In previous posts, I’ve mentioned how nice it is to occasionally convert some of our online connections into real ones.  This week I had the opportunity to again meet up with someone I’d only ever know through the blogosphere.

Susan Sedro is a teacher at the Singapore American School where she does ICT support for years 3, 4 and 5.  The first time I “met” her was during a group Skype call back in September last year and since that time we have read each other’s blogs, chatted occasionally on Skype and, along with Kim Cofino, even recorded an episode of Virtual Staffroom together.

I’d noticed that Susan was asking some very Aussie-centric questions on Twitter a while back, wanting to know the best places to go snorkelling on the Barrier Reef, etc, so I assumed she might be planning a trip down here.  We got in contact and I said if she was in Australia to give me a yell and we’d catch up.  Well, she yelled and we caught up.

So last Wednesday night, Linda and I met Susan and her partner Kent in front of the Orient Hotel at the Rocks here in Sydney.  We had a very pleasant evening wandering around the city, starting by catching a cab down to Darling Harbour, walking across the old Pyrmont Bridge to have an al-fresco dinner and a few beers at the Pyrmont Bridge Hotel, followed by a walk through Darling Harbour, up Liverpool Street through the Spanish Quarter, left into George Street past Town Hall and St Andrews Cathedral and all the way down to Wynyard Station.  It was a nice night for a walk and we had a good chat about all sorts of things, some education-related, and some not.

I made the offer to Susan and Kent to drop into my school, PLC, at some stage if they had time.  Fortunately, their plans for the next day had them catching a train that went right through Croydon so they took me up on the offer and popped in on their way.  We did a quick tour of some of the school, and even dropped into one of the computer rooms where Year 4 was having a lesson and had a chat with some of the kids.

My school runs a program called Transition Class, which caters for special needs students with fairly significant learning disabilities.  These students, about 20 of them, attend regular classes but also focus on learning a lot of life skills.  To help facilitate this, PLC bought a house next door to the school which they call Transition House and the kids regularly spend time there, learning very practical skills to teach them to look after themselves. One of the wonderful things these kids do every term is called Transition Cafe, where they host and manage a cafe luncheon for PLC staff… the menu is prepared, orders are taken and the food is cooked and served by the transition students and it’s a wonderful example of real life, relevant learning in action. Kent and Susan’s visit just happened to coincide with this term’s Transition Cafe event so of course they were invited to join us for lunch at the table reserved for the IT Services team.  We all had a very pleasant time sitting in the sunshine, chatting and being served by our wonderful transition kids.

I had to sneak off from lunch a little early as I had an IWB workshop I’d promised to run for our Creative Arts staff.  I left Susan and Kent in the capable hands of our IT Director, Chris Waterman, who escorted them over to meet me just as the IWB session was winding up, and we took another quick tour through The Croydon, an old pub that was bought by the school a few years ago and converted to our centre for technology and the arts, before eventually bidding them farewell as they continued on with their day.

Meeting IRL is a good thing… If you ever get the chance to meet up with colleagues you’ve only ever known through the network, I’d encourage you to do it.  It was terrific to meet Susan and Kent, and I’m hoping to be able to take them up on their offer to catch up in Singapore one day.

I think it would be rather nice to sit and share a beer or two at Raffles Hotel. 

This is a joint post between Sue Waters and myself about integrating Flickr with Picasa, and has been cross posted on each of our blogs.

Let’s start with a little background on this post’s origin

After spending some time yesterday migrating Linda’s entire photo collection (well, most of it… did I mention that regular backup is very important?) into Google’s Picasa photo management application and then giving her a bit of a tutorial in how to use it tonight, she asked the next obvious question… how do I put some of these photos onto Flickr? A good question. After all, Flickr is without a doubt the best online photo sharing website around. With amazing tools and options, an incredible online community for sharing and learning from each other, and a huge array of APIs that enable Flickr to work with a range of different online and offline services, the decision to use Flickr as your online photo storage tool of choice is a bit of a no-brainer.

However, on the desktop it’s a different story. Flickr is purely a Web2.0 service, and there is no local desktop component offered with it. This means that while Flickr is wonderful at managing your photos online, when it comes to dealing with the photos stored on your hard drive the only real options you have is whatever tools are already on your computer. If you have a Mac, iPhoto does a great job of photo management. It’s free and comes with every Mac. If you are more serious you can always look at Adobe’s Lightroom or Apple’s Aperture, but these are quite expensive applications. On the Windows side, there are probably dozens of “photo management” applications but most of them are pretty awful, and some are also expensive. Most people just settle for managing their photos directly in Windows Explorer which is an average solution at best.

Using Picasa for your offline photo management

Enter Picasa from Google. Picasa is a wonderful free piece of photo management software and lets you sort, arrange, adjust, crop, rename and generally manage your photos on your computer. It really is an incredibly sophisticated yet simple tool for photographers and the price tag can’t be beaten…. you can’t do much better than free. It is available for Windows only, which makes perfect sense since it essentially does most of what iPhoto already does on the Mac. As well as the desktop app, there is also a “Flickr-like” online photo service from Google called Picasaweb. I say “Flickr-like”, because although it lets you store your photos online it lacks the same community and API sharing that makes Flickr so compelling. If you’re serious about photos online Picasaweb could be a little disappointing. However, being from the Google stable of products, there is some common functionality for exporting photos directly from Picasa on your computer to Picasaweb on the net, which is a nice touch.

The trouble is that while Picasa may be an obvious best choice for local photo management, Flickr is the obvious best choice for online photo management. It would be nice to have the option to manage your photos locally with Picasa and then send your best shots up to Flickr to share with the world. Nice, except that Picasa is owned by Google and Flickr is owned by Yahoo!, and when companies are in direct head to head battle like Yahoo! and Google are, the last thing you want to do is anything that promotes your competition. This is unfortunate, since the losers in that battle are you and I, the consumers. We just want to manage our photos using the two tools we like, but it’s not as quite as straightforward as that.

Connecting via Twitter

Talk about synchronicity. As I was pondering this question tonight, the exact same question floated through my Twitter feed. Mrs_Banjer , sujokat and Sue (dswaters) were discussing the very same issue - how to manage your photos on and offline, what service to use, how to integrate them, and essentially they were tweeting on the very same things I was thinking about. One thing led to another, so via Twitter we discussed, chatted, talked and shared links. We pontificated on the pros and cons of Flickr versus Picasa. This is just one example of the power of an always-on personal learning network. Eventually though, I felt I needed to clarify a point in the discussion so rather than overTweet to the world, I Skyped Sue Waters in Perth and chatted about it directly. While we were talking a tweet came through from sujokat asking “someone do a blog on this please this is fabulous but all too quick for me to take it all in”. Sue and I decided that we’d do that… write a post about the pros and cons of Picasa and Flickr, but we’d do it as a joint post. So this is being written in Google Docs and is a collaborative effort between Sue and I… over to you Sue.

Now for My Thoughts On Picasa vs Flickr

One of the best aspects of Twitter connectivity is the challenging of your thoughts, beliefs and making you really think; often about issues you had not considered. This was definitely the case with Picasa vs Flickr. I have rarely used Picasa as Window Explorer and Picture Manager have been adequate for my needs but really into Flickr. In all fairness to Picasa more likely that I have not spent enough time exploring the virtues of Picasa — it did take me 12 months to realise the benefits of Flickr. So my homework for the next few days is to throughly road test Picasa and report back to ensure I have done my usual through research.

It is definitely benefical to import photos from your camera directly into Picasa because it means you don’t import multiple copies of the same photo.

Uploading to Flickr

For Mac users, there are several options for getting photos to Flickr. As iPhoto is a standard application found on every Mac it is a much simpler proposition for developers to create APIs that hook directly between iPhoto and Flickr, so there tends to be a number of uploading tools available, the best known of which is Flickr Uploadr. As well as the Flickr Uploader, there are free tools like FFXporter that plug directly into iPhotos Export option to offer direct Flickr integration. Another option is to use Flock as your web broswer… Flock has Flickr uploading tools built right in.

For Windows users who like Picasa as their photo management tool, uploading images to Flickr from Picasa is also a relatively simple process, even if not quite as obvious or integrated as that enjoyed by Mac users. Just download and install Flickr Uploadr on your desktop, open the Flickr Uploader and Picasa windows alongside each other, then drag and drop the images from Picasa library onto the Flickr Uploader. Simple!

Final Thoughts

Also worth checking out David Jake’s thorough information on Flickr (thanks sukojat for the link) and Philip Nichols’s guide to Picasa.

Besides learning a lot more about Picasa it has been amazing collaborating with Sue to write a post together; using Google Documents, Twitter and Skype.

Sue and I would love to learn more about how you manage your photos.

What are your thoughts? Do you use an offline photo management software? What features do you like about the software you use? Do you share your photos online at Flickr or do you use another photosharing website? And if so, which one and why?

Please take this opportunity to drop past Sue’s post and leave some tips for her as well.

Twitter was down for a while today. In order to feed the Twitter addiction, @shareski started a group Skype chat and started to drag people into it, who in turn started to drag more people into it. Pretty soon we had our very own pseudo-Twitter going, as everyone continued adding people into the chat space until there must have about 50 people in the room… easily the biggest Skype chat I’ve had.

Twitter eventually came back up, and a huge collective global sigh of relief was breathed.

Still, the Skywitter chat was a fun experiment. As Vicki Davis observed…

“It is like an Elvis impersonator — not the real thing but close enough when the real one is dead.”

That comment made my day.

Tags: twitter, skype, pln

As an existing customer of 3, Australia’s first 3G mobile phone network, and an avid user of Skype, I was interested to see this new product just about to be released here in Australia. It’s a 3G/Wifi enabled phone that lets you make free Skype-to-Skype calls over wireless LANs. Given that I spend all day at work, and all my time at home bathed in the radiant glow of wifi, the ability to make free calls is pretty attractive. I’m assuming that it reverts back to a standard GSM phone when you wander off the grid, and switches back to wifi when you get back into a wifi zone. I need to read the fine print of course, but it’s an intriguing idea.

While it’s not exactly an iPhone (far from it) it certainly looks interesting and suggests that the already competitive mobile phone business is about to get a whole lot more heated in the next 12 months. There’s been no word from Apple as to when the iPhone might land in Australia, so this push by Skype and 3 might be a positioning strategy to establish themselves as players in the developing VOIP mobile scene before Apple gets a chance to dominate it completely.

Either way, we live in interesting times!

Tags: skype, 3mobile, iphone

I’ve been trying to make a screencast of Skype conversation. And I thought it would be pretty simple. But as so often happens, there are technical issues to overcome that can make things so much trickier than you first thought they would be.

I’ve done quite a bit of screen capturing before, usually for short training videos on how to do certain software tasks. In fact I made a CD for a commercial training organisation a few years back that had over 80 tutorial screencasts on it made with Capture Cam Pro, so I figured I knew how to do this stuff. I’ve also been using Jing lately to make short screencasts on tech tips for our school network users. I think that screencasting is a great way to learn (and teach) this sort of practical, “show me” sort of stuff. Atomic Learning is another excellent resource based on this idea.

So I wanted to make a couple of screencasts to demonstrate how to use the features of Skype. I’d been using Snapz Pro X on the Mac, but wasn’t totally happy with it. I’d heard good things about iShowU so I downloaded a copy to try. I only had to use it a couple of times before I realised that it was going to be well worth the $20 they were asking for it, so bought a copy immediately. Easy to use, lots of professional options, and very customisable. A cool tool.

So I set up a screen capture, fired up Skype and called the Skype call testing service at echo123. iShowU captured all the on-screen action easily, as well as my microphone input, BUT not the audio coming out of Skype. Hmmm, that’s no good… I can’t do a demo of Skype if I can’t hear the conversation played back in the screen capture. I thought of a bunch of ideas to solve this, including using Audio Hijack Pro to capture the Skype audio, iShowU to capture everything else, and then dropping it into iMovie to edit them into a single movie but that seemed like it was all getting too hard and time consuming. I’m basically quite lazy, so I wanted a better, more elegant solution.

After quite a bit of trial and error I finally figured out how to do this, so here is my solution in case you ever need to do it yourself.

The trick is to use Soundflower, a Mac system extension that lets you route audio around the system in non-standard ways. From the Soundflower website, it says “Soundflower is a Mac OS X system extension that allows applications to pass audio to other applications. Soundflower is easy to use, it simply presents itself as an audio device, allowing any audio application to send and receive audio with no other support needed. Soundflower is free, open-source, and runs on Mac Intel and PPC computers.”

So, here’s how you do it - or at least it’s what eventually worked for me after much trial and error…

1. First, I set the audio inputs of the Mac to Soundflower (2ch), that’s input, output and system.
2. Then in the Skype preferences, set the Audio input to your desired microphone (I used a USB headset mic) and the Audio output to Soundflower (2ch). I set the ringing to Soundflower as well, but that’s probably not so important.
3. Finally, in iShowU, set the Input selection to Record Microphone Audio, Force it to Mono, and turn on Record System Audio. Set the microphone input to the USB headset (in my case). I also prefer to get the monitor feed while both previewing and recording, so turn that on if you want.
4. By the way, setting the compression to H.264 makes a huge difference to the size of the final files.

There you have it. From what I can figure out, it works by routing the Skype microphone input to Soundflower, then routing its output to be the Mac’s regular audio input as a Soundflower stream. Then the Mac uses that diverted audio stream and treats it as the regular mic input to the computer (except after passing it via Skype it now has the entire Skype conversation in it) and then using iShowU to monitor the standard audio feed, which now contains the Skype audio. This may all be totally useless information to most of you, but for someone out there it may just save you a whole lot of time. I hope so.

Tags: skype, soundflower, ishowu, mac. audio

It’s cool to see just how our networks of connectivity are letting us find each other so easily and spontaneously, and the conversations that are evolving out of those connections.

While checking my mail tonight, my Twitter goes off. It seems that Jeff Utecht in China is hosting a chat session using something called Wiziq. A number of Twitterers are talking about it. I’m intruiged, but I didn’t have Jeff on my Twitter list so I carry on with what I was doing. More conversation tweets out about this session, and I’m following along vicariously through everyone else’s Twitters. Pretty soon I see another tweet from Kim Cofino (from Bangkok, Thailand) talking about how she’s chatting with Graham Wegner (from Adelaide, Australia) and Chrissy Hellier (from Napier, New Zealand). By this stage, I feel like the party is going on without me, so I decide to have a guess at Kim’s Skype name and do some gatecrashing.

Next thing I’m in a text chat with Graham, Kim, Chrissy and Susan Sedro (Singapore). I suggest we try going to voicecall, and there is some concern over how well that will work. I suggest that we won’t know till we try it… “use it till it breaks”, I suggest.

So we move to voice on Skype, and it’s all good. Poor Graham got shafted as his computer didn’t have a microphone, so he follows along on text chat for a while. Hmm, we start to wonder how many people we can get in here before we break it? Only one way to find out…

I spot Allanah King (Nelson, New Zealand) online and drag her in to the chat (When I say I dragged her in, I don’t mean that she was unwilling at all… on a Mac you literally drag someone’s icon into the chat window to add them to the call) So now we have five.

It’s early morning in east coast USA by this time, and my friend Janet Barnstable (Oak Park, Illinois) pops up on Skype… drag her in too. Carolyn Foote (Austin, Texas) comes online, so in to the chat she goes. Sharon Peters (Montreal, Quebec) appears, and so we drag her in too. This is fun!

We still haven’t broken it, and apart from a bit of background noise and a couple of scratchy bits, Skype is holding up remarkably well. We need more!

Lisa Durff (Maryland) and Robin Ellis (Pennsylvania) appeared online and also got dragged in, although not at the same time, so the most we had online at any given moment was nine.

This was tons of fun… just being able to spontaneously pull a chat together like this is very cool. We had 10 people, from 6 countries and 5 timezones, all chatting away together. As the only male in the group I feel like we maybe need to balance the numbers up a little next time… I tried to drag Jason Hando (Sydney, Australia) in the call, but he must have been away from his computer at the time.

Thanks everyone for jumping in to the call and sharing like that. It was nice to connect some voices with some of the names I recognised. We must do it again some time.

I am sitting in class at the moment, minding a group of kids for another teacher that had a meeting to attend. The kids are good, working quietly and getting their task done…

Then up popped a mate on Skype, a teacher from Saskatchewan, asking a couple of questions about a podcasting project I did last semester so we chatted online for a while talking about all sorts of podcasting stuff. He did however mention that where he was in Saskatchewan was having a huge snow blizzard at the moment, and that a friend of his had a some photos of the storm on his blog.

I headed over to his friends blog and found an interesting post about what happens in school during a snow day. What I found interesting was this comment…

“We took the morning to divide our 13 student class (a result of a depleted school population) into four groups to create a project about the effects of the blizzard. We had a podcast group, a newsletter group, a video group and a digital story group.”

This is what school should be like everyday. Kids creating and publishing content based on what’s important to them and the world.

It’s true isn’t it? Kids really can see a very clear dividing line between doing authentic tasks that matter to them, and doing tasks that simply require them to “play school”. Playing school is all about doing things to keep the teachers happy, who are in turn often just keeping the system happy. I keep observing that when we treat kids like intelligent human beings with interests and passions and we design tasks that enable them to feed those interests and those passions, whether they fall within the boundaries of some arbitrary curriculum or not, they become truly engaged in what they are doing.

I could tell you quite a few stories about tasks where I’ve had students doing real tasks that they truly cared about, that let them explore ideas that truly mattered to them, and where they went way above and beyond the call of duty to make sure that every i was dotted and every t was crossed. If it matters to the kids they will take enormous care with their work.

The problem with most school tasks is they are so lacking in relevance to kids. We ask them to “submit” work, where we should be asking them to “publish” work. We ask them to “write” where we should be asking them to “communicate”. We threaten them with deduction of marks if a task is not “successful”, instead of rewarding them for trying something new. And we continually ask kids to engage with work that most of us would object to doing ourselves. Have you ever looked at the tasks you ask kids to do? I mean really looked at those tasks, from the perspective of the kid? It doesn’t surprise me that many kids are bored with school.

Let’s think more about designing learning experiences for the kids we teach that are more in line with the sorts of tasks that we’d like to do ourselves. Let’s try to make these tasks truly curious, engaging, interesting, enthralling, fascinating experiences…

We live in a world that has so many possibilities. Let’s try and build some of those incredible possibilities into the school experience.

Following on from the success of the “When Night Falls” Skypecast that concluded the recent K12 Online Conference, I offered to run a similar Skypecast for members of the Australian OzTeachers group.

If you have an interest in education, you might like to drop in to say g’day. It starts at 10:00am Saturday morning (AEST), or 6:00pm Friday evening (US EST). You’ll have to do the math for other timezones.

https://skypecasts.skype.com/skypecasts/skypecast/detailed.html?id_talk=52950

Update:  It was quite a success and about 30 people showed up.  Keep your eye out for the next one, which we will do as a conference rather than a Skypecast I think…