SWA Channel is now on the iTunes Store

Take a look at SWA Channel on the iTunes store.
http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/swa-channel/id399346930

A True 21st Century School - The Future is Here!

Ena's Digestion Video - Insight Stats

I run the You Tube channel for SWA. I usually upload to this channel at least twice a month - sometimes more frequently. Imagine my surprise when I clicked on Ena's Digestion video to see that it has had over 12700 hits!



Insight in You Tube
In a previous blog post, I described the Insight stats information which is available inside every You Tube channel account. You can read about my previous blog post here 'Insight in You Tube is Fascinating'.

Ena's Grade 5 Digestion video was posted on the school You Tube channel 11 months ago. It has since become 'hot' in the attention section of the Insight stats. I have screen captured that data below:


In the past 7 days alone - it has been viewed 994 times.



I can also check which countries are watching this video the most. In this case - the US.



I can also see the 'hot spots' in the video itself.
"The ups-and-downs of viewership at each moment in your video, compared to videos of similar length. The higher the graph, the hotter your video: fewer viewers are leaving your video and they may also be rewinding to watch that point in the video again. Audience attention is an overall measure of your video's ability to retain its audience."



An interesting point here: When Ena starts her picture in picture video explanation, the meter goes up - showing that it is her own talking added to this Magic Schoolbus video that is engaging the audience. How cool is all that? What a fantastic 'Insight' You Tube gives its channel owners! Continually I am inspired by the fantastic tools online such as this that enable ordinary teachers like myself to share good practice with the wider community.

ANPS Teachers Conference Presentation

This is my presentation for this Saturday at ANPS Teachers Conference at Tiara Bangsa School in Jakarta.

Teaching With Technology No Longer Belongs in a Lab

View more presentations from Jane Ross.

ANPS - Sharing Good Practice Google Slideshow

I am presenting a couple of workshops at the ANPS Teachers Conference this Saturday. I will be using Google Docs Slideshow as a part of my workshop. I wish to make the presentation interactive and will use this instead of the usual big pieces of paper and markers.


Click on this link to access this shared Slideshow:
ANPS Sharing Good Practice Google Doc Slideshow

Smartboard - making it more mobile

At JWA there is one Smartboard that needs to be shared between different classes. One of the challenges of using a Smartboard in different classes is setting the correct angle for the projector. If a mobile projector on a table is used, the person using the Smartboard will encounter difficulty. They will be between the projector and the board and therefore will block the light. To solve this problem, a throw projector can be used. We have just had a throw projector installed at JWA and here are the photos.

Sinarmas World Academy Open Day

We are having an Open Day tomorrow, 1st October
Take a look at our school Profile:

SWA Profile 2010-2011

Simply Box

I have been looking for a solution to share bookmarks of online games with young children that is more visual that just a list or web addresses. I used to create a web page with labels and icons that were hyperlink enabled. This is very time consuming. I have just started using Simply Box.

Simply Box acts as a Firefox add on. It lives in your toolbar. All you do is whenever you see a game (or web page) that you want to add, you click the button 'Box it' and then draw a box over the area of the screen that you would like to have as the thumbnail hyperlink.

When you have created the capture, you simply drag it to one of your containers at the bottom of your screen and it has been captured. When you are satisfied with your collection, you can share it with others. They will see a page of click-able icons that you have made. This is fantastic for young learners as they respond more to images rather than text.

Click here to see an example Simply Box

Watch this video. I love that you can use this in collaboration with others.

iPads - publishing to iBooks via Pages

I recently attended Learning 2.010 in Shanghai. During the conference I was fortunate to attend an Apple workshop on iPads. What I found most interesting was learning how to export a Pages document and then syncing it with iBooks. Pages is an easy publisher to use that can accommodate multimedia such as music and videos. This makes it a much more flexible tool for students wishing to present information in a more dynamic way. In order to get this to work you need to have the latest version of Pages which is 4.0.4


You will also need to latest version of iBooks for iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch. This is iTunes 10


You can create your multimedia book in Pages and then click 'Export'
Don't forget to deselect 'Use first page as book cover image' unless you have created a front cover.



Next you need to locate that file and drag it to iBooks in your iTunes.



Then all you do is sync your iPad/iPod Touch/iPhone and you're done!

Google Docs

Click here to see planner one