Week 1

Goodmorning all,

I have just begun my blog for the ICT class at La Trobe University in the Dip Ed part of my course.

The purpose of this blog is to enable me to review software that has been shown to us by Greg, our teacher.

http://www.tumblr.com

This is my recommendation for ultimate free blogging (image above). Compared to blogger.com, I think this web site is a little bit more user friendly, and idiot proof. It is very easy to add photos, videos and text. While you can do nearly exactly the same things on blogger.com, tumblr.com is easier to use and more fun.

http://www.edsoft.com.au/
This is a website that Greg recommended. It is the main software supplier in Australia for educational software. There is an amazing amount of software on this site, with hundreds of different categories. One new product that caught my eye was a stop motion camera, specifically designed for kids to use it to make animation in the classroom. As a film-maker I know how much time can be wasted by using a digital camera to do this and load the pictures up. Looks exciting!



During class, we had the opportunity to play around with Inspiration software. This is an ideas organising program. It enables the user to design diagrams and mind maps based on research or planning for a project. It is very user-friendly. As a person with years of experience using a computer, I found it very intuitive. The added bonus for students in primary schools is that you can use pictures in the diagram and join them together.

Sam, a friend in class, told me about an online program called Mindmeister. This is basically a mind mapping interface. I had a look at the tutorial. If this is anything to go by, I recommend you take a look.



The main difference between Inspiration and Mindmeister is one is online, and one is off. The beauty of having your mindmap online is that you can access it at home or at school. So, for students, I think this is a feasible option.

Mindmeister also enables you to add icons to the words in the mind map. Like Inspiration, there is a limited gallery available to choose images from. However, one really cool feature is that you can ask the web to find a picture appropriate for you. For example, if you have "health" and click to find a picture, it may come up with an image of apples. I think kids would find this really exciting and it will also inspire them to make more links in their learning by observing associations of words and images.