Overview

Here’s a web tool that may have many applications in education. Stained Glass collage allows the user to create a stained glass style picture using pictures from Flickr or pictures that you upload yourself. The program then creates a stained glass style collage of the pictures you selected. The user can choose what section of a picture to use, the size of that section, and orientation on the page. You can also choose the size and color of the borders and whether there is a border around the whole composition. Pictures can be in portrait as well as landscape mode

You can view the image as a whole and also each individual section. The sections are clickable and reveal the whole photo that was used to create that section. By clicking on the enlarge text at the bottom of a collage you can access a high resolution image. This image can be saved as usual. You can also create a zip archive of the image and an html image map for browsing the photos.

Here’s an example I created from some pictures from Wright Patterson Air Force Base when I toured it with my scout troop in September.

http://www.sgcollage.com/view.jspx?id=me5m6tw

Potential Applications for Education
Students could use this tool to present pictures of subects that interest them. Perhaps a teacher could assign a topic and students could find images online that illustrate the topic. What if students wrote poetry and created a collage for that poem. They could use that collage as a cover for a Photostory. They could then use the individual images and their own audio to create a unique photostory.

http://www.sgcollage.com/

After listening to David Warlick’s Keynote at the K12 Online Conference this past Monday, I thought of another metaphor for capturing our students interests and our curriculum.

A subway has two rails that guide the car and a third rail that provides the power and electricity. Traditional content and curriculum can be thought of as the guide rails for the subway cars (our classrooms)while the third rail (Web 2.0 and other interactive technology) provides the excitement that gets our students going. Our classrooms can provide a safe place for students to use this third rail. Much like someone who explores the subway tunnels is likely to get hurt or lost when they are not within the confines of a subway car, our students are exploring that third rail now and are making mistakes that may hurt them. Yes there is some danger in using the third rail but with education our students (and our teachers) will be better for it. In addition our classrooms can be the exciting places we want them to be rather than just coasting along.

Its time for teachers (and administrators) to join the students in exploring the third rail in their classrooms.

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Using digital recorders to record student’s reading samples provides a way for students, teachers and parents to document growth. The resulting files could be burned to a cd-rom to give to the student, their family and their teacher for next year. If they were stored on a server a lasting record of a student’s reading progress could be shown.

Digital recorders can be purchased at many computers stores. Another idea would be to use audio recording software such as Audacity to record the samples. The difficulty with using such software is the student would then be confined to recording their samples at that computer.

Welcome to Tech Ice Breaker, my home for ideas to break the ice of Technology Literacy for teachers and their students.

Wayfaring.com

Here’s a neat tool for creating and sharing maps. I have created one showing the location of the blogs that I subscribe to.

http://www.wayfaring.com/maps/widescreen/25092