ICT

CS4HS

fjostsons — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 10:29:46 +0000

During the holidays I went to a CS4HS (Computer Science for High school teachers) workshop at Sydney Uni which was sponsored by Google.

It was fascinating, well organised, thought provoking, exciting and well worthwhile. There’s another one on in September! I can highly recommend it.

The materials and presentations are here. Initially I thought some of it was going over my head… but it was interesting to discuss implications and ideas afterwards. The ideas of creating efficient algorithms are far reaching in all aspects of problem solving and critical thinking. From searching for a name alphabetically in a phone book to more complex ideas of how to rank web pages for google search engines, algorithms are used to solve problems everywhere. We need to be able to create efficient and fast and robust algorithms.

There are several opportunities for our students that need to be highlighted.

For Year 11 and 12 students who are keen on a summer school week in January, there is the Summer School. Here is a You tube link. It looks great fun. The program is run by James Curran who was recently named as one of Australia’s most influential people list by the SMH. He is brilliant, articulate, approachable, amazing as were the other tutors involved!

For high school students there is The NCSS Challenge. This is a 5 week challenge run in August for any student interested in programming. Each week you are guided through a number of tasks. The tutors are amazing. And there are three levels that you can go in. Everyone starts as a beginner. You can be any age. (in High School) Brochure is here. Its well organised and just ready to go!

The workshops and summer school are sponsored by Google . I think there may be some other sponsors but google is the main one. I didn’t realise Google employ up to 600 people in Sydney. The Googlers! hosted a careers question and answer session and described their roles within the Google organisation. Again, articulate, intelligent, interesting, approachable, brilliant! I was blown away by the interesting and far reaching things they are doing! We really are in the Information age.

Data Projects

fjostsons — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 10:04:47 +0000

Tm data visualisaton

This was the presentation on data tools and data visualisation I presented at TeachMeet Brookvale on Wednesday 21st March.

View more PowerPoint from Fiona Jostsons

Popplet

fjostsons — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 11:22:34 +0000

Popplet is a free mind mapping and summarising tool. It does require an email account for registration. I like that you can easily add images directly from Flickr and your PC and also youtube videos.

It is easy to use and it looks great. I can really see kids using this to summarise a topic. Karen Atkins suggested one use could to set up all the vocab of a topic and then have the definitions in seperate popplets and get the kids to link them up. They could email their finished products directly to you.

Examples of Popplets

Napoleon

Earning Money Year 11 General Maths – A collection of resources and discussion points.

This is an example of a timeline created by Horry County Schools by Sean Junkins.

What other uses are there for Popplet? What else works??

LiveBinder

fjostsons — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 11:59:37 +0000

Live binder is a great way to collect all your information on a topic. I can see this being a great way to set up all your resources regarding a topic.

Sue Waters from Edublogs has created a really detailed overview of this tool here as part of her Teacher Challenge Series.

Symbaloo

fjostsons — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 11:41:50 +0000

Symbaloo is a very cool and visual way of keeping all your favourite bookmarked sites together. There are some good mixes in the Gallery that you use. I can see this being used by a school or a department within a school to have all their useful sites visually represented in front of them. Sometimes you forget about really great sources of lesson plans, or where did I see that topic really well set out. Symbaloo is a very useful bookmarking tool indeed. You can also add feeds of your favourite websites and blogs to a mix too.

It seems that everyday there is a new blog post listing 50 great apps you must know about or the top 20 sites for lesson plans. How are we actually meant to keep on top of it all. Well symbaloo is a great way to store all your favourite tools and blogs for easy reference.

Its free and all that is required is an email address to get going. The only negative with symbaloo is that many of their tiles are very American based. Its very easy to create new tiles, but I can see it will only get easier to use as more Aussie and international tiles are added.

Stop Motion Movie

fjostsons — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 07:31:54 +0000

This weekend I attended the ICTENSW conference at Sydney University. One of the workshops was given by Sam Pennnington where we had the oppotunity to make a “Stop Motion” Movie.
We downloaded MonkeyJam. We took the photos and uploaded them to Monkey Jam. Make sure your photos are of a low resolution (like try not to have 80 photos at 10MB each). You may need to use Windows Picture Manager to resize them or use Picresize to resize them. We then used Movie Maker to add titles and credits. It was a great session. Thanks Sam!

7 tips for using Outlook 2010

fjostsons — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:42:42 +0000

We’ve just upgraded to Outlook 2010. These are some simple but useful things to know.

1. Set up a Contact Group,(otherwise known as a distribution list)

In Contacts, on the Home tab, in the New group, click New Contact Group.

In the Name box, type a name for the Contact Group.
On the Contact Group tab, in the Members group, click Add Members, and then click From Outlook Contacts, From Address Book or New Email Contact.

2. Create a signature

Open a new message. On the Message tab, in the Include group, click Signature, and then click Signatures.

On the E-mail Signature tab, click New.
Type a name for the signature, and then click OK.
In the Edit signature box, type the text that you want to include in the signature.
To format the text, select the text, and then use the style and formatting buttons to select the options that you want.

The signature that you just created or modified won’t appear in the open message; it must be inserted into the message.

To Insert a signature automatically

On the Message tab, in the Include group, click Signature, and then click Signatures.
Under Choose default signature, in the E-mail account list, click an email account with which you want to associate the signature.
In the New messages list, select the signature that you want to include.
If you want a signature to be included when you reply to or forward messages, in the Replies/forwards list, select the signature. Otherwise, click (none).

3. Recall a message We’ve all done it. Hit send too early… If only we could cancel that message before anyone sees it. Well now you can.To recall or replace a sent message, open the message in the Sent Items folder, and on the Actions menu, click Recall This Message.

4. Print only one page from an emailOn the Print menu, then select a Page Range option.

5. Sort messages alphabetically by sender name To sort, click Arranged By and then click From. To reverse the alphabetical order, click From again. To sort by Subject line, click Subject. You can sort this way in any table in Outlook

6. Reduce Clutter with Clean Up Conversation FeatureOutlook’s new Conversation Clean Up feature is a great space-saver, because it can delete a tidal wave of older messages from a conversation while preserving all the information. It does this by checking whether a later message contains the text of an earlier message. If it does, Outlook deletes the earlier message and retains the only the later one (which contains the text from the earlier one). It’s smart enough not to delete message with attachments.To use this feature, turn on the Conversation view by clicking on the View tab, then add a check next to Show as Conversations.Then, to clean up a conversation or a folder, right-click on the message or folder, choose Clean Up Conversation. A dialog box will open with buttons marked Settings and Clean Up. To use the default settings, click on Clean Up.

7. Insert a Screenshot in an Outlook 2010 MessageWhen you want to e-mail a picture of a dialog box or browser screen or anything else that appears on your desktop, begin writing your message, click on the Insert tab on the Ribbon, then click Screenshot. A dialog box shows you all the current windows open on your desktop so you can choose the one you want to insert, or click on Screen Clipping and click to draw a box on screen. Press Enter, and the contents of the box will be inserted into your message.

You are your Words

fjostsons — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 10:23:12 +0000

You are Your Words is a web tool created by the American Heritage Dictionary. It allows you to upload a picture of yourself and then add some words and it uses these words to create a self portrait. It is easily downloaded or shared to twitter or facebook. No registration is necessary. Good Fun!

My Favourite Websites

fjostsons — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 10:34:16 +0000

The Smithsonian List of Places to see before you die

Need Inspiration!

fjostsons — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 09:56:10 +0000

The places you’ll go by Dr Suess

Steven Bradbury

Susan Boyle