Greetings and welcome to the new home for Tech Ice Breaker.

Here are some cool web 2.0 tools for education.

Imagination Cubed 

Imagination Cubed is an online collaborative tool that allows users to draw with others. Work can be saved, emailed or printed.  The tools seem simple enough to use.

Art Rage 2

Art Rage 2 is an easy to use Art program that allows users to experiment with Paint. The tools function more like paint tools in real-life. There is a free version and the full version is only $19.

Microsoft Photo Story

This program allows users to easily create slide shows with music. It requires Windows Media Player 10 to use. Its a great tool for Digital Storytelling.

Stained Glass Collage
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/

My troop was camping this past weekend at Cole Canoe Base in Northern Michigan. At our evening campfire I was playing with my camera and I had some scouts play around with flashlights while I took pictures. Here are two of the best results.

I have recently started using Thunderbird for reading blog posts. This allows me to me to read without having an active internet connection. I download them at the beginning of the day and read them at my leisure.

However, I like Google Reader for its ability to tag posts and the structure that provides. Is there a way to do that in Thunderbird?

What are you using for reading and organizing blog posts?

Greetings,

With all of the focus on negative events happening online, I’d like to thank those of you who through the wonders of Web 2.0 have helped me to learn.

Will Richardson- Thanks to Will for his presentation at the MACUL conference in 2006. I caught the last few minutes of his presentation and it changed my way of thinking about the web. Needless to say I attended almost all of his presentations at this year’s MACUL confereence.

Tips From the Top Floor and Chris Marquardt- This was the first podcast I started listening to last year. It features great tips for Digital Photography

KidCast: Learning and Teaching with Podcasts by Dan Schmit- Thanks for the ideas and tips on using podcasts in the classroom.

Scott Mcleod from Dangerously Irrevelant, Dan Meyer from DY/DAN and David Warlick from 2 Cents Worth
For making me think with each of your posts.

Clarence Fisher from Remote Access-Thanks for the ideas on classrooms as learning studios.

Chris Lehman from Practical Theory- Its great to hear from alternatives ways of schooling. My school is a charter school in Michigan and its nice to hear different approaches to learning.

Wesley Fryer from the Speed of Creativity- Thanks for all of the ideas and podcasts from conferences I can’t attend. Also thanks for my first comment on this blog, many months ago.

Vicki Davis from Cool Cat Teacher Blog- I’ve really appreciated the frequent links to tools and websites.

I am sure there are other people who I have forgotten to thank. Thanks to all for your thoughts and time in putting together your blogs and podcasts.

Chris