Writing a slideshow program

I have spent much time lately writing JavaScript and JQuery code with a JQuery plugin called cross-slide to make a slideshow on my class wiki. I looked at many other slideshows including some I had used before like PowerPoint and decide they were not right. I wanted a solution that was easy to add photos and captions to, I did not want students to be uploading photos, just cut and paste from the web. I also wanted the Ken Burns effect. When I saw it, it makes the show more Attention grabbing by it's movement. I also wanted scrolling captions. I have these now. However the students still are not doing their best work.
I can also print out a strip of photos I have loaded myself so the students can write cations or correct theirs.

I am getting quicker at preparing resources for making a slideshow but need to make the resources easier for the students to use.
I need to focus now on getting students to self-assess and correct their work.

On the cloud, but not yet cloud 9

Last week I solved the problem of the student's difficulty with sharing and accessing the digital stories they wrote by getting them to work in the cloud. I wrote some JavaScript in a wiki page that allowed them, when editing the page, to copy photos from the net to a table then to write captions for each slide. Then, when they viewed the page they saw a slide show with captions. They had no trouble doing this.
This weekend I spent a lot of time improving the look of the slideshow using jQuery and crossslide plugin to produce a Ken Burns effect and a continuous running show that looked like a YouTube. I can't wait to see if the students relate better to this than the PowerPoint like show they had last week. JQuery is a very clever JavaScript library that makes JavaScript work on all browsers and gives special effects like animation. I did something like this years ago using DHTML, but this was so much easier. It was easier to understand jQuery because I had learnt about object literals last year in finding out about JSON.


-- Post From My iPhone

Spiritual Learning

The NZ Curriculum says that students "will be encouraged to value ecological sustainablity, which includes care for the environment". How can we motivate students to do this? One suggestion was to show them Google Earth's flooding prediction as a result of global warming . This would be motivation through fear. Could students be motivated by spiritual concerns?
What spiritual ideas from Maori could help? The Health teachers use: taha tinana (physical well-being), taha hinengaro (mental and emotional well-being), taha whānau (social well-being), and taha wairua (spiritual well-being).

"In the beginning the belief was that the god Tane offered mankind three baskets of knowledge - "Nga Kete-o-te-Wananga". Within these baskets were the stories of creation, instructions concerning magic, etc. The Māori believe all living things are descended from the Gods, embodied within certain mountains, rivers and lakes. All things have a type of soul - the wairua. This is why the Māori have strong spiritual ties to the land." from
http://history-nz.org/maori6.html

NZ Curriculum in Action

Today was the first NZCIA day. Teachers sharing their experiences of the curriculum . Two schools, Alfriston and Albany Senior include cross-curriculum time where students work on inquiry learning projects. Could we do this at Otahuhu College?

First Post

This my first blog page. The fact I have a blog a consequence of my attending the TUANZ2007 conference in Auckland on Friday 30 May 2007 and hearing Miguel Guhlin http://www.mguhlin.net/ talk about the use of blogs in teaching.

I was motivated and stimulated by his talk but not convinced that a blog could be useful to me as a teacher. However I am prepared to "give it a go" (as we say in New Zealand). Here goes.

If I am unsure about the relavence of blogs to me as a teacher, I am very sure that blogs at school are not relevant to my students' learning and rather are inhibitory. It seems over the last few years in every session we have in the computer room, I have had to spend time and energy in stopping the students accessing Bebo and emailing each other. Maybe this is the future of learning but is not appropriate for me now.

I found Miguel's wiki on blogs http://www.budtheteacher.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page most interesting and will investigate these some more. The conference was useful and I learnt some works and acronyms like Moodle, LMS, RSS that will probably become part of my "use vocabulary". In the trade displays I saw some "Clickers", which I had heard about a couple of years ago, I want to see if I can make some of these for my classroom.

Anyway, its dinner time and so I must go. I have enjoyed writing this page and will use it to remind me of the conference and follow up on some of the ideas I got there.