Free podcast hosting and how to publish a podcast...

This is an explaination of how to host your podcasts for free using GoogleDrive and there is a link at the end to show you how to publish a podcast to iTunes

Poll Everywhere

To remind myself of where to find this, here is a link for Polleverywhere.com 'How it works' page.

Nearpod

This is a tutorial for Nearpod... So I remember.
Nearpod tutorial
There are loads of tutorials/help guides at  http://nearpod.com/help/

Quizlet

A quizlet that I created with ilversmithing tools....

The value of mobile technology in teaching and learning

"ICT has given the, till now mercifully silent, blogger a new sense of the power of his own voice, and you can bet he is not afraid to step out of the shadows, stick a new piece of Sellotape to his glasses and declare his power." (Beadle, 2011) Well, here I am wishing I could be silent but having to blog. It still feels weird to me, even if I do add that bit of Sellotape to my glasses. All protests aside, there is a benefit to blogging or at least reading other people's blogs, in that you have access to a wealth of information from anyone and everyone. Most importantly though you can access information from your peers and you can do this any time and pretty much in any place thanks to mobile technology. Some of my blog posts have been written on my iPhone as I have tried to keep up with my work-load on the go, for example; whilst sat in the doctors waiting room I am no longer wasting time listening to the horrifically bad music playing on the obscure radio station which I am assuming is all that they can tune in to, I can write an essay using Pages, I can work on the internet (eg. blogging), I can read books, listen to podcasts, send and read emails, build a Pinterest board, etc. Laura Doggett, who is director of e-Learning at Westfield Community Technology College, writes about similar things in a blog post entitled Nine Great Reasons Why Teachers Should Use Twitter. She describes Twitter as being like a virtual staffroom which she can enter at any time, day or night, where she can access resources from Global professionals and she uses Twitter to question and improve her practice.
 It makes sense that, even though someone like myself may not be a digital native and may sometimes struggle with technology, it has a valid and very useful place in today's teaching environment.  


References
 
Beadle, Phil Bad Education (Carmarthen: Crown House Publishing, 2011) pg.67
http://www.elearninglaura.net/2009/03/29/nine-great-reasons-why-teachers-should-use-twitter/ (date accessed 16/01/15)

Barriers to the effective use of technology in education.

Whilst on my teaching placement I have used technology as I am pretty technology reliant in my every day life any way, my iPhone is my alarm clock in the morning, my calendar, my diary/planner, my to do list, my music player on the walk to placement, my device for checking Moodle and emails as well as my phone and probably a myriad of other things that I have forgotten (unfortunately my iPhone cannot think for me and write this blog post for me, yet!). Besides all of these things I have also used my iPhone whilst on placement to create a quick Pinterest board for students to accompany my first workshop/lesson which I had to plan in 5 minutes as it was my first day of placement. The ability to do this on my phone and then to give the students the link to the board made the seemingly impossible task of teaching with no resources become possible.
 There are barriers to the effective use of technology at my placement and these include:

• lack of available technology; the technology available where I have been teaching consists of 3 iMac desktop computers and a photocopier/printer (which are available for students to use), a projector, mobile phones and other devices brought in from home by tutors/students.
• lack of understanding of technology
• lack of knowledge of new technology
• lack of funding
• relevance

Also, where students are asked to go away and research for themselves they inevitably come back with either reams and reams of irrelevant or incorrect information or nothing at all, attention needs to be paid to their "information skills", there is an abundance of information available but  much of it is not quality information and so students need guidance processing, evaluating and selecting the quality rich content. (Crawley, 2005)


References

Jim Crawley In At The Deep End (David Fulton Publishers Ltd., London: 2005) pg 55 - 59

A blog for anyone interested in knitting and taxidermy (probably only me?)

If you can knit and prefer animals that are not alive then this is the blog for you!
http://sincerelylouise.blogspot.co.uk

How technology has changed the way we learn.

Technology has certainly changed the way my children learn, and also the way I learn, compared to the way I was taught when at their ages; I had the choice of being taught at school, private instruction (something unaffordable to my family), learning through books or peer to peer learning, whereas, my children have access to all of these things and also the wealth of instruction provided by the internet and current technologies.  As an example, when I was eager to learn taxidermy I found that there were no courses or people giving private instruction in Wales and so I bought myself several books on taxidermy. These books were all very outdated, referencing the use of chemicals that are now unobtainable and I found it nigh on impossible to find any up to date material to learn from. Technology came to my rescue; the internet provided me with websites where I could find online tutorials, I could Google modern day equivalents to the dangerous chemicals used in the past, I could use YouTube to watch tutorials and see taxidermy techniques carried out before my eyes and I could do all of this on my mobile phone at any time.
 In Reflective Teaching In Further And Adult Education Yvonne Hiller discusses computer assisted learning and the potential that technology and the internet has for self-directed learning, it is also noted that consideration should be given to any information found using this resource. (Hillier, 2005)
The main benefit I find to using the internet as a learning aid is the amount of information that you can find on any subject, the down side to this is that you have to cross reference any information that isn't from an academic source as it may be incorrect or unreliable content. However, this cross referencing can help you to find an alternative explanation that you can understand more easily, for example I am learning to play ukulele and I have come across several people offering ukulele tutorial lessons on YouTube and I have the luxury of being able to select the tutor I find easiest to understand. If I were in a classroom learning environment and I struggled to understand a teacher's explanation then I may have a problem. If this happens with a YouTube tutorial video then I just find another video from another person. I am concerned that I have no one to check I am learning correctly though, it is easy to misunderstand instructions and I could be getting it wrong so although I have all of this information at my finger tips do I have the quality of learning that I would have if I was trying to learn the ukulele without the use of technology?



References

Hillier, Yvonne Reflective Teaching In Further And Adult Education pg. 116 - 118

Tedtalk (I have finally found/unpacked my computer after moving)....

JR's Ted Prize Wish
This Tedtalk should be inspiring to everyone, not just to me. I watched a few Tedtalks and was underwhelmed if I'm honest, I struggled to find anything that I found interesting, let alone inspiring until I came across this one.
 This is an art project that I had heard and read a little about but until watching the Tedtalk I had no idea of the scale, impact or ambition of the Inside Out Project. There is a website for the project which has further information than the Tedtalk and from the website there is information on participation which is something that I would be interested in pursuing with students. Something that I have always believed is that art can change the World and this Tedtalk inspires a feeling of empowerment and motivation within me.

Bookmaking books!!

Okay, so, I did promise to put books from the university libraries up here for anyone who is interested and I am actually able to go on my computer for five minutes today as I'm at home looking after a child with suspected mumps! She is in quarantine at my house until Wednesday and Public Health are sending a swab kit round to confirm if mass hysteria at her school will outbreak or not.
Anyway, the books;
Expressive Hand-made Books by Ailsa Golden
Shelf-mark - 686.302/GOL
The Handmade Book by Angela James
Shelf-mark - 686.302/JAM
The Penland Book of Handmade Books: Master Classes in Book Making Techniques
Shelf-mark - 686.3/PEN
Paper by Melody Lord and Jeanette Bakker
Shelf-mark - 745.54/PAP
Handmade Books - An Introduction to Bookbinding by Rob Shepherd
Shelf-mark - 686.302/SHE
these books are all in Griffith Library (Dynevor campus) but can be ordered into Townhill library.

Preparing for the micro lesson has forced me to learn how to to take a snippet screen shot on a mac...

CMD + SHIFT + 4 then outline with your mouse and hey presto you have it saved to your desktop. Just make sure you rename it or you will be confused by all of the screenshot titled icons/pictures floating before you on your desktop!

Explain Everything

Here is an attempt at making an Explain Everything about silicon mould making. It is very basic but I can see the potential for this app. The one below was created very quickly in uni but if I had this at home with access to all of my photos, etc I could make something much better. 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwfuHQJ5z6MvQWNjX0lqRHdvNWM/view?usp=sharing

Delicious.com

This is a social website bookmarking site, I am finding it confusing but here is the address of mine: https://delicious.com/p095860
Do not expect to find much of use here but Mandy's will be more useful!
 https://delicious.com/peacehome

Explain Everything app

This is a link to the developer's webpage for  Explain Everything., This is one of the apps that the geezer (sorry, can't remember the name) who came it to talk to us yesterday was on about. I haven't really explored it yet, thought I'd post this first so I don't forget about it! 

What an amazing technological world we live in!!! (QR codes)

So I have just been researching QR codes, when I say researching I mean that I have just spent less than 5 minutes finding a website that lets you create QR codes that link to pretty much anything for free. You can have a website, a phone number, an email address, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, plain text, and the list goes on, linked to the QR code. I also downloaded a QR code reader from the app store onto my iPhone to check the QR code that I had created and am frankly amazed at how quickly I have managed to create and use something that has been pretty much an enigma to me since I first saw one years ago. Why have I not discovered this sooner, it has so many potential applications.
Anyway, here is my QR code:

But where does it lead??

Pinterest

I have just opened a Pinterest account and it looks like a very useful tool for teaching, you can easily and very quickly gather lots of information and images together on boards which you can either keep private for personal use or make public for access by others.
This is a link to the Pinterest that I have Pinterest

Bubbl

bubbl
This is an online mindmapping website, I probably wouldn't use this as I have a mind mapping program on my Mac which I do find helpful to use sometimes. The program that I use can take your mind map and then create a document in Word or Pages for you.

This is supposed to be helping me to do my homework, I cannot work in silence. I am "one of those" that has to have background noise to help me get on with my work. It's probably because quiet worries me as I have children and if there's quiet I know something untoward is going down!!!

Microsoft Applications

I have no clue which applications are Microsoft and which are not..... Apart from the fact that I know that Office is a Microsoft product, I would call it a program not an application, this may be because I am old.
I generally use Apple/ Mac applications as I have Apple technology, I do use Office on my computer but I use Pages on my iPhone, I switch between the two so that I can work on a document when I am away from my computer (which is a lot as my children do not allow me to use my own computer).

I have been attempting to use PowerPoint tonight and I have to say that I am not getting on well with it or PowerPoint online or Microsoft online in general. 

Another Blogger Who Is doing It Well

This is part of a task that was to be done by myself and Taran, his part can be found here: http://p137114.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/here-is-blogger-that-has-gone.html#!/2014/09/here-is-blogger-that-has-gone.html

http://arthistoryblogger.blogspot.co.uk/

This art history blog captures your interest straight away with their layout. It's neat and tidy and well organised and the latest post stands out in a larger format at the top of the screen. Each post has a picture of the painting, or an artwork by the artist, that the post is discussing. As I am new to blogging I have no idea if this is a standard thing or if this is an option that the blogger has chosen, but along the top of the blog is a ribbon (not sure if this is the correct terminology) with optiions for you to change the way you view the blog, ie; classic, flipcard, magazine... I find that this is a useful option for seeing which posts may be most relevant to you.

 http://arthistoryblogger.blogspot.co.uk/?view=mosaic#!/2012/11/the-unicorn-tapestries.html

 This captured my attention as I like unicorns and had seen this image before but did not know that it was from a series of tapestries entitled The Hunt Of The Unicorn, these tapestries were created at around 1495-1505.