Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech

24 hours of Flickr inspired me to recreate a previous post I did over 2 years ago. That post featured a photo every hour on the hour. Here are just some samples of my day…I have till May 21st to submit one photo to be considered for the 24 hours of Flickr book. Which one would you submit?

The List

Cleaning Gutters

Washing Windows

Help from Martha

Mowing the Lawn

Watching Golf

Board Game with Family

[tags]flickr, 24hoursofflickr[/tags]

Flickr offers some Easter Eggs. Not to mention some upgrades in their services.

Add a note to a photo with the text ho ho ho beard or ho ho ho hat and you’ll get a resizable Santa hat or beard to drag and drop onto the unsuspecting subject’s head or chin.

More good stuff. This one from Kathy Cassidy’s class

I’ve used this tool before but a couple of days ago, I picked up on an entry by Ewan Mcintosh and passed along his suggestion to our local schools. Here’s how one teacher took the idea and creating something outstanding.

I’ve had the opportunity to share the “news” about social software/web 2.0/Read Write Web (choose your favourite term)  to some groups other than classroom teachers. In the past month I’ve done two workshops for our provincial teachers’ association. One to the local teacher association groups and the other to the special subject councils.

The message is virtually the same but it’s nice to discuss the use of these tools outside the classroom application.
This week I also begin a series of 3 workshops on digital photography as part of our community courses.

The fact that these topics and tools have great use for adults in everyday life, once again brings validation to the importance of them to be explored and used with our students.

I’ve been playing around with geotagging for about a year using a firefox extension. It was always a bit wonky. Flickr has now added geotagging. There are several ways to utilize it from the geotag bookmarklet to flock’s uploader extension. I prefer the bookmarklet but whatever works. The result is a great opportunity to tag photos to locations. I’ve started tagging a few of my photos with this result:

There are even a couple of screencasts on Youtube on geotagging and flickr.

• Geotagging with Flickr
• Geotagging with Flock

I uploaded the last of my summer photos to flickr and wanted to showcase a few.

Bet you didn’t think you could grow grapes in Saskatchewan. Well this crop comes from my backyard. We had some great crops of both raspberries and strawberries. These are my favourite.

Never been much of a farmer but this wheat field near Waldheim, SK was quite amazing.

This is the largest tree in Saskatchewan also near Waldheim. If you go to flickr, I geotagged it so you can see the exact location. Again, you wondered if there were any trees in Saskatchewan, I give you this.

Came back from vacation down to Yellowstone last night. A big thanks to Wes for guestblogging. As expected, he did an outstanding job and of course manage to post some great stuff.

Looking back at our holiday, there were a number of ways technology was used to create a better vacation.

• Wiki. We travelled with another family and used a wiki to plan out the details. While I basically did all the editing, everyone viewed it many times prior to the trip and we all sat down and used it to finalize things. When travelling with another family, it was nice to have many things pre-planned.
• Flickr. Friends and family members loved being able to keep up with things along the way. In addition, it enabled me to deal with all the pictures in smaller chunks rather than doing it all after the fact. I also found a great little bookmarklet that easily adds a geotag to your photos. I also incorporated a little tip found at photojojo.com that we had a lot of fun with.

• Youtube. I was even able to create a short video and upload it to youtube.
• Blog. Providing short updates rather than emailing, allowed me to describe some of the details of our trip.
• Geocaching. Had the opportunity to do a few geocaches which led us to some interesting places we may not have found otherwise…Ousell Falls being one.
• Cellphones and text messaging. We needed to text message each other throughout the trip as the US charges $1 a minute for cellphone use.

I’ll definitely use these again for future vacations.