Adobe Education Exchange – resources for teachers
The Adobe Education Exchange hosts a range of free, peer-reviewed teaching and learning resources, developed by Adobe Education Leaders, educators who are already integrating technology in to classes with great success who also use the Exchange themselves to find inspiration for creative teaching activities.
For example the site contains guidance on teaching code for games design and app development which supports collaborative learning, or lesson plans for effectively teaching photography students panoramic techniques.
For more information or to sign up to the Adobe Education Exchange visit: http://edexchange.adobe.com.
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Sankore – free open source IWB software
Open-Sankore is free interactive whiteboard software that is compatible with all types of IWB. It’s based on what was previously called Uniboard software. It’s been in beta for a while, and from what I can see this is a recent release, although it still needs some work.
The basic tools that you would expect are here. You can write with a pen (4 colours only) and a pencil. There’s a rubber tool, lines and text. Annoyingly you can’t move anything written with the pens – they seem to be fixed once you’ve drawn them onto the page.
The sidebar gives access to shapes – but you can’t group shapes with text. So a speech bubble with a text box over the top will remain separate objects. You also can’t fix layers either – so if you click on the bubble it will pop over and hide the text.
The sidebar also gives access to different apps such as timers, protractors and rulers. There are folders for clip art and videos, but these seem blank right now.
You can choose from 4 different backgrounds – one plain, one dark and then a dark and light grid. The colours of the pens change automatically when you choose a dark background.
In terms of dealing with files – Open Sankore will let you export as it’s own ubz file type. I’m not sure anything else will open that. You can also export as pdf. It will apparently open .iwb files but the two I tried did not import very successfully – I only got text and none of the images or annotations.
I’m really hoping that eventually we’ll get a decent open-source alternative to the big two for users of other boards, interactive projectors,and for teachers who want to write platform-independent resources. We’re not there yet with Open Sankore, but maybe in the future it will get there. But for now it’s just too clunky and lacking in features. As an alternative to Smart or Promethean you’re still going to have so buy Easiteach for now.
You can check it out at http://open-sankore.org/ The download page is in French, but the software will work in English once downloaded.
What do you think? Let me know in the comments.
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Serif DrawPlus X5 Review
I’ve always been a big fan of Serif products* – they provide a much more affordable alternative to the likes of Photoshop or CorelDraw. Just out is version X5 of their popular DrawPlus vector drawing package.
As well as creating standard vector drawings – SerifDrawPlus X5 also lets you generate both Keyframe and StopFrame animations which you can export as either animated .gif files, or as Flash .swf files.
DrawPlus X5 contains all the drawing tools you’d expect. There are lots of pre-set document types including posters, greetings cards and banners, to kick start your designs.
New in X5 is The Shape Builder Tool which can be used to combine simple shapes, including the built-in palette of QuickShapes, into more complex shapes. Dragging between the shapes combines them, and clicking on shapes that overlap will split and create new objects. It’s quick and easy to use.
An instant 3D conversion tool lets you convert simple objects into 3 dimensional shapes. There is also new Styles tab that lets you quickly apply various preset shadows, glows, bevels, feather edges, textures, text effects and more. The user interface has been improved, including the option to display larger tool icons if you wish.
Serif DrawPlus X5 is an excellent product when compared to similar products produced by Corel and Adobe. It can’t do everything these can, but it does enough, and the price should make it very attractive for schools. A single licence for DrawPlus X5 is about £80. It’s also worth looking at the Serif Design Suite which packages up DrawPlus along with MoviePlus, PhotoPlus and WebPlus. A 100 user licence costs around £2600 plus student licences are also available. More info here.
ICT Teachers should definitely take a look at the free teacher resources for using Serif products to support/teach the OCR Nationals, 14/19 Diploma, DiDa etc. These include ideas for projects, step by step guides, pupil worksheets and course materials. It’s an excellent set of resources, and much of it is free if you contact Serif. You can also download some free samples immediately. Take a look here : http://www.serif.com/Education/CurriculumCourses/
As an aside – you can also download and try out free versions of older Serif Software here.
*Disclosure – Over the past few years I have written some of the Serif training materials for the OCR Nationals and 14/19 Diploma, namely the Multimedia, Computer Graphics and Web Design modules. I was sent a free copy of Drawplus X5 to look at, but I have not been paid for this review.
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Hue Animation Studio
Hue Animation Studio is an all-in-one kit to kick start your animation project.The pack includes a webcam and some animation software plus some modelling clay to get you started. I was sent a trial version of the pack to review
The studio includes Zu3D animation software which I wrote about last week which is a very user friendly piece of software. I found it very simple to create a simple stop motion animation and add sounds and titles. Zu3D lets you do onion skinning – so you can see a ghost of the previous frame overlayed onto the live image so it’s easier to see how far you have moved your character before you take the next picture. A very handy feature.
Also included is a Hue flexible webcam. This webcam includes a microphone and comes with a long flexible neck which will help position the camera at a variety of different heights and angles. The picture quality of the webcam is very good and the manual focusing was quite simple to use.
For info the Hue Animation bundle, which comprises Zu3D plus the webcam costs £59.99 on Amazon. But it is worth knowing that Zu3D itself can be downloaded on a 30 day trial and then activated for £29.99. The Hue webcam can be bought on its own for £29.95 on Amazon. Not included in my pack, but apparently part of the bundle, is a pack of plasticine – I bought a simple pack of 8 colours for £1 in Tesco.
I can see that it’s more convenient to buy the bundle, but you will not really be saving any money compared to buying the components individually, especially if you already own webcams in school.
And while the flexible webcam looks great, you can buy things that look similar for about £10 on Amazon for example this camera which costs about £7. Any webcam will work with the Zu3D software.
If you do already own webcams then you can just buy the Zu3D software direct from Zu3D website. And if you want to run this on multiple machines, site licence deals are also available.
Find out more at http://www.hueanimation.com/ and find out more about Zu3D at http://www.zu3d.com/
If you’ve bought the pack – let me know what you think in the comments below!
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Quick and Easy Animation with Zu3D
Yesterday I attended the E2BN conference in Bedfordshire. One of the workshops I attended was by Oscar Stringer of Animation for Education. It was a fun workshop and gave me some more ideas for using animation in the classroom.
The software we used was Zu3D which was pretty easy to get to grips with very quickly. You can download a demo version for free from the Zu3D website. If you like it a single version licence costs only £29.99. Site licences are also available.
It’s a great bit of software which has all the features you’d expect – onion skinning, variable frame rate, copy/past frames and simple playback to review the work so far.
We very quickly made a simple animation from a few lumps of plasticene. The software made it easy to add sound effects and credits and title without having to use other software such as Movie Maker. Several sounds can be layered on top of each other
Here’s what our group made in about 15 minutes:
For some resources to help your class plan an animation, check out the animation for education website and also the learning tools section of the Zu3D website.
For some inspiration for classroom ideas – check out this YouTube channel : http://www.youtube.com/user/claymot
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Smart Notebook Express out of beta
SMART have recently announced that their SMART Notebook Express web application is now available globally and is no longer in beta. SMART Notebook Express is a lightweight version of their SMART Notebook™ collaborative learning software
SMART Notebook Express enables educators to open, edit, save and share .notebook files from anywhere, at any time, regardless of whether they have access to the Internet. Depending on their needs, users can access SMART Notebook Express online by visiting express.smarttech.com or offline by downloading SMART Notebook Express to their desktops.
Both versions offer the same intuitive user interface. Educators who do not otherwise have access to SMART Notebook software will now be able to use SMART Notebook Express to open and interact with SMART Notebook lessons for use in their classrooms and to share those lessons with colleagues, students and parents.
SMART Notebook Express allows for simple editing of Notebook files with the following features:
- Online or offline – Open, edit and save .notebook files from anywhere, at any time, whether online or via a downloaded desktop application
- Platform agnostic – Works with Microsoft Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems
- Save function – Save SMART Notebook files to your computer, including any new content you’ve added or changes you’ve made to the pages
- Page Sorter – View SMART Notebook software pages as thumbnails and reorder the pages of any presentation by simply dragging and dropping the thumbnails
- Text-editing tool – Add or edit text and change the font style, color and size
- Pen tool – Highlight information or write over SMART Notebook files with digital ink using a variety of colors and line styles
- Object manipulation – Select and move or delete any object on a SMART Notebook software page
- Multiple languages – Available in U.S. and UK English, Spanish, French, German and Italian
- Create new pages or files – Add new pages to any SMART Notebook file, or create a new file
- Multimedia support – Open and view Adobe® Flash® files, video, audio and object animations
Also – with the release of SMART Notebook 10.7 (expected March) there will be support for the common whiteboard format .iwb files.
It’s a very handy application to have bookmarked – especially for those teachers who want to access their Smart files from home and who haven’t installed the software for whatever reason. It’s also useful to point pupils there so they can open notebooks produced in a lesson for revision purposes.
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Google Earth v6 released
Google have released version 6 of their amazing Google Earth software. As an application to use on your interactive whiteboard, this really is an essential piece of software to have. Combine it with your desktop capture/camera tool and you can grab images from anywhere in the world and annotate over the top.
New features include Street View that will be familiar to users of Google Maps, which lets you see what these places look like from a visitors eye view. The History view is less obvious, so you can look back over past images for an area, and you can also see trees at street level which is less useful, but quite impressive.
So using street level view, here’s my hometown of Southend. Standing on the seafront at the top of Pier Hill looking at the longest pleasure pier in the world 
To see the History Tool in action, heres the Anglia Ruskin University campus in Chelmsford where I occasionally work. This is how it looks today.
And here is how it looked in 2000, before they built the new wing, using the History slider.
This is a great way of looking at different areas and seeing how they changed. You can go back quite a way, depending on the images available. If there are local developments near your school you might be able to see what the area looked like before they were built.
The obvious use of Google Earth would be for Geography lessons – it gives you an amazing globe at your fingertips which you can spin, zoom and see pretty much everything on Earth. The search facility lets you find a place almost instantly. You can also add weather information, radar images and recent cloud cover information. There is an ocean view where you can explore the sea floor and obtain information files about ocean life.
History teachers might want to take tours of Rome, or Athens and see where the monuments are. Many famous buildings are rendered as 3d structures. Street level view even lets you take tours of some of these areas from a visitors eye view – visit the Colosseum from the comfort your classroom! It doesn’t beat visiting places for real, but it’s the next best thing.
Modern Language teachers could use the Street Level view to take tours of foreign towns and cities and look at street signs, shop signs etc. Try using it as a way of giving directions in a different language
For Science teachers I love the Sunlight feature, where you can view light/dark areas over time. Drag the slide to change the time and see how the area of light and dark moves. This is really nice for showing how we get night and day (use alongside a demo with a torch and a football/globe).
Google Earth is free to download, and it adds a whole new level to the regular Google Maps website. It’s definitely well worth getting hold of a copy.
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Clipbank News Blast Launched
If you are a secondary school, you may already be a subscriber to Channel 4/Espresso’s Clipbank service. If you are, then you might not have noticed that there’s a brand new daily feature that has just launched called News Blast.
News Blast is a daily 60 second bulletin specifically for secondary school students. It is a joint project between Espresso and ITN. The Clipbank site will now be updated every day at around 8.00am during term time. Each bulletin has an accompanying full text transcript and can be accessed at a later date through an archive.
News Blast should greatly enhance the presence of Clipbank across the whole secondary school. Containing the latest news for that morning, the fast paced bulletin will be ideal for showing in assemblies, form tutor time, PSHE or Citizenship lessons, pre- or post-school clubs or on screens located around the school.
For example this morning’s News Blast featured these stories:
- UK STANDING: Cameron denies Britain is in decline on the world stage
- BLACK HOLE: Nasa finds evidence of youngest black hole in Earth’s cosmic neighbourhood
- FACEBOOK EMAIL: Mark Zuckerberg launches new messaging service to compete with Yahoo and Google
- SPIDER MAN: Australian man begins record attempt by living with 400 spiders
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Podium for Podcasting
I’ve had the chance recently to have a little play with Podium from Lightbox. Podium is a PC based podcasting software which enables users to create, edit and publish audio and video podcasts from a simple interface, meaning that pupils do not have to work with a number of different software packages in order to podcast in lessons.
Podcasting with Podium is very easy, pupils are able to create, edit and publish their audio or video podcasts all during one lesson! Podium has a handy scripting tool which allows for group working as pupils can create scripts together and assign dialogue to different members of the group. When they begin recording, they each know whose turn it is to speak.
The Podium interface should look pretty straightforward to anyone used to software such as MovieMaker or Audacity. There’s not too many buttons to confuse and provide too much choice.
Recording audio and video is a very simple process. Click the red record button, and if your webcam or microphone is set up, off you go!
There’s no way of changing the settings within the main piece of software. You need to run an additional application called Podium Options that installs at the same time. Make sure you keep the manual nearby as it has initial password to get into this area (You can change the password once in).
I found this a little confusing at first (as someone who rarely reads the manual first and just dives straight in), but I can see why it’s done as pupils should not need to ever go near these. If you make changes to the settings, you need to exit Podium and go back in to get them to take effect – as I found when trying to modify ftp information and select which folder to upload into.
I had a little difficulty getting my FTP settings correct, I wanted to put my podcasts into a podcast folder – which causes some confusion. But once it was sorted the software would automatically upload an audio and video podcast to the designated folder. I found that if you add a podcast folder into the settings, you also need to add it to the web address, I assumed it would do that automatically.
Once recorded, and edited – it only takes one click to upload the podcast to your ftp site. You can if you wish purchase hosting space from Lightbox, or use your own school space. You can set a password for uploading so that pupils can be restricted from uploading before the teacher has had a chance to approve the finished product. Podium will then produce the rss feeds that your visitors can subscribe to:
So…. by of way of testing the whole thing out, here is my quick video podcast feed produced by Podium automatically as an mp4 file:
Whiteboard Blog – Testing Video Podcast
and here’s the audio one if you want to hear but not see me
In all the process was very simple and once you’d got to grips with the interface for Podium the whole thing was very easy to do. Apologies for the quiet audio, I think that’s more down to my own audio settings on my system. I did this in a hurry!
Getting Podium:
If you like the sound of Podium, you can download a trial version from the Podium website.
Also, if you come to TeachMeet Essex, there will be a copy of the Podium Audio version in the charity raffle, so someone will go away with a copy!
Podcasting Links:
For more ideas, Podium have produced a free booklet ‘Top tips – 50 podcasting ideas for the classroom’ which is well worth downloading, even if you don’t use Podium.
My presentation on Podcasting can be found on SlideShare here.
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About Me
Danny Nicholson : Educator, Science teacher, ICT Consultant, PGCE lecturer, Author and Web2.0 / SMART Masters/ Interactive Whiteboard Trainer. Contact me for any training requests. 
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