Always more tools

Seems that there is always something new to play with that we can come across. These are a couple of things that would be good to find some reviews of or try out. These applications seem to be ‘in the cloud’ which seems a bit like the old idea of the thin client, but with access to everyone else’s files.

Aviary: This seems like Google’s way of doing everyone out of business (is technology a public good now) with a set of apps which do image and sound. I guess there are other apps for this (garage band and adobe ilustrator at school) but this is free and drops right in to the google apps account that everyone in school has- even sets up a folder for files automatically. I think it would be good to have some fluency with this one.

Many eyes is a data visualization tool. Not really an alternative to graphical analysis for producing graphs for IBIA – more cool toys like word clouds and so on. Not really sure what it is for at the moment – maybe data analysis for text survey data.

Nice to have some things to play with in the holiday to reduce productivity!

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Photos and whiteboard notes

A couple of quick things.

A simple and quick way of taking exemplar work. After marking a set of lab reports today I took a couple of pictures of some good examples of some sections. I was then able to put them straight up on the board for discussion – very immediate if you have the camera and card reader there. This takes advantage of the projector in every room thing. Archiving these may have some value, though the immediate feedback is good – this aspect is worth some thought.

Whiteboard notes is progressing well, but there is a lot of fiddling to get into the right display mode quickly and to the right part of the text. This would be worth some thought. Have resisted publishing this so far, but it may be more important to support some middle school students, so I think I should revisit this decision.

Here the middle school web page may be useful. Certainly some thought needs to go into how to use this efficiently

Grade 11 students have used the graphical analysis part of logger pro with train data. This seems good, bit takes some time to teach and a manual for this in some form (video logs?) would be great.