Save your Scrached projects

The following two procedures should be done in all learning and practicing sessions. The "Save now" procedure is to be executed every two to three minutes, in order to prevent loosing too much progress in case of a Internet connection problem or similar. The "Download" procedure is to be executed before the end of each all learning and practicing sessions.

Save now...

Saving your scratch project in the cloud is easy as to click twice ! Just click on the file menu and then on "Save Now". The only requirement is that you should sign in first.

Download

Downloading a Scratch 2.0 project is done from the project editor. There is an option under the File menu, "Download to your computer". Upon clicking, the user will be prompted to choose a name and location for the file. It will be a .sb2 file.

The "Save as..." dialog box will open and you should select the network disk, as shown in the picture above. The network disk is named Y: and / or \\birdman\Alumnos.

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Gmail language configuration

You can change the display language for all your Google Apps. The display language is the language used in all text and menus for the Google interface.

Remember, your Gmail's display language doesn't affect the language in which your messages are sent and received.

		Access your account settings by clicking on your image, located on the right top corner. Click on "Account"
		Once in your account settings, search for the Language configuration menu. Click on it.
		Finally, use the pencil icon to access a list of all available languages. Select English, EE.UU.

Information sources: Web query, Google Support Page. "Languages Image", Flickr royalty free stock photo.

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Amazing word clouds

I wonder if you knew this on-line app. Last weekend I was browsing around and found a typical Top-10-websites-you-should-visit list. This kind of lists are not big deal, most of the times, but in this case one link stood out.
The link directed my browsing to tagxedo.com.

Would you like to try it out with your favorite song lyrics?

Tag cloud definition: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/word+cloud

Video, How to use Tagxedo.com: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf3IOS5fhi4

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Blogging rubric

A rubric is typically an evaluation tool or set of guidelines used to promote the consistent application of learning expectations, learning objectives, or learning standards in the classroom, or to measure their attainment against a consistent set of criteria. In instructional settings, rubrics clearly define academic expectations for students and help to ensure consistency in the evaluation of academic work from student to student, assignment to assignment, or course to course. Rubrics are also used as scoring instruments to determine grades or the degree to which learning standards have been demonstrated or attained by students. From: http://edglossary.org/rubric/

The following rubric will be used to grade all posts exactly one week before the end of the term. Check the topic list to see the precise deadline for your class. 

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Student´s Blogs

Why should we encourage our students to blog in a regular basis? Authentic student´s work, blogs give a voice, comments are genuine feedback, posts make progress recognizable, develop writing skills, multimedia integration into posts, and many other advisable benefits.

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Left unlocked. Seriously?

Be security minded and never leave your computer accounts unattended.  

Bynum’s Definition

In 1989 Terrell Ward Bynum developed a broad definition of computer ethics following a suggestion in Moor’s 1985 paper. According to this view, computer ethics identifies and analyzes the impacts of information technology on such social and human values as health, wealth, work, opportunity, freedom, democracy, knowledge, privacy, security, self-fulfillment, etc. This very broad view of computer ethics employs applied ethics, sociology of computing, technology assessment, computer law, and related fields. It employs concepts, theories, and methodologies from these and other relevant disciplines. This conception of computer ethics is motivated by the belief that – eventually – information technology will profoundly affect everything that human beings hold dear.

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Pixlr Collages

Once a week I visit all my students blogs to provide them with feedback. The feedback chat takes between 10 and 15 minutes each and is mainly organized into three categories: relevance / coherence of the blog contents, writing quality and layout / format of each post. One question arose quite frequently, How can you place two or more images together in the same paragraph? We tried out many things: we used text flow tools (unfortunately the text did not flow the way we wanted), we placed some HTML tags (for some inexperienced users this seemed to be too complicated and a waste of time) and in some cases we finally used the "<table>" tag. 

Some students liked the idea of using the "<table>" HTML tag and they are using that "old fashioned" tag to arrange elements in a web page. As Blogger allows us to insert our own CSS, I'm planning to "migrate" those old fashioned tables to CSS markup descriptors in the near future, but that is a topic for a different post. Other students preferred to use another kind of tool. 

What about using an image editor to arrange images as a collage? then we would use the collage as a solid image, composed with the smaller images as components of the bigger one. The authors of the post would have to insert a single image file, still looking like a complex arrangement of different pictures. An example, the following image is a unique file, containing several others as components: 

Now, here you have a nice tutorial to learn how to create a collage.

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Bits being equal

Browsing the Internet I found a lecture that´s similar to one of my recent sessions with you. As we began learning how a computer represents an image, the "bit" was presented as the most basic building block of modern computing. Collections of bits are interpreted as being different kinds of information, for example: this aggregate of 8 bits (01100001) represents the letter "a", if you consider the ASCII code.  

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Photo Editing - Sharpen and pixel replacement

Photo or image editing is one of the most interesting creation techniques I ever experienced. No matter whether it is a photograph or a digital drawing, I am passionate about creating images. I usually begin with a sketch or a fast edit, just to see if the workflow I have in mind, will do or not. Most of the time, a rapid preview is enough for me to confirm whether I´m on the right track and if I actually am, hours of dedicated work are to come.

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Converting files is an easy task

A few weeks ago we were working in our audio personal presentations. Some of the students decided to use their personal device, such as cell phones or Ipods, to record their voices. Some others used the Windows Sound Recorder or even Vocaroo.com. Although the variety of devices and tools used, it was something of value for the learning process, we found a limitation. The selected streaming platform (GoEar)  allowed us to upload only MP3 files. 

The problem was, that we had created many different audio files in a variety of formats, such as: AIFF, WAV or even MP4 (come students used youtube to record presentations). What would happen if we had no other choice than uploading to GoEar? We needed a file converter, one that would be available to all students, from home or from school. I suggested zamzar.com  

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The Flubaroo experience

Google forms is a great tool for conducting online surveys. Teachers around the world are using this tool in a number of different ways, including for online quizzes for students. The advantages of gathering student information in digital form and being able to analyze that information using formulas and charts are simply undisputed.

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You sound...

This week we were engaged recording our audio personal presentations and publishing them in our blogs as the first post. 

Students ranging from 2nd. to 6th. HS years had the task to present themselves and record the audio. All students got the same short task description with few constraints as possible (personal information protection guidelines were discussed previously). A short tutorial was available only for beginners.

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