Week 1 - Inspiration and Screen Shots

So it all begins!

Greg has just introduced us to Blogger, a site that I am familiar with as my husband and I used this to create an absolutely fabulous and well followed travel blog. We documented our extended honeymoon from South East Asia overland through Central Asia and into Russia. If you are interested, check it out it's titled Shell and Brock's Excellent Adventure and can be found at http://shellandbrock.blogspot.com.

My IT consultant husband even taught me a little about Html so that I could fiddle around with the placement of my photos within the blog posts rather than having to re-upload them. I don't claim to be able to write code of any description, but if you look at it carefully enough you can find the keys words that correspond to the size and placement of your images and have a play around with them and see what happens. If it all turns pear shaped if you have saved your previous draft then it's not an issue.

The new version of Blogger (formally called Blogspot) seems to have undergone a few updates since we created our blog, there are more blog designs to choose from and the tool bar is a bit different too. While we were travelling it was great to see our friends and families comment on our blogs and be able to reply to them via the blog.

My sister in law Cassie is a teacher who's grade 3 class followed our travels via our blog. Cassie also set up a class blog for her student's which they used for literacy and integrated studies. Her current class also has a blog which they use frequently to share their writing and also use it as a forum to comment on each others work. Cassie also has students leave comments/reflections as proof of their own work, enabling it to be used as a form of assessment. I can see many applications for the use of blogs in my future classroom.

Enough about blogger...

...The first thing that Greg taught us how to do was create screen shots, very simple: print screen, paste into MS paint, cut and repaste, resize if you want and then copy and paste from there to where ever you want your picture to be.

This is all very simple untill you try to do the same thing on your Mac. The MacBook Pro does not have a print screen button. I used my powers of Google to find out that to capture your screen there are a few options. The easiest method for me was to press "command" + "shift" + "4" all at the same time. You then get a little cross appear on your screen which you use to click and drag over the portion of the screen that you want to capture. Once you release your mouse the computer makes a camera shutter noise and saves your image straight to the desktop. I like this method as you do not need to trim the image of your screen as you are already able to select the bit that you want.

The other difference with the Mac is that it does not have MS paint. This means that if you did want to crop your screen capture it is a little bit difficult. I ended up downloading a free version of Paint for my Mac, it was supposed to be identical to the MS product but I personally don't think it has as many features or is nearly as simple. If I end up with a classroom full of Macs next year I will now be able to show my students how to capture their screens and utilise the images in their work as well as do anything else they may need to (I hope).

Greg then went on to show us how to use the programme Inspiration. This was an excellent tool for creating diagrams and mind maps. The above images are screen shots of the mind map and diagram that I created. Inspiration was user friendly and I can easily see how it would have many applications in the classroom e.g brainstorming, mind mapping, family trees, summarising and more. It was loads of fun playing around with it and members of my workshop group produced some very nice looking products in a very short space of time.

Once I got home from uni my Husband told me that they use a similar program at their work and that there are loads of freeware programs available to download that all do a similar thing. It is good to know that if my future school does not have Inspiration that there are other options out there that can be used to do the same thing for example; Bubbl, MindMiester and Mindomo.