you share the URL of the psych site with your Psychology colleagues. I used slideshare to put the video in, however Derren Brown has banned embeds.. it does mean you can click on the link and watch it in youtube.

2011 sasta psych conference presentation collins

View more presentations from cyberspaced educator.

So how did I embed that video? Firstly I snagged the video using this technique, making sure it was an mp4. (powerpoint doesn't like flv files) and placed it where I could find it (if you can't find it, it is in your downloads folder).
In a new slide there are some content options.... select the icon that looks like a film spool.

You then find and select the mp4 you want in there.

Then choose whether you want it to play automatically or when clicked. Then you need to tick the box that says "play full screen", and voila, you are DONE! 

One word of caution... if you copy the powerpoint to somewhere else, eg a USB, it won't work because the mp4 is not really "embedded", it just creates a link.

Astronomy STARters

I love teaching astronomy. Here are some slideshare powerpoints to explore.

Younger kids intro
Year 10 astronomy
Planets
Spectacular space pictures
Space shuttle

If you like them "favourite" them.

Tagexdo tag cloud

Similar to Wordle, Tagexdo has tag clouds that come in many shapes. Here are my deli.cio.us tags.

Blog to Zine

This is what I love about the web. I think to myself - "I wonder if anything can turn my blog into an e-zine?" type "turn blog into e-zine" and surely enough someone out there has a tool at the ready, in this case Zinepal.

Why?

It is one thing to view a blog, but it doesn't convert well into paper.

Reason #1 :Let's say you have a favourite blog that have numerous posts that you think would be relevant to your staff. You can print those posts that are relevant and place them on a pin up board, circulate it at a faculty meeting, or stick them up on the back of the toilet door so you can catch a captive audience. (professional development by stealth!)

Reason #2: Your students are blogging and you wish to have a hardcopy to mark/critique or submit for moderation etc.

Reason #3:Perhaps you have a class blog and you want to send hardcopies home to parents to showcase student work.


How?

1. Make an account with Zinepal.
2. Put the URL for the blog in the window

3. You select the blog posts you want, then you can rearrange them in the order you prefer.

4. Then the blog is made into a lovely looking pdf which can be read on the screen, emailed or printed.

Any drawbacks?

The free version can only contain 5 blog posts, and has Zinepal branding. If you want to have more scope for your zine you need to pay $5 which is a reasonable price for the professional looking product.

Naked Scientist experiment resource

Last year during Science Week I had the pleasure of taking my year 9 class to see Chris Smith of The Naked Scientists radio program (he was fully clothed) at the RIAus. They have the mantle of promoting science communication, which they do via their weekly podcast, their website and my favourite, their "Kitchen Science" segment.

The Kitchen Science segment has experiments that anyone can do with household equipment. Experiments I have used in the classroom are extracting iron from cereal, making a trebuchet (we did this on peace day while examining instruments of war!) magnets and TV's and making a toaster hot air balloon. The great thing is that all the experiments come with clear instructions and video clips.

Their new video segment Science from the Sporan is silly but fun and their Science Scrapbook is good for kids.

I subscribe to the kitchen science RSS feed so get to scan their experiments from my iGoogle page.

CleVR panoramic photos

You don't need a fancy camera or software to stitch together numerous side by side photos to create a landscape, the easy to use site CleVR can do it for you (note the VR is for virtual reality). If you do have a fancy camera that does it for you, you can still upload your panoramas and use the CleVR interface to display it on your website, blog or wiki, just by embedding the html code.
This was my effort after visiting Uluru in 2009 (note:Oprah is not in the picture). Zoom in, zoom out, restart the pan by right clicking and pressing play. You can even make a complete 360 degree view!

Panorama of Uluru on CleVR.com

What makes CleVR really clever is the ability to make hotspots that will take you to other images. With a tripod you could get the students to make a VR tour of the school! Perhaps that could consitute a new SACE research project for a student.

This is what the CleVR guys had to say: Most people have seen panoramas embedded on sites, whether this is on a real estate site or something like Google Street View. However it can be really hard and annoying to create and share them. The best stitching software is very expensive, and even the free ones can be very fiddly to use. Sharing them is even harder, especially if you want to link different locations together into a virtual tour. CleVR makes all of this very easy by having a very simple stitcher which integrates with the site, and an embeddable viewer. CleVR does for panoramas what YouTube did for video.

Annenberg Resources

There are many sites on the web that have the brief to improve the quality of teaching and learning - Annenberg Media's Learner.org site is one of them. It has diverse resources in most subject areas, videos, interactives and articles all sorted in disciplines and grade level.

The interactives include "Amusement Park Physics" where you can design a rollercoaster. For my money the best resources are the psychology resources. I set up some launch sites for the last SASTA Psychology Conference to give teachers an overview of the Annenberg resources. Essential viewing for psychology teachers!!!

• Watch "Discovering Psychology" with Philip Zimbardo
• Watch "The Mind"
• Watch "The Brain"
• Watch "The World of Abnormal Psychology"

Science Podcasts

I would like to recommend three outstanding podcast series to every science teacher or anyone interested in science, which you can listen to on your mp3 player as you walk, in your car - WWW stands for - Where ever, Whatever, Whenever!

The first two are from the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), firstly "Chemistry in its Element" which has their podcasts laid out in an easily navigable periodic table. This would make a brilliant chemistry assignment - choose an element, listen to the podcast and make a summary of the audio information OR just a homework where students list 3 interesting facts.

Check down the bottom of the page if you want to download them rather than listen to them on the page, or use itunes.

New is the RSC's "Distilling the Compounds the Count" which is a still evolving series, both series are brilliant.

The last series is a physics series which uses a similar format to the podcasts above, called E=mc2 explained (I can't superscript!) from Nova. Ten top physicists—two Nobel Prize winners among them—describe Einstein's equation to curious non-physicists.

Popplet Mindmaps

I love mind and concept maps in the classroom. They can be used to

• gauge student knowledge before teaching a unit
• help students link concepts together
• summarise content in a unit
• assist retention and recall

I have used bubbl.us successfully in the classroom, both as a teaching tool to whiteboard information, as in my medical class ...

or for students to generate their own maps. Students enjoy using technology and producing a professional looking concept map.

Popplet is in its beta phase, it has the simplicity of Bubbl.us but has some similarity to Prezi, in that you can play a sequence of popplets. Even though I like the interface of Prezi, Popplet is so simple anyone can just start poppleting! Available for both the web and the ipad.

Wikipedia - Good or Evil?

Last year I did some professional development and engaged in a conversation with some experienced and regarded teachers. The topic of Wikipedia came up and a quite a lively discussion ensued. Most teachers there seemed against Wikipedia as a source of information for students. The statement that really surprised me was the contradictory "We send our students to Wikipedia first, but we don't let them use it as a reference." 

It is the often cited reason  that "anyone can edit Wikipedia" which makes teachers discourage their students from using this valuable resource. Wikipedia is like a living organism in that it is self healing. If someone "wounds" Wikipedia with erroneous or biased information the community which monitors it, fixes the wound.

Deli.cio.us to close?

Deli.cio.us is the utility I use to remember and organise all the fantastic sites that I happen upon in my journey through cyberspace. Yahoo owns the social bookmarking site and in December rumours surfaced that in an act of corporate pruning they were taking the shears to Delicious which isn't turning a profit. This has been met with outrage from the Delicious community and Yahoo has stated that they are selling, not closing. However when your information is contained in the cloud, there are no guarantees.

One solution is to safeguard your information by exporting it somewhere else and there are several options. You can move to another cloud... Diigo, Yourversion and Xmarks (and probably others) have the facility to import your bookmarks. Quite a few articles rate Xmarks quite highly as a Delicious replacement.
The other is to move from the ephemeral cloud to your machine, and import to Chrome, Firefox, Opera or Explorer.


Go here and then hit export/backup bookmarks. Ensure that you’ve included all tags and notes.

Then go to your favourite browser and simply import the HTML file.


So whether it is closing or just changing ownership it doesn't hurt to back up your precious bookmarks! Do your research, make sure your tags are preserved and that you have all the functionality of Delicious.

Top Tools

Youtube has number one spot for me!

Top100 Tools for Learning 2010

View more presentations from Jane Hart.

Instant crossword using Quizlet terms

Crosswords are excellent for improving students familiarity with new terms. It enhances definition retention and spelling. However generating a crossword takes time, even with a crossword program as you have to input in all the words and definitions. But with Quizlet and Free Crossword Puzzle Maker it is a snap!

1. Firstly find or make a Quizlet set - very quick with their autodefine function.
2. When you have your quizlet set press "Export". 
3. All the terms and definitions are then in a box, click "Select All".
4. Ctrl C to copy all the selected terms.
5. Open Free Crossword Puzzle Maker and paste all the terms in the box. 
6. Don't bother with their questionnaire... then hit "Create Puzzle"
7. Then click to see your "puzzle as a web page". 
8. I then take a screenshot of the puzzle, paste that into a word document, then a screenshot of the clues. With some arrangement get them on the same page in the word document.
9. Do the same for the answers. If only Quizlet had this function!

Step 2

Step 3

Step 5

Step8

Teaching in a flash

Last year I had the opportunity to write and teach a year 10 semester science subject called Medical Science. As there was no textbook I primarily used the internet as a resource to support teaching and learning - this started with my Medical Science website which I created with Google Sites.
My main sources of internet resources were interactive flash websites, fantastic medical animations abound in cyberspace. It is amazing the level of understanding and engagement that can be generated by well constructed flash interactives.
To give you a taste of some of the resources I discovered -

• Cardiac Rhythms and Anatomy
• Physics in Medicine the Inside Story
• Yorick the Bionic Skeleton 
• Valve replacement surgery
• Stent Angioplasty
• Anatomy of breathing
• Shoulder replacement surgery

I usually generated a worksheet that accompanied the flash animation to ensure that students had to summarise and synthesise the information presented. I have set these as relief lessons and they were very successful in the students using the internet as a teaching tool.
So how did I find these flash animations?
Using google I put in "shoulder replacement filetype:swf" to see if anyone had made any useful flash animations.

Here is a screenshot of the Physics in Medicine site where you can perform a colonoscopy.

Feel free to use my worksheet which accompanies the Physics in Medicine flash site. There are many biology flash biology resources, go searching!

Neave's Planetarium

I have been a great fan of Paul Neave's site for sometime, which is choc full of visually inspiring and quirky flash fun. Imagination is quite beautiful as is the Mandelbrot set.
Now he has added some more educational offerings like a Planetarium which is a browser-based virtual planetarium of stars and planets customizable by location (latitude and longitude) and time of day.
However the standout for me is Flash Earth which is like a Google Earth or Google Maps.

Easy to use and move around, awesome on full screen mode. This is my screen shot of Uluru... I put Yulara in the search box to find it. I went to Uluru, aka Ayres Rock, six months ago... an amazing place.

If you want see any of my images full size, just click on them, then hit the back button to return to the blog.



Advantages are the speed at which the images are rendered (super quick) and the ease of the interface. Select "Bing with labels" and you have an instant interactive atlas!

Size and Scale

There are some great flash apps which visually give you an appreciation of the microcosm and the macrocosm. Universcale by Nikon is visually dazling as you zoom from the scale of the Universe to the scale of the proton. I used Universcale in my Physics class as an exercise in scientific notation, unit conversion and light years.



Cell Size and Scale by the University of Utah is also an excellent site that trips through the biological word from a coffee bean to a carbon atom, useful in teaching about cells in Biology.


Scale of the Universe by Primax Studio is similar to Universcale, spanning from the scale of the Universe to quantum foam.

Lexipedia

Lexipedia is another visual dictionary which is similar to Visuwords. Hover over the word and the definition appears, then click on the speaker button and the word is pronounced for you.

Digital Library

The paperless reading revolution started with ebook readers like Kindle and has landed firmly with Apple's ipad. The ipad has some limitations, however it has the touch and feel of the future. Reading a document is very seductive on such a crisp screen, I look forward to the deluge of machines and the price plunge on equivalent technology.

Most magazines are going with digital versions, and Cosmos has a free edition for perusal. Cosmos using the zinio interface loads much quicker than Nature. Digital editions are replications of the paper version, rather than web pages with the same content. The benefits of digital over paper is not only saving trees, and greenhouse gases in production and transportation; it is searchable and interactive, delivering audio and video content as well as hyperlinks.

Using a limited trial of three zooms, try out New Scientist (which has its digital offering which touts $125 for 52 issues), National Geographic, BBC Focus also Popular Science.

Get a free trial edition of National Geographic or Popular Science's The Green Home Guide. There are some interactive features in the Nat Geo, but the Green Home Guide has awesome interactives throughout... if this is the future of publishing bring it ON.

Free digital edition of Nature

Nature is the preeminent scientific magazine, to get your paper published in Nature is the scientific communities stamp of approval that you have made it. It also has great news articles and pictures and recently Nature released it's new digital edition. For a limited time there are free subscriptions available and I signed up in October and have been getting regular deliveries via my inbox.



The pages do take a few seconds to download in the iBrowse interface, but the interface is easy to use. It is tough viewing on my 11.6" screen at times, I think a standard 15" would be better. You can change the amount of zoom in the preferences button which is on the bottom right hand side of the screen.

This weeks edition has an article on nanotubes, graphene and fullerenes. I saw Sir Harry Kroto speak at Adelaide Uni about his nobel prize in discovering the fullerene, and he described it as "...the super model of the chemical world. Very pretty to look at, but essentially useless."


So to subscribe >click here< If you don't subscribe at least have a quick look of their photo gallery of 2010 in science.


Happy reading!

Science Practical Resources

Thought I might blog about a few of the many resources I have encountered and used. The UK give their teachers a lot of web support, these sites are chock full of practical ideas.

Practical Biology
Practical Chemistry
Practical Physics

Super searchable sites that detail the experiments with perhaps one thing missing... video support.
Another UK site that does have video support and some great ideas is teachers.tv.

However you can always find your experiment then jump on youtube to see if some keen teacher has uploaded a clip of the prac. Mr Sully is an example of one teacher who has shared his experiments with the world via youtube. His clips have attracted a million views and has over 400 subscribers to his channel. Anyone can participate in the web 2.0 revolution!

Wall Wisher

Wall Wisher gives a grafitti style wall that anyone can add their comments to. It is a little restrictive in that there are no choice of fonts which lacks visual appeal, however it has some real positives in that you do not have to register (your email address suffices) you can name your wall what you want, and you (the wall creator) can opt to vet all the posts on your wall.

Once you have created your wall an email is sent to you giving you a password so you can adjust your wall settings, and a suggested invitation.

Invitation Template:
Hi Guys n Gals

I have created a Wallwisher wall. It is a simple webpage where we all can post our messages easily.

So simply go to http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/cyberspaced and post your message there.

You could use this tool for students to post useful research links so students can research collaboratively, or perhaps feedback on an assignment. Students don't need to register to post on the wall, just double click anywhere on the wall! Maybe math students can post useful youtubes they have found on rearranging equations, or and english class can all post a short poem! If you have a sick student or a student with a birthday this could be used as a virtual card.


You can even embed walls on a website or blog.

Web based Flash Cards - Quizlet

There are several flash card sites on the internet, Quizlet is the one I like to use and I recommend it to my students. I stumbled up on it when teaching the topic of Memory in psychology and the students love it.
Making an account is easy, however if you are on facebook even easier, just login with your facebook account - students love this feature.
Then you can use other peoples flash cards or make your own. There is no need to type in reams of text either, the site asks if you want to "auto-define", which gives suggestions for definitions of your word. Just scroll down to find the one you like, or type your own definition. You can make a set in minutes.
You set the priveleges for the cards, who can view them, who can edit them.
The students can either learn the cards, print them or play games like scatter and space race. Then when they have played with the terms they can test themselves. The site then shows the words that students had most difficulty with.
You as a teacher can see who has played with the cards the most. There is also a cheap app for the iphone/ipod touch that students can download to have the flashcards on their gadgets for truely mobile learning.

I would definitely recommend this for students that struggle with terminology, especially in language intensive subjects like biology and psychology or even foreign languages. Fantastic for ESL students.

Searching the web for tests, pracs and ppts

Have a test on cells coming up? Search for "cells test filetype:doc". That limits the results to word 2003-2007 documents. No luck? Try "filetype:docx" and "filetype:pdf". If you are having trouble finding what you want consider key terms you would expect inside your test like "plant" and "animal".

Perhaps you are looking for a practical activity on surface tension. Try "surface tension" and "practical" or "lab" or "experiment". Then for a worksheet you can add the filetype you are looking for, of course doc or docx files are the best because you can adjust them to suit your needs.

Perhaps you are about to teach a unit on the periodic table. Try "periodic table filetype:ppt". I have yet to find any one PowerPoint that I have used without editing. I usually download several and then cut and paste, alter some text here and there and end up with something that looks like it took me hours and hours instead it took me a fraction of the time. I also use slideshare which I have found some excellent PowerPoints. Just try "periodic table" and see the wealth of resources available.

There are some excellent self-teaching flash resources on the net. Try searching for "filetype:swf" with whatever topic search terms to look for interactive flash animation.

Searching the web

Searching the web is definitely an art. Most students (and some teachers for that matter) don't know how to effectively search the web. Commoncraft do many excellent videos and if you want to know more about web 2.0 either go to the commoncraft site or look on youtube for their clips. Play this clip for your students and improve their skills.

Tutorial on Google Sites

Mary Fran has compiled an excellent tutorial on using Google Sites. Click on Video Tutorials in the menu and there is a tutorial on how to do most things. There are also lots of examples on how google sites can be used in education.