Sunday, June 17, 2007
Animal Farm: Napolean Trading Card
In one of my clases this summer at NYIT, the professor Susan Silverman created a group at www.flickr.com. You can find our group at this link. This past week we have been using Flickr and some Internet applications. There are a wealth of tools available to use in conjunction with Flickr (or other images), and these little apps are called 'toys."In my lesson plan I used Trading Card Maker from http://www.bighugelabs.com/ for depicting and describing a character from Animal Farm.
It's pretty easy to use most of these tools, and a lot of them can easily be used in the classroom at almost any grade level. Stop on over and check out the lesson plans we've developed!
Lynne M Bailey
teaching portfolio: http://www.lynnembailey.com/
studio portfolio: http://www.presentsbydesign.com/
http://www.funmasters.biz/ for face painting and body art
Labels: animal farm, ELA lesson plan, teaching with flickr
Monday, June 11, 2007
Weekly Reflection: The Importance of Labels
This week I had a look at another TED presentation, which shows an application prototype using Seadragon and Photosynth. Seadragon is a computing environment that lets you interact with a vast amount of visual data in a multi-resolution experience - An amazing tool to work with visual data, it allows for a multi-resolution experience (like zooming in and out effortlessly). Photosynth marries the capabilities of Seadragon and computer vision research by Noas Navely (sp?) In this extraordinary application, images gathered from multiple sources are arranged spatially and converted to panoramic views and much more.
"Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation. Its architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, shows it off in this standing-ovation demo."
Watching this demo, which used images gathered from http://www.flickr.com/, drove home an important point about the importance of metadata and tagging, or labelling data, that we publish to the web. It just makes it so much easier to share data if you make it searchable, and tagging is one way to assure that. He does talk about the tapping into the social web universe, using data from users worldwide, creating a "cross-user social experience". It creates hyperlinks between image collections from all users, linking to the information about each image, thereby making for a richer experience.So don't forget to tag those pictures you upload to flickr!
And just think about how you can use this technology in the classroom. Linking images and text, to make a visual potpourri of available resources, can provide a much richer database of related information, for any topic. In order for such a collaborative learning atmosphere to flourish, data of all kinds has to have an efficient way of being found. By tagging our posts, files, images, audio, etc., to the main idea, we are helping to build a world wide index that can add to the human experience and knowledge base.
Lynne M Bailey
teaching portfolio: http://www.lynnembailey.com/
studio portfolio: http://www.presentsbydesign.com/
http://www.funmasters.biz/
Labels: importance of labels, metadata, photosynth, seadragon, tagging, tags, TED
