Chris's Blog

Photoshop of Great White shark and helicopter

So, two main questions came up from today’s lessons:

1) Serif or San-Serif and color?

2) Is bigger actually better?

So, is the font we use important?  Well, the answer appears to be a YES.  Serif text, such as Times New Roman are easier to read on paper so apart from the style and wording of papers, we should consider the font as well.  If we are leaving information as a web page or computer readable document, sans-serif fonts like Arial are easier on the eye and easier to read.  We should also focus on our line spacing and not make the text to close or too far away, thus easier again on the eye!

Is bigger better?  Do you really need a 25 Megapixel camera? Are you going to blow your photos to fit on the side of a skyscraper or just print out a regular 3″ x 5″?  If you are not using them for massive campaigns, you really don’t need more than 8-10 megapixels.  However, bigger is better with optical zoom! The more optical (not digital) zoom, the clearer the picture will be when focused and zoomed in.

HMRC runs out of paper!

Day 5 already? Wow, time flies by but the great thing about this course so far is that everything I have learned so far can be implemented straight in to my classes when I get back.  So far, we have looked at many different tools and “cloud based” technologies which are all readily available, as long as the Internet is up and running and the government don’t shut it off again

Animoto is an interesting piece of software that Shanel showed us and her use of Google Docs has helped inspire my ideas for my final assignment as well as my course collaborations for next year.

RSS feeds are a great way of staying current on blogs, sites of interest and students.  I will not really pay with RSS feeds too much until I am back on a broadband connection (my Vodafone 3G is running low of juice) and until I get my iPad2 – then it will be RSS time!

Wikis look like a free and interesting way to allow collaborative work that can be shared by all and I especially liked Craig’s example of the biology Wiki.  I intend to do something similar with students updating it topic by topic throughout the year so that we have an easily accessed revision guide by the end of the year.

Bring on day 6!

Google Docs is cool – check out the Google Docs presentation below to find out my reflection from day 4!

Word of the day is… embedding… Cool! I always wondered how youtube videos and such like were put into other websites… and now I know. The wonderful world of embedding!

I am intending to set up a blog next year for each of my classes and so far, this is probably the most valuable tool I have learned about. And it’s not just youtube clips we can embed! I embedded a timeline into my second assignment from TimeRime which was cool and below, I embedded a rugby movie for all the American Football fans who think their sport is tough

Tomorrow, we are looking at Google Docs, which, could end up being even more useful than embedding as apparently, I can embed them as well, just like the course blog!!

So last night was the assimilation and today was refreshing.

The problem with the classes so far in this course are that I have now found so many new toys to buy that I have to save up and prioritize what to get first!  There are so many new and wonderful tools out there to play with and the apps being produced are just getting better and more useful.

Today we focused on hardware and this was mainly a refresher, but i learned some new things about bits and bytes, and, more importantly, I learned how to use this blog!  Since yesterday, we have had a bit of a face lift and I have added some hyperlinks as well as some of my favorite websites into the links category over on the right, just below the calender.

Looking forward to tomorrow and the Web 2.0 tools

Today was the first day of EDAD660 with Craig Kapp.  I have been looking forward to this course as I believe that I can build on what I know and take the integration of technology into my classes to a higher, more interactive and fun level with what I hope I learn over the next 11 days.

Our overview today showed us some of the technologies that we will be using over duration of the course but targeted emerging technologies.

Cloud technology is pretty much Internet based.  There are benefits of storing and booting remotely in that you shouldn’t ever lose your content, have any compatibility issues and you can access it anywhere.  The major downside to cloud technology is that consumers still don’t trust storing sensitive information on the net as there is a feeling of “losing physical control” over your documents.

Mobile technologies appear to be the direction that businesses and people are heading towards with iPads now generating 1% of all browser traffic on the net.  People are constantly on the move and becoming paperless, so the mobile office / newspaper / book / entertainment system is becoming more and more popular. We have more and more open source software available to us and apps are fairly cheap or free for tablets and smart-phones; where the leading three software providers are Apple, Android (by Google) and Blackberry; all which support apps. Another cutting edge technology is “Augmented Reality” where we combine traditional media and computers to produce virtual 3d images that are interactive.

One day down, lots of information assimilated and looking forward to day 2!