ISTE 2011: Web 2 Smackdown

First up in Philadelphia for us was the EdubloggerCon on Saturday June 25th.  This was a great chance to meet up with friends and learn new things.

These are my notes from the web 2.0 smackdown.  If you have been using any of these feel free to add links to your work through the comments.....

Web 2.0 Smackdown - Organized by Lisa Thumann

Shapeways.com
3D printing software

http://stencyl.com/
Scratch kind of website for making games

 



screenr.com
records whatever screen you're on

 



jotform.com
create forms that go straight to your Drop Box








notaland.com
kinda like prezi

Casual Collaboration.

Mash your ideas and media together with friends in a dynamic whiteboard wiki. Using photos, videos, and other web content you can instantly create brainstorms, presentations, scrapbooks, and enjoy an interactive chat with more than 50 friends. 

answergarden.ch
no login required so great for school kids.  Create quick surveys

AnswerGarden is a new minimalistic feedback tool. Use it as a tool for online brainstorming or embed it on your website or blog as a poll or guestbook.

scoopit.com
Find web2 tools, post it on the website. Kinda like netvibes or iGoogle

Be The Curator of Your Favorite Topic!

Create your topic-centric media by collecting gems among relevant streams

Publish it to your favorite social media or to your blog

 






lucidchart.com
Create organiser diagrams and mind maps online.  They give all educators free pro accounts.
Diagrams Done Right

We have rethought and redesigned the entire diagramming process to make it as easy as possible. Draw flow charts, wireframes, UML diagrams, and more with just a few clicks.

HTML5 and web standards make LucidChart fast, smooth, and reliable.

Collaborative. Work simultaneously with as many people as you want.

 






qwertytown.com
Keyboarding game. A social network.  Teach your kids to type.  Can limit the social network to the level you are comfortable with
30 day free trial. Also teaches Internet safety as they play

QwertyTown teaches keyboarding, an essential component of literacy for today's students.

Reinforces skills through safe online communication

Addresses Common Core Literacy Standards

Entirely web based

Customizable for learners with different abilities

 






class.io
A way to host your class within Google Apps.  Kinda like teacher dashboard but much more limited



Bo.lt
Connect with People through the Pages you Share
allows you to take any URL and create a unique one

 






shmoop.com
Learning guides
eg literature.  Allows students to choose a novel and has masses of information about the book.  Free text to speech so they can listen to this as well.



present.me
a really easy way to present and share your presentations
If you can’t see a presenter’s face their impact reduces by 55%!

Present.Me is a community for easily recording & sharing your presentations. If you’re a business – it could be to share within your own private space with your employees and customers, or publicly on www.present.me to market to your prospects and collect leads.

Present.Me combines video, audio and your presentations in an easy and intuitive way, so your audience get to see and hear your message in the way it was intended. We’ve built the whole process with ease of use in mind, there’s no need to download specialist software – it’s all there in your browser already. And because it’s online, you can instantly share it with anyone you like, anywhere in the world.

gamesalad.com
Make games with GameSalad Creator
Create games for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and HTML5. No coding involved. All drag and drop. Similar to scratch. Embed code available for blogs portfolio etc. No flash, all html5

 






storybird.com
Storybirds are short, art-inspired stories you make to share, read, and print.
Read them like books, play them like games, and send them like greeting cards.
Create a story with their clip art. Keep adding pages. Collaborative storytelling. Embed on web.  

 




mycybertwin.com/
Create your own cyber twin.  Possibly fun for adults, but kids would have to give it way too much information to make it effective - unless you were doing an embellishment genre for writing, then it may be great fun!

 




popplet.com
combination of glogster and prezi
Check out Amanda's great post about how she uses Popplet here.

 




pixlr.com
Online image editor for the masses
Edit photos online. Kinda like photoshop express online

 



oneword.com
Online vocal builder and enhancer. They give you a word, you write as much as you can about it in the time allocated ie one minute.

You’ll see one word at the top of the following screen.

you have sixty seconds to write about it.

click ‘go’ and the page will load with the cursor in place.

don’t think. just write.

Then type in name and email and submit it.  Then you can see what eveyone else has written.
 





weekinrap.com
Flocab gives you the last week in current events in rap

 




flocabulary.com
hip hop in the classroom for vocabulary

Flocabulary produces educational hip-hop music and engaging curricular materials to teach academic content for grades K-12. The programs are proven to raise scores on state reading tests and are being used in over 10,000 schools nationwide. Heralded as "groundbreaking" and "necessary," Flocabulary has been featured on The Today Show, Oprah & Friends, and MTV.

Dream Job

How do you feel about your job?  Would you call it your dream job?

From time to time I meet people who don't seem that thrilled about their job.  I guess in recession times it is understandable why they don't move on, but I have often wondered why they would keep doing it. 

Today I came across this diagram when I was reading Jen Hegna's Moodle course on Creating Student ePortfolios with Google Sites (and yes, I did have a smile at using Moodle to workshop Sites....).

 

I feel blessed that my job has more often than not landed me in that sweet intersection of passion/talent/career. Hard work, crazy hours - impossible milestones! But if those 3 circles align it doesn't seem to matter.

How 'bout you?....

Google Apps Transition Process

In the first half of 2011 we were notified by Google Apps that our school account was going to be transitioned into a new environment which would provide many additional apps and benefits for our users.
This was great news and something that we had been looking forward to.

It was not completely straight forward, particularly if you were a school with no full time IT admin staff or if you were a school who had been using Google Apps in a big way prior to the transition.

I decided to document our experience through a series of posts as we went through the transition.
Because Blogger is linear, the posts are in reverse order now, so this final post on the subject is to provide a table of contents in chronological order for anyone interested in benefitting from what we learnt.

1. Transitioning our Google Apps accounts
     Where to start

2. Impact of Conflicting Accounts
     What to do if you have used your school email address to sign up to other Google tools in the past

3. More servoices available to your school
    What new apps are available to your Administrator and your school

4. Transitioning User Accounts
    Move the whole school at once or select some pilot users to move first?

5.  Transition Process Complete
    Helping teachers and students access their apps (in our case Blogger) that have been moved from public Google accounts inside the school Google Apps domain.

Transition Process Complete

Several posts later, we finally get to enjoy the fruits of going through the painful transistion process with our Google Apps accounts.  We have apps like Blogger and Picasa inside our school Google Apps Domain and everyone is good to go.

Except.

There is one more step with the student individual blogs. Up until now the students from each class have been sharing a generic login to author their own blogs 

eg. room29@ptengland.school.nz

So the class teacher (who is Admin for all the individual student accounts) had to go into each blog from her Blogger Dashboard and choose Settings > Permissions >

then send an invite to the student using their personal Google Apps email address and invite them to be an author of their own blog.

This seems pretty straight forward:

The students receive an email in their gmail inbox, they click on the link which takes them to Blogger, they follow the instructions and, hey presto!  They can now sign in as themselves when they post to their own blog.

Well it should be that easy, but unfortunately the links to make that happen on two screens in the process are quite small and the text on those pages which catch the eye lead the student to start setting up a new blog.  So we made this next movie to remind the teachers and kids what to do.  They say it has been helpful....

Blog transition to Google Apps from KPE TV on Vimeo.

Now all this is behind us.

Our students sign in to their own Google Apps account.

They can acess their Docs, their mail, their Blog, their Sites, their Picasa account, their Maps - all through a single sign-on process.

The good news is that for the schools in our cluster who only joined up to Google Apps this year, they did not have to go through this process at all.  Their accounts are already in the new Google Apps environment.

Hope publishing this learning curve has been of use to others who are going through it.

Transitioning User Accounts

Having made the decision about which services to offer your school, the next step is to decide whether to bite on the bullet and transition everyone at once, or whether to test the waters with a few user accounts first.

"You can move everyone to the new infrastructure today, or you can try out the new account services with selected pilot users"

Pilot Group

 We went for the selected pilot users option and moved a few teachers, a handful of students and some random accounts set up for subject areas.  When you begin the transition Google offer you an email that they have created to send out to the people being moved to explain what was occuring. We accepted that offer - may as well see the reaction of the pilot users when they get that in their email inbox over the weekend! 


The result was a mixed bag as most of the users had conflicting accounts and they had to work through thay process by themselves.  The feedback from them clarified where the rest of the school would need support.  And that is what led me to this series of blog posts and movie tutorials.


The first concern to me was that a small group of users were unable to be moved at this time - and that included me!  It appeared that the one thing we had in common was that we have signed up to a lot of public Google services using our school domain email.  We are still "on hold" today, waiting for them to sort us out.  It seems that we can sort this ourselves though if we follow these four steps:

Step 1: Visit www.google.com/accounts and sign in with your personal Google Account
Step 2: Click "Change email" under "Personal Settings"
Step 3: Enter a different email address where you can receive mail, enter your password, and click "Save email address"
Step 4: Check your other email address and click the link in the verification message from Google to confirm your change

 With the knowledge we had gained so far we made this next video and showed it to the staff to give them an idea of what was to come...