Thing #9 of “23 Things”

Online Image Generators

Ok, I must stop now. This is really addictive. There are literary hundreds of tools on the internet that can be used to customize pictures, texts, videos and, I am sure, music and other stuff. This is addictive because is a game. Unfortunately, as any game, it is mostly a waste of time. But it was fun! Hopefully I will stay away from it as I do with my favorite game – The Sims!

I went to so many “places” that I don’t remember most of them now! Let me see… I decided to make the Header on this blog with http://www.spiffytext.com/.

I selected a cool background and some cool font but when I uploaded it onto my Header I noticed two things. First, the banner would not stretch all the way across the page (it was not wide enough). Second, the picture had their internet address embedded into it on two opposite corners. I decided to fix this. To make sure I am not ignoring any copyright rule I want to make this clear: I made the banner shown on this page with spiffytext.com. Please visit this website to make your own banner!

Then, thinking that perhaps I will have to get rid of this banner anyway, I decided to make my own. You can scroll down to the End of this page to see it.
I continued to play for a few hours making useless creations. Someone said that art is supposed to be useless so I don’t feel too bad about it. Looking at different text generators I found one that I thought would be interesting: Confucius Says Generator. I thought this tool shows Confucius quotes randomly, but it is just a caricature of Confucius with a text on top which can be customized:

I thought the coolest think was to make a caricature from your actual picture. Don’t go to www.Zwinky.com. This website says that you can create a cartoon of yourself for free but when you click on “Let’s go”, it just closes the tab on your browser and who knows what else it does.
I was determined to make a cartoon of my picture so I continued to try different sites. I found a promising one: http://www.cartoonme.com/. I entered a fake email address (baba@hotmail.com) and uploaded a picture of Eintein and this is what I got:

I couldn’t find anything for free so I gave up.

By far, the best picture effect that I found was how to make a 360 degrees panoramic picture with a normal camera. You must take several overlapping pictures turning around less than 90 degrees every time until you turn all the way around.

Then you load all the pictures with a freeware (http://www.photo-freeware.net/autostitch.php) and wait a couple of minutes. The composite picture is saved in the same folder where the rest of the pictures were with the name pano.jpg

After you make the panorama picture, open it and zoom in to see the height of the pano-picture as wide as the height of your computer monitor and then begin sliding the button slider of your picture viewer to have the same feeling as if you ware turning slowly around and looking around yourself 360 degrees. Here is My Barrio: (Click the picture for better resolution)

For step by step instructions on how to make this panorama picture go to this internet site:
http://eventhorizons.wordpress.com/2007/12/20/make-your-own-360-degree-panoramic-picture

I’ve been thinking about how to use these tools in my classroom. I teach mathematics in a high school so I don’t see much use for Them in my classroom. I can see how teachers in elementary and middle school, and even teachers of other subjects, can use these tools. Art teachers could use all of them. Obviously, as a way to enhance the classroom website, these “image effect generators” and “Text generators” are very handy. But I cannot think of anything else for mathematics. Perhaps math teachers could use them when they are making a new PowerPoint presentation to animate some math explanations or to create some drawings related to the lesson at hand. I personally do this with MS Paint. I never do anything complicated enough to require a better image editor such as Adobe Photoshop.

A free program which claims to be “just like Photoshop but free” is GIMP. I haven’t used it but on a first look it doesn’t seem to be able to do “panoramic stitching”

In conclusion, free image, text, video and sound editors are a lot of fun and very handy to create attractive documents such as web pages, PowerPoint presentations, papers, custom books etc.

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Thing #8 of “23 Things”

Flickr Mashups

I was somewhat disappointed to find out that most of these Flickrbits can be used only with Flickr. In Thing #7 I chose not to open an account with Flickr since I was given a second option and because I already have my website with family pictures. Therefore, it took me a long time checking all theses kr-tools and find something interesting, useful and of general use. Also, I could not get over the lack of intuitiveness in these names. Names like Gickr, Chasr, FlickrSLiDR don’t say anything, they just don’t stick and nowadays is unnecessary to give names like those. It reminds me the days of DOS with black and white screens (or black and green) and names with maximum of 8 alphanumeric characters and one three-character extension. Almost all of these gadgets do things that you can do at home with pictures from your computer by using some freeware from the internet. In my opinion the flickrbits keep the users entertained with Flickr pictures and forget about the rest of the internet. Also, you will never use any of the picture editing flickrbits if you have Photoshop.I decided to look at Mashups since they are more independent than the kr tools. Of course, many Mashups in Flickr let you use only pictures from Flickr. The idea of a Mashup is to combine information and functionality from two or more sites or sources to create something new. For this reason Mashups by nature are site-independent. A useful and commonly used effect is “slideshow” of pictures. You can use this effect in your home computer as a screensaver or you can “embed” a slideshow html code into your blog site to show pictures to your visitors, one at a time, every few seconds. Most of the popular picture posting web sites let you choose this effect when you are creating your album, but blog sites require you to add it by yourself (update: There is a Gadget here at Blogger.com which allows you to add this effect to your blog without effort - Slideshow). I found a kr which does exactly this: http://www.gickr.com/First I selected family pictures, pictures of flowers etc and transformed them with Photoshop by using mainly one effect, the smudge tool! Truly, I had done this before to make tiny wall pictures for “The Sims”, a game that I used to play when I had time. If you look at these pictures long enough you will see a picture of my family (not smudged up!).

Make your own animation

The next thing I did is something that may be useful for anyone, especially for lifelong learners! You can use this at school with your kids or at home for yourself. I am sure there are similar slideshows out there that do the same thing: Show words with their definitions as a screen saver one at a time.

Make your own animation

To do this I selected the words that I wanted to learn. I used a collection of words from a pack of flashcards that I found in my daughter’s room. You could subscribe to http://www.dictionary.com/ and choose to get the word of the day or get the word of the day for the last 10 – 15 days etc. Then I used an old electronic dictionary that I still use today made by Microsoft (QuickShelf 2000) to find the definitions of the words. After I find the definition I press the key PrtScn present on all regular PC keyboards. PrtScn stands for Print Screen. Pressing this key on a PC is the same as copying the screen with the copy/paste commands of any program. I never remember the key combination for a Mac (it is not as intuitive as PrtScn)… but Dr. Wall told us the other day! I use both Macs and PCs, but I prefer my Vista Desktop Computer. I prefer this one for many reasons, some of the main ones are:
. My Vista desktop PC never crashes. I had this computer for 2 or 3 years and I don’t remember it crashing even once.
. I made it by myself (secret: it is very easy to make a PC) therefore I chose my own monitor (I bought a 32 inches LCD TV at Best Buy), amount of RAM memory, hard drive, motherboard, microprocesor etc.
. I have bought over a hundred programs and I keep buying the newer versions. These programs are always released for PC first and a few months later, if ever, for Macs. Many of my programs have compatibility problems when installed in a Mac.
. There is by far more software out there (free and not free) for PCs than for Macs.
. I like Tablets (Tablet PCs) but Macintosh doesn't make Tablet Macs (Update: They finally do!). I bought my first Tablet Laptop in 2004. Now I own a Slate (a Tablet PC with detachable keyboard)

After I copied the whole screen with PrtScn I opened Paint, a program that always comes with any PC because it is part of the Windows OS, and pasted it there with the regular key combination “Ctrl + V” or click on the “Edit” pull down menu item and then click on “Paste”. Then I selected the area of the screen that I wanted to crop with the “select” tool. Next I did “right click” on the selection and clicked on crop from the popup menu that appears when I “right clicked” on my selection. Finally I clicked "Save As..." from the File pull down menu item and I saved it as a .jpg file choosing JPEG as the “save as type” (click on the right arrow to see all the file types available). After I have saved 10-15 words that I wanted to remember, I created a screensaver slide show. There is no need to use a third party application to make a slide show of selected pictures in PCs (I don’t know in MACs). In vista: Right-Click on the desktop, select “Personalize”, then “Screen Saver” and “Photos” and change the “settings” as pleased. In Windows XP: “Right-Click” on the desktop + “Properties” + “Screen Saver” + “My Pictures Slideshow” + customize settings as pleased. In Windows 98 and older versions is similar to Windows XP. This will give you a “Vocabulary Flashcards Slideshow Screensaver” in your PC. To get it here I just used http://www.gickr.com/.
I liked some other tools, such as retrievr, mappr or colrpickr. Here is one more reason why I didn’t like Flickr – While playing with colrpickr, one picture got my attention. When I tried to see the picture I got this message:

I don’t like control either! Here is a partial snapshot of my screen at this moment (via PrtScn + Paste in Paint + crop + save as).

Can you guess what picture they wouldn’t let me see? (Note: The lady is not naked) I would continue to do things here but it is already Sunday and I have classes to prepare, HW to grade, grades to enter etc! Until the next thing! Ah! My feelings about personal pictures - I think they are clear from this blog! I normally keep family pictures to the family. I don’t post anything that I wouldn’t do or say in public, but for example, my daughters don't like some of the pictures I have posted of them; therefore I would avoid upsetting them by not showing those pictures to everyone who knows them, other than family.

Note: Please email me if you see grammatical and/or orthographical mistakes in these blogs (I know there must be many!). My email address is Ridelto@hotmail.com

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Thing #7 of “23 Things”

Explore Flickr

I thought about opening an account in Flickr and upload some pictures, but I already have a website with family pictures in Windows Live SkyDrive, so I decided to just explore Flickr, search for an interesting picture and comment on it here.
In the Army I was an Apache helicopter armament/electrician, therefore I searched for “Apache helicopter” (AH-64A). This search took me to a ton of good pictures, but one caught my attention:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wparsons/3911403106/ by Warren Parsons

Warren Parsons labels this helicopter “Apache AH-64A”, but this helicopter is a “Longbow AH-64D”. I worked with both of these helicopters.
This picture is special because it is not easy to take a picture right under the helicopter when it is landing right on top of you or when it is hovering only a few dozen of feet above you. Only the soldiers who work with these helicopters are allowed to stand on the pad when it is landing; and not all the soldiers; only the “armament guys” which are ready to run towards the helicopter and begin loading/unloading the missiles, rockets and the 30 mm gun. Not even the pilots are allowed to do that. The enemy never gets to see the Apache this close… normally they die without ever knowing what hit them. The “fuel guys” must wait until the Apache completely lands and is properly grounded. The armament guys are there, waiting by the ammunition boxes and are always too busy and tired to be taking pictures of this nature.
Another reason why this picture is so difficult to take is because during the landing, a “shower” of debris flies towards you. On top of this, the “wind” created by the blades of the helicopter which is much stronger during landing can throw you off your feet. Usually the armament pad chief, with one or two soldiers, waits for the landing squatting down and facing away from the helicopter.
I also searched for Apache pictures using Google to compare the results. I went over 30 pages of pictures and I couldn’t find one similar to this one.
I had the rare opportunity to take pictures in 1997 during a training exercise. I was a Specialist then and my platoon sergeant let my take pictures for an hour. I had just bought a new digital camera and since in 1997 digital cameras were a “novelty”, everyone was interested in seeing the results. In one of the pictures you can see the rocks flaying at me. I jumped right before they reached me and the camera!

Flickr is a good service for picture sharing and it is evolving to include videos. I really liked the “Flickr Services”, especially “Retrievr” and “Mappr”. Retrievr “lets you search and explore in a selection of Flickr images by drawing a rough sketch and then seeing which of our interesting photos come up as a match.” Mappr “makes it possible to map photos with geographic location tags.” You can also do this with Flickr Maps.

Perhaps the most useful feature in Flickr is the ability to form, joint or search groups. Groups “are a way for people to come together around a common interest, be it a love of small dogs, a passion for food, a recent wedding, or an interest in exploring photographic techniques.”
What I don’t like about Flickr is that you are restricted to find pictures within the Flickr communities as opposed to the freedom that you have when you search pictures using Google. You are guarantee to find a lot more pictures with Google than with Flickr. The downside is that with Google you can find pictures that you don’t really care to see. This is obviously a bad thing, if you want your students to use it. For example, while searching for “Apache Helicopters” I came across some really gruesome pictures (and videos) of Taliban insurgents beheading Russian soldiers during the Afghan-Russian war of the eighties.
Another important thing to consider is the amount of maximum space to upload pictures. Flickr give you only 100 MB per month for pictures while Microsoft Windows Live gives you 25 GB with each hotmail account (I have 4 hotmail accounts). To get an idea, 25 GB is 25 000 000 000 bytes and 100 MB is 100 000 000 bytes, that is, Windows Live gives you 250 times more space. At 100 MB per month it will take you 250 months (20 years!) to reach the space given by Windows Live with one account… a considerable difference right! Of course, for $25 a year you get unlimited space in Flickr.

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Thing #6 of “23 Things”

Discovering Web 2.0 Tools

I picked YouTube! After considering a good number of these Award nominees websites I realized that I wasn’t getting anywhere in my decision. Most of these websites are good at what they do. I liked how easy it is to create a page ready to go with iGoogle. I would like to study Portuguese and Italian, therefore I decided to take a look at Mango Languages. It is a good idea but it costs 350 per course or 12 months subscription. I even thought about using a different web site not on the list, for example http://www.howstuffworks.com/ which is an excellent source of knowledge and a great resource for educators, or http://www.secretoscuba.cultureforum.net/, a site where Cubans from all over the world and people with an interest in Cuba post pictures, blogs, videos and news about Cuba and stories and facts from Cuban history. A forum where Cubans do what they are denied in Cuba: Free speech. But as I said, these weren’t on the list.
Then I noticed that YouTube is on this list. I picked YouTube because I believe is a great source of knowledge and free information for educators and long life learners. If I want to cook a Cuban dish I don’t need to call my sister in Miami, I just search in YouTube and I am certain that I will not only find the recipe, but probably I get to see some Cuban vet actually cooking it. I often search for songs of my childhood and youth and even shows that were never aired again on TV but someone, moved but old memories, decided to upload on YouTube. The other day I got a root canal on one of my molars. My dentist explained the procedure when asked in less than 5 minutes; therefore I had a vague idea of what he did in my mouth. When I searched in YouTube I got to see exactly what the dentist did. I even saw an animation which further clarified the procedure.
I found some mysterious mounds in my front yard. I obviously suspected they were made by some sort of animal, perhaps a tarantula, or a snake… but there was no visible entrance. When I searched YouTube for “mysterious mounds in yard” I not only learned that they were made by moles, but I saw various videos made by expert exterminators on how to get rid of them. I did.
You can use YouTube to learn from experts or people that just have their own ideas about the theme that you are researching. You can watch reviews and demonstrations on almost any product out there. If reading a product review in Amazon is a good thing, to be able to see a video demonstration of the quality of the product is impossible to beat.
This is why I decided to select YouTube… although everyone knows YouTube! Then again, I think that we all know about most of the other good sites on that list! That is one of the reasons why they are good sites in the first place right?

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Thing #5 of “23 Things”

Some Perspectives on Web 2.0/School 2.0 and the Future of Education

I read most of the posted perspectives on Web 2.0/School 2.0. I couldn’t find one of them in the intended location, but I Googled it and found several articles with the same name. Some of these perspectives are lengthy and confusing or too technical; some are more straightforward and easy to read. But all of the perspectives talk about what Web 2.0 is and how schools are being impacted and will be impacted by Web 2.0 (The so called School 2.0).
Web 2.0 is not a new software version for the internet as the name suggests. It is instead a different way of doing things on the internet compared to Web 1.0; the traditional read only internet-user interaction. Web 2.0 is also known as the Read/Write Web because the users not only seek information but also actively creates it and change it.
Web 2.0 is more interactive and completely global. Podcasts, Blogs, Wikis, Social Networks and many other new ways of sharing and storing information as well as creating artwork, music, writings are now available and becoming more and more important and natural in our society.
To me School 2.0 is a new way of looking at education in our schools. Many schools and specially universities have online classes or teachers which never see their students in person. School 2.0 should happen when most of our schools have included many of Web 2.0 tools into their instructional plans and curriculums.
Unfortunately many obstacles exist that prevent this. The most obvious one is “inertia”. It is hard for everyone to change how content has been taught for decades and even centuries. Older teachers are comfortable teaching the way they have been teaching and don’t see how this web 2.0 will work better than traditional education.
The other problem is the lack of money to buy the needed resources, such as laptop computers for every class. If every school had laptop computers for every class, the transition to School 2.0 would happen sooner than later.
If I could ask three things to improve my classes I would ask for 30 graphing calculators (preferable the TI nspire) and 30 laptop computers with access to the internet for my classes. I would also ask to have access to YouTube and other social networks.
There is an increasing amount of resources on the web for educators. Given the minimum conditions and the attention of the administrators and the government, Web 2.0 will enter our schools to facilitate the transition to School 2.0
The school of the future I think is going to require more than just Web 2.0. We may see in the future a decentralization of the educational environment and perhaps even a complete rethinking and restatement of school goals and the ways schools operate. The schools in the future may stop looking at grade levels and begin seeing levels or degrees of school completion. More like some universities do today. The school of the future will include Web 3.0 or Web 4.0!

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Thing #4 of “23 Things”

Why Commenting is Important

“The 10 commandments blog commenting” and “Commenting using an alias vs. your real name” blogs links don’t work. So I read “Edublogger Etiquette - Responding to Comments”,” Your comments?”, and “ 10 techniques to get more comments on your blog”

I decided to read and comment the next five students from our class:

1. Kristy Stanley
2. Sylvia Ekkert
3. Nichole Collyard
4. JAMGRANT
5. Emma Burton

And the next two blogs from outside our class:

1. Pass TAKS ALGEBRA
2. Mathematics Education Research Blog. A researcher's attempt to follow his field

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Thing #3 of “23 Things”

Register Your Blog

A Blog can be used in the classroom for many things, especially if you have a way of sharing/passing files with/to your students. Previously to this class task/activity, I already had a Blog-Website located at http://www.ridelto.spaces.live.com/ which I used only to share Power Point presentations and other files such as worksheets with my students. But obviously it can be used in many more ways. For example, an idea that occurred to me while I was working on these “23 Things” is to create a Blog similar to 23 things and make it into a class assignment. Of course it will take me some time to decide what tasks to add to the “23 Algebra Things” and I will have to require them to create a Blog so I could grade them according to what they write on their blog. The biggest problem is that these Blog-sites don’t allow math/formula symbols/characters.
Either way is an idea worth exploring. The other obvious things a Blog-site can be used for is sharing ideas with other teachers, posting best-practice activities and comments about how some strategies work and how to implement them. Another idea would be to use the “chat window” to communicate with teachers during classes. In our school we communicate during classes through emails and those who have Mac laptops (notebooks!) through a Macintosh messenger software (I don’t remember the name).
After these experiences I know I will be using Blog-sites in new ways. I wish all my students had access to the internet from their homes.

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Thing #2 of “23 Things”

Create a Blog, Add a Post and an Avatar

This thing was not hard to do. I decided to use my real name because I don’t think I will ever write anything here that I would like to keep secret. I think this avatar thing is a good idea but it is used very primitively here. In other words, there are not enough choices. If you have ever played “The Sims” or other games you know that there are limitless ways of customizing the looks and the cloth of an avatar. I think my avatar looks exactly like me. Too bad that the goatee they have looks horrible on my avatar!
Before the internet becomes completely wirelessly, with people having access directly from their brain with a small implant, I believe we will have a 3D internet environment through which we are going to surf as an avatar moving from one place to another and interacting with other avatars which could be people or AI avatars. I think this will be the 3.0 version of the internet. Right now several people go at once to the same webpage, but we rarely find out that there is someone else looking at the same page, and we almost never talk to each other during this process. In Internet 3.0 this will happen automatically just like in “Ultima Online”, “War Craft” or other gaming environments.
The website that can be created with blogger.com is a classic blogger site. I would like to see more “gadgets” to add, and more importantly, a “Folder” Gadget which would allow you to “store” files such as pictures, music and power point presentation. Microsoft’s Windows Live lets you add folders to your “bloger-website” through MS Windows Sky Drive which is a service that gives you 25 GB of free space to store anything you want (and you can have more than one).
You can see my Windows Live website at: http://ridelto.spaces.live.com/
I use this one to share Power Point presentations and other files with my students, but I have another one for family pictures.
Overall, the experience was fun and the tools were very user friendly. I am looking forward to do more “Things” and to add more “Blogs”. It was a bit time consuming, but I think it was only because it was the beginning (not the end!).

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Thing #1 of "23 Things"

Lifelong Learning and Learning 2.0

All right… Hi everyone! Hello strangers! This is my first Blog. I have written stuff before on the internet but never a blog and never in English, so please bear with me and don’t be too demanding with my English.
This Blog is about “Thing #1” of the 23 things that I should do as part of the grade for a college class. Thing #1 is about “Seven and 1/2 Habits of Highly Successful Lifelong Learners”. In a few words, these habits are goals, responsibility, attitude, confidence, planning, and to be a teacher and a player; to have fun when learning. Finally, the use of technology to enhance humans’ natural limits and to increase productivity is also an important habit.
I am a “Lifelong Learner” and I believe I have all of these habits although some come easier than others. I have immediate and long term goals. My immediate goals as a learner are to get the most out of this class (Instructional Technology Strategies) with the objective to improve my teaching. I teach Algebra 1 in a High School. Another immediate goal is to finish reading some books about classroom management and strategies as well as to learn more techniques and ideas to better prepare my students. My long term goal is to get a MAT (Master of Arts in Teaching). My real long term goal involves continuing education as far as I can go… maybe one day I decide to finish a Ph.D.
I am responsible, confident and have a positive learning attitude. I am a teacher who loves to see the spark of understanding in my students' faces. I enjoy teaching more than anything; I always did, even when I was a kid.
I like discipline. Discipline is crucial in any classroom, but especially in a math classroom. However, my students know that there is a very young side in me. When there is time to play I am the first one in line.
The use of technology to my advantage is perhaps the easiest of all the habits. I’ve been a technology junkie since the invention of the computer. I was building computers and digital components based on Intel microprocessors 8080, 8086, 8088 and also Z80 since my college years in the eighties (I graduated in 1986 with a Master in Physics and Mathematics and a concentration in digital electronics for automation of physics experiments).
The hardest habit for me is what I call planning: “Create your own learning toolbox”. I think is harder because it requires organization and planning ahead. I am not necessarily a disorganized person, but I have to admit that I am not very organized either. Also, I like adventure and the factor of surprise and spontaneity!
I suppose I should work on improving all of the habits, especially this last one: Planning and creating a learning toolbox.

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