Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Publishing your own magazine

As part of my students LA program they are creating a magazine. They will be publishing it at their electronic portfolios . I am trying out a few tools.

One is Issuu. Issuu is a site that allows you 100mb uploads of magazines. Create these in a program that allows you to export them as pdf and you can upload them to issuu. I am attempting this and seeing how to get the job done. I have melded a picture from flickr, a keynote presentation and a google doc. When it is done it should look like this...

This embed gives you lots of options. You can just scroll through the magazine here in small view. Or you can go to Issuu and see it full screen. Just like voicethread you can enlarge the picture and zoom in and out.

One of the issues that surrounds this is creating one pdf file. The links they give for software to eliminate this problem are
for mac Combine PDFs 3.0
and for windows PDF helper 1.01

I also tried scribd. It seems easy and is similar to At the time of this post I had to reload the pdf and go again.
(15+ minutes later)It seems to take longer than . I am still waiting. Perhaps there is a file limit. This will be a real downer for the kids if the upload takes this long.
At 20 minutes...
Yeah it finally made it. Here is the same material on scirbd



Either way this is a really cool way to embed some spectacular work at a students eportfolio or just to publish work. I am looking forward to how the student use these tools and how they can teach me.

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Live from NY... no Winnipeg its Smartboard Live

I tried an experiment today. I finally got ustream to work in my class under much protest. It took forever to load and man it was making my mac mini chug like a Dell using Vista (had to say it). But it worked and wow talk about an instant remedy for kids who are absent in class.

/>

Here is my ustream about why this is a good idea.


Now this technology will allow you to project all that you do on your interactive boards to your class blog hub for all to see. I have the luxury of having 4 classes a day taking the same thing. So you do your minilecture...lesson or what ever. Have it on the whiteboard and presto with the help of ustream you have an answer to "Mr. Harbeck what did I miss?" Now Sally did you check out the math hub and the video of todays lesson.

Using Camtwist to project ones desktop eliminates the testy subject of student identity. You will have voices but no faces. Just like an old radio drama.

I will try this again if I can get camtwist to work. It stopped working part way through the afternoon.


Next on the agenda might be Mogulus. I have a channel and will figure out how to work this app. I think it might be time for the Math Action News at 6. With your hosts Frank Fraction and Donna Decimal..... Hmmmmm
Enjoy

Friday, February 01, 2008

Alatoba07 February 1st

Our second collaboration went today. This time Chrystal and I decided to test out Elluminate's Academic version. This allows you to use Elluminate with most of the bells and whistles except the recording feature.

There were some issues because we decided to video and audio through skype and it bonked on us a couple of times. It was nice to have it there for back channels though.

The problem was to do this from The Man Who Counted. I had created a slidecast at slideshare a few weeks ago. The student then had time to work on the problem and then share their work on the elluminate white boards.





This part of the collaboration was excellent. With both of us being moderators we could manipulate the white boards and have them at our disposal. The kids enjoyed this part too. The could see the writing going on the boards from 2500 kilometers away.

This still wasn't the perfect fit. I have 3 fifteen minute screen captures sitting on my desktop at school and they will be too bi9 to upload anywhere. I will have to import them into imovie and then split them up.

Actually I slimmed them down and uploaded them to viddler. You can also see them here at the Alatoba wikisite. I just love viddler because you can leave comments behind at all of the videos. It is a mini pop up video. Please leae comments behind.

On the bright side I was able to get ustream to work at school and this means that the next session on February 19th will be streamed. much better for all I hope.

Thanks for reading and I hope you will try collaboration out.