Smart Academy

Visit www.pixlr.com

Or use the express version here

Take a look at this great tutorial on how Aviary’s Myna tool can be used to create pod casts.

http://www.aviary.com/tutorial?tutorial=getting_started_with_myna&singlepageview=1

Perhaps you could use these pod cast file in an rcast?

Click here to find out more about rcast

There are loads of web apps that you can use to show teachers what you know.

Use realsmart to record and show what you know through:

• blogs and podcasts
• simple websites
• mind maps / concept maps / graphical organiser
• learning passports
• self assessed portfolios

Remember, all of the above can be collaborative (you can create and / or add to them together as a group if you want)

Go to www.rlsmart.net/help to find out how to use it. It’s really easy.

Or try these below (remember to log in or register using your smartpass):

• Aviary – photo editing, vector drawings, multi track audio recording! (SSO)
• LinoIt – PostIt notes with media (smartpass)
• SpicyNodes – interactive presentations (smartpass)
• Voki – make an avatar and give them a voice!
• Prezi – present ideas as the big picture, then zoom in to the detail!
• WallWisher – collect all your ideas together on your wall
• Comix – make a comic from what you know
• MuseumBox – collect items together to put forward ideas, or to represent times/places/people
• Wordle – represent ideas as a word cloud
• GoAnimate – create animations!
• VoiceThread – collaborative conversations around media (SSO coming soon!)
• Glogster – highly visual, interactive posters

remember, if you create something in the above apps, most will let you embed the results in realsmart. This makes it easy for your teachers to see them.

If you find something else that you think is great, add a comment to this post and share it with us!

Essentially, CoverItLive allows you to send instant messages, photos, videos and 30 second interviews to the cloud and then directly into the application. The key part is that you can embed it into our school website. Its free iphone app makes it incredibly flexible. For example, you are able to wander around school and showcase what’s going on all from your phone. Consequently, it’s potential is massive!!! (Thats 3 exclamation marks)

The example below is from today’s ‘Immersion Day’. I asked a few colleagues to download the free iphone app and showed others how to use the desktop version. Check out the day below:

Not only are you able to highlight the great practice that is going on for teachers, it also shows that you value the learning that students are taking part in. Even further, you are able to highlight this to parents and the local community as its happening. Once your event is over you can close it’s live feed and it’s then saved as closed event – still allowing you to access what happened, as it happened.

I intend to use this for every ‘AC Day’ and other whole school events like our ‘Immersion Days’ – even school trips.

Bloody fantastic!

We can create really engaging content for our website and other places like in realsmart, or our intranet using various “web apps”.

Web Apps are websites that allow you to create things, and then “embed” them where you want them to appear.

You can access web apps in different ways:

• Through our smartpass Single Sign On (eg Aviary)
• By using your smartpass Google or OpenID account (eg wallwisher)
• By creating an account using your smartpass username / email address
• By using the school accounts for website content (teachers only)

Teachers wanting to use the school accounts, please see Alan the Technician.

See the posts below for ideas of different web apps you can use, and how you can use them.

We use the following apps, but feel free to use what you want:

• Sound / Audio – audioboo.com or soundcloud.com
• Video – Vimeo.com
• Picture slideshows – Picasa or Flickr.com
• Documents / PDFs – Issuu.com
• Presentations – Google Apps or Slideshare.net
• Questionnaires / Forms – Google Forms
• Live events – CoverItLive.com

Google forms can be created from your documents page in Google Apps. They are a great way of gauging pupil opinion and following trends across cohorts.

Once made these forms can easily be embedded in blog posts.

If you’ve a video you want to share, upload it to Vimeo and embed the video where you want it to appear.

It’s better to do it this way because:

• It “streams” your video like youtube (you don’t have to download the whole video before it starts playing)
• It plays your videos on whatever computer or mobile device you’re viewing it from (even iPhones etc)
• It takes care of loads of technical things that we don’t need to understand!

If you want to upload a video for the school website, we’ve got a school account (See Alan)

Embedding HTML in realsmart web cells from realsmart on Vimeo.

Audioboo are a mobile & web platform that effortlessly allows you to record and upload audio for your friends, family or the rest of the world to hear.

Click here https://audioboo.fm to sign up for an account and for more info

Using a free ipod, andriod or webapp you can record your audio and publish direct to your website.

You could record;
A good learning conversation
A student talking about a new extra curricular club
Your headteachers weekly address
A thought for the day / week
The school choir
Vox Pops from a school trip
Interviews with members of the school community

Upload your documents to ISSUU, then embed them into your web page. ISSUU creates a visual, interactive copy of your document that can be read full screen.

For example:

To sign up for a free account go to www.issuu.com

Why?
Rather than having to download documents, you can read them in your web browser.
Use it to upload multi-page documents, your prospectus, past papers, example work etc

How to?
Upload your documents then click the share button. Click on the embed link this will give you all kinds of easy to follow options to customise the size, shape and colour of your embedded document. Copy the embed code from the top of the page and insert it in to your blog post using the HTML editor tab.