ITFairhurst’s Blog

Changing Educational Paradigms

Next Generation Interactive Whiteboard by Promethean

This Blog has moved to http://edublogs.riverview.nsw.edu.au/itfairhurst/

Ning hopes to compete with large social sites like MySpace and Facebook, by appealing to users who want to create networks around specific interests or have limited technical skills.[6] The unique feature of Ning is that anyone can create their own custom social network for a particular topic or need, catering to specific audiences. At its launch, Ning offered several simple base websites developed internally and by members of a closed beta. In late September 2006, Ning narrowed its focus to offering a group website, a photos website, and a videos website for people to copy and use for any purpose. Later, these three templates were superseded by a single customizable template aimed at allowing non-developers to more easily customize their copy of the social website. However, Ning does allow developers to have some source level control of their social networks, enabling them to change features and underlying logic. Core feature modification has been disabled on October 21, 2008.[7] Ning has also been used by educators in S-GI to conduct a book study on Curriculum Mapping. Many educators are using ning for developing educational resources. Features were customized so that participants could upload pictures and videos of student developed projects as well as links to blogs and Flickr.

Pivot makes it easy to create stick-figure animations. You can build your own stick figures and load your own backgrounds. The animations can be saved as animated gifs to be used on web pages. An example animation is included.

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages. (more…)

Terragen 2 (TG2) is now the primary development focus of Planetside Software. TG2 is a complete rewrite of Terragen from scratch, and is a significant advance beyond the capabilities of Terragen v0.9. Apart from being a much more powerful renderer, TG2 has a much more flexible architecture which will allow development to proceed at a considerably greater pace.

Conserving energy & water is largely about education but importantly it’s also about reinforcement

Everyone is quite well informed now about the need to conserve energy and no one wants to deliberately waste resources by leaving computers, lights and other equipment switched on unnecessarily, its just that we’re all very busy people, with a lot on our minds and we often just forget.

This is where ecoDriver sc comes in; by monitoring electricity, gas and water consumption and by continuously broadcasting this data to a prominent display in the school, the issue of reducing energy & water consumption becomes a matter of daily concern for both staff and pupils.

And most importantly people can see, very quickly, the effect of their energy conservation initiatives.

By reducing energy and water consumption not only does your school save money but levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are also reduced. (see diagram)