This bizarre and strangely compelling site almost had me believing it!

Great Pockets

This just blew my mind away when I saw this as a piece of 3d virtual reality. Drag the time square image into the viewer and be amazed! On full screen it’s awesome and gives you a feel – almost 3d – of being there. You can pan up and down more freely than some VR players I’ve seen before. WOW!  Try the Bristol Balloon festival!

Panorama.dk

Sometimes it’s really effective to have a collage of images . Useful for Design and Technology as you could make tablemats of them at A4 size which can be laminated. The following link will take you to the download. As with all things Google it’s a good idea to check what you tick as you might sufffer a lot of useless additions to slow your desktop down!!

http://picasa.google.com/

Have fun!

The Dell Mini-9 is one of the best mini-notebooks for schools we’ve tried. The Asus was good but seems slow and a little small on the keyboard for us grownups. The link below will take you to the website. You may have seen it advertised in the Sunday Papers this last weekend . Price £299 for the Xp version with 16gb Ram

http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/laptop-inspiron-9?c=uk&l=en&s=dhs&cs=ukdhs1

CCame across this web based tool today and thought it might be a helpful source of useful slideshows for teaching and learning as well as training. Click on the link below :-

http://www.slideshare.net/

This is an amazing application that combines different views of any place into a 3D virtual tour. The packaged called Microsoft Photosynth in free and downloadable from the link below. It has just got better by introducing a create option which allows you download your own pictures to the website which will then be incorporated into 3D views. Maybe, it would inspire some creative photography now that digital photography is not constrained by film size. How about some Stonehenge or Salisbury Cathedral views done in this way? A class could take this on as a project and combine their images together.

Get started at:-

http://photosynth.net/default.aspx

This search engine has some unique features and feels very much like an apple iphone interface. Then I began to think of it in terms of its use for special needs pupils , in particular, autistic spectrum pupils or visual thinkers. Anyway, check it out:-

http://beta.searchme.com

Funny how things IT get’s a man working all hours for no pay and cries ” what’s the POINT!”  and “millions starving in Africa and you are still at the computer!” Point taken and a good one! I realise that this becomes an obsession and a pull for those who love problem solving. Strange – as I have no desire to get involved with online puzzles and things like scrabble and patience. I much prefer car and plane simulations with a bit of war thrown in! Still that’s the way it is.

I’ve spent the best of a week trying to resolve a stupid issue with Vista – the new windows operating system! It was working beautifuly on Monday when I was stremaing photos and videos from the home computer upstairs when all of a sudden when I came to switch it back on in the evening I could no longer log in and had to restore it several times. Unfortunately, on Vista you have to TELL it to restore which means that comment do you want to make a backup disc when you first get your new Vista computer all the more significant. I did not! Thinking ( foolish me!) That windows would not crash! ( Who am I kidding?). I could not go back – and seemingly have been on a journey of self-denial and frustration trying to locate the problem and find a solution as of this date and time – still looking – and it’s nearly Christmas. If anyone out there takes the time and trouble to read this – HELP!.

On a different note – what a great plaything the Ninetendo WII is (pronounced “Wee”) . Simple and effective and works !! That’s the technology we could all live with.

I am also becoming a fan of all things Google. From my domain area I bought into for £10 a year to the file sharing of my work documents through Google Docs. It is again both easy and reliable. I am into Web2 technologies which deliver all this information to you free of charge except for time inputting the info in the first place into this blog. But the benefits are enormous- especially as we can access the stuff on any computer, anywhere in the world!  I can also port this out to any of muy chosen blogsites for different readers. Truly making my audience – worldwide. Images can be shared without the need for projector or my own laptop. As this site proves. I use this – and have been using this site for a number of years to store my images.  That is duplicated across all systems for the first rule of computing in my opinion is:-

“always store your data in more than one place ( preferebly 2 or 3!)”

That way you shouldn’t loose it when Vista fouls up for instance.

Well it is getting late. I need to go to bed ready for tomorrow being Sunday and the need to be ready for singing in the worship group.

Happy Christmas – anyone who cares to read this!

Wouldn’t be great if you could carry on working on #

Any machine

Anytime

Anywhere an internet access is

Then software like this could be really powerful for collaborative work. I particularly like:-

http://www,exploratree.org.uk – this has useful planning ideas that may interest teachers and trainers to use in their sessions.

http://www.bubbl.us – looking for a simple tool to use that is graphical and intuitive then this online mindmap is the one.

http://www.mind42.com – is for more traditional mindmaps but does have all the collaborative opportunities of the others

All of these took less that 5 mins to register and then you can work straight away. No manual . No fuss. Just get on with thinking and mapping those ideas