To those members of Yr 10 who are actually doing their homework tonight, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a creation from http://www.jibjab.com/ that surpasses the portrait of me in S2.

Have Fun

Mr B

In another class today we did some experiments with Podomatic. We had a few hassles but think we might just about have the process under control.

Looks like we might have to abandon embedding the player and just put a link to each show.

Let’s see if this works.

A Funny Joke - for an 8 Year Old

cheers

Adrian

Hi All,

For the last few weeks the blogs have been rather quiet as the kids really got into this rather open ended task I set them…

‘You must create a 2 minute video to showcase to the world how intelligent, articulate and creative you are. The video must not be contrary to school ethos and you are only able to use puppets.. What will you do?’

Needless to say we learnt HEAPS and I’m sure we’ll up the production values and refine the process over the coming weeks.

Feel free to leave a comment for these budding poets on their blog.

cheers

Adrian

At school this week one of my classes has a puppet show due for me that we are going to upload to TeacherTube and then embed that video into our blogs.

Here is my first go. My son made this Photostory after attending his aunty’s wedding almost 2 years ago. I often show this video as an example of what children can do with a bit of help and encouragement.

I’m fond of the saying, ‘Teach them how to do it, expect them to do it and they will’.

cheers

Adrian

My son recently had a birthday and his aunty, who is very, very pregnant, forgot his special day. She then wrote him a poem so Samuel and I had a play with the free software Audacity and then tonight I started experimenting with Podomatic as a possible way of hosting class podcasts.

Click here to get your own player.

cheers

Adrian B
NB This post was created in May but got a little lost in the draft box

Edu-bloggers Award

On Saturday I’m flying to Melbourne (c.2000km) to present a couple of sessions at the Expanding Learning Horizons Conference. Needless to say I’m really looking forward to it. I see Will of Weblogg-ed is presenting in the room next door. I’m looking forward to having a chat with him

Last year I found the delegates really responsive to the messages, processes and applications I presented. This year I’ve got a fair few new ideas for them to take back to their schools and classrooms

Here are the outlines of the two sessions I’ll be leading.

The MONSTER 5 1/2 hour session that will give you a little something to work on.

Presentation Title: Productive AND CREATIVE uses of ICTS in the Modern Classroom Presenter - Adrian Bruce Duration - 5 1/2 hr

Presentation Description:
My course is ‘Hands On, Minds On’ and is based on software and processes that I know work in real classroom situations. The course is designed to give delegates ‘just a brief feel’ of the variety and power of modern free educational software applications and web tools.

During the course I also explore processes and organisational strategies that enable teachers to implement Information and Communication Technologies in highly creative and engaging way. Course participants will leave this session with a plethora of great teaching ideas, an incredible amount of inspiration and realistic goals to implement back in their schools and classrooms.

Software (Take a deep breath and brace yourself)

Machinima (2nd Life, Cam-Studio, Movie Maker), Stopmotion animation (Monkey Jam), Podcasting (Audacity and Pod-o-Matic), Digital Story Telling and Vodcasting (Photostory 3 and Teachertube.com), My Classroom Blogging Experiments (Classblogmeister.com), Functional and Creative Photography for Blogging ( Paint.Net, Imageshack.us, jacksonpollock.org), Read and Write tools for Blogging ( The resources are ever changing for this section ) Mind Mapping (C-Map), Digital Music Making (Ejay), Digital Drawing (Inkscape), Cartoon Making using Online tools, Computer Aided Design ( Google Sketchup and Lego Digital Designer), Robotics (Mindstorms NXT robot), 3D animation (Anim8or)

and here is the short one

Presentation Title: Classroom Blogging - The Most Engaging Thing I’ve Done with ICTs so Far - Presenter - Adrian Bruce Duration - 1hr

Presentation Description:
At the beginning of this year I began a project with six teachers where we gave each child in the school from Yrs 3 to 6 their own blog.

We now use the blogs as an online publishing medium for thoughts, opinions, artwork, poetry, digital cartooning, digital artwork, website reviews, book reviews, thinking skills, collaboration and a way to showcase the possibilities of ICTs in the primary classroom. By the time of the ELH Conference we will have mastered integrating many other technologies to our blogging projects such as podcasts, video, 3d animation, stop motion animation and much, much more.

Come along and check out our initial experiments. Hear a few stories of success and failure. Then get a few ideas for using blogs creatively in your own classroom to engage your students in the writing and creative processes.

So get your registrations in and drop in and see me.

cheers

Adrian Bruce

My sister does make me laugh so

Over the next two days she is attending a conference in Sydney Australia which will examine models of education used in disadvantaged schools.

At many of these conferences she allows herself a slight chuckle when a presenter throws up a slide and recommends either my Reading Games site or Phonics Poster site as excellent resources.

She has been known to nudge the person next to her and say, ‘I used to live with that guy.’

Check out the completely remodeled phonics site. New posters. Motivational quotes added to each poster and the posters are now available as pdf and doc files.

cheers

Adrian

One more vote gets me 100 votes in this Blogging Award. Go on. Be the 100th

Edu-bloggers Award

Recently I added this cool little tool that showed where all my visitors came from. It recorded the number of visitors for a day and where in the world people were currently online.

A couple of days ago I noticed that when I clicked on a link on my homepage an Ebay log in page would open. I searched the code on the page and found no references to Ebay or even _blank.

This morning I’ve taken the GeoVisite code off the page and all is well again.

Sorry for any annoyance

Cheers

Adrian

Since my last post I’ve been working a heap and having a little down time.

I’ve been updating the phonics poster site and am almost finished. Already the traffic has doubled since I made it look a little prettier I’ve put together this little flash animation that anyone can use to LINK to my pages.

Free Phonics Posters from adrianbruce.com

Recently I spent 3 days at the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival just engaging with ideas. I’ve always found it funny that teachers have to ‘teach’ Writing but rarely are we what people would consider ‘writers’. So it was nice to attend forums by journalists, poets, activists, novelists and even bloggers.

cheers

Adrian