Haugen’s Tech Tips Blog

SchoolNetAfrica is a pan-African education portal for practitioners, policymakers and school communities across the continent with resources in English, French, Kiswahili, Portuguese and Arabic.

SchoolNetAfrica is made up of the African Education Knowledge Warehouse:

• SchoolNet Centre, which has tools and resources to support national SchoolNets
• Policy Centre, which provides resources and studies to support policy development on ICT integration in education
• Learner Centre, which houses resources for learners and provides space for networking and collaboration among young people
• African Teachers Centre, the meeting place for the African Teachers Network
• Gender Watch, which houses gender and ICTs related resources and captures voices of women and girls using ICTs for their advancement
• Innovation Watch, which tracks innovations and innovators to inspire learners and educators in using ICTs for Education
• Campaigns, which include their One Million Computers for African Schools campaign.

Their campaigns include:

• One Million Computers for African Schools
• Global Teenager Project
• Researching ICTs for Education in Africa
• Building African SchoolNet Champions
• Supporting National SchoolNets
• African Teachers Network
• ThinkQuest Africa
• From Guns to Computers

On a personal note, I’m delighted to call as a friend Babacar Fall, from Senegal, one of the governing members of SchoolNetAfrica.

I’ve written about Skitch before, but now that I’ve been using it a while, I have to put it out there again as one of my must-have’s. Why? It’s fun, it’s good looking, it’s easy and above all, it’s several practical tools built into one.

• Screen Capture – grab a window, the whole screen or anything you can frame or drag across. You can even do a ‘timed snap’ which gives you a few seconds to set things up.
• Photo Access – grab images from iPhoto, your iSight camera or drag an image into the Skitch window from anywhere.
• Drawing Tool – have fun with the Skitch drawing tools – freehand (smoothing) lines, straight lines, circles, rectangles, fill, eraser, text and arrows. Choose from available colors or any color from Mac’s built-in color picker. Or, try the very cool shadow or highlight effects. Drawing elements remain selectable so you can change, erase, copy or move them. And why is Skitch so cool? Because you can draw on a blank screen OR on top of any image you choose. And even then, you can choose whether or not to wipe the original image, or wipe your strokes and keep the image.
• Resize it – resizing is an intuitive grab-the-edges process to either crop, expand or shrink the image. How easy is that?
• Drag it out or Upload it – It’s one thing to grab or create a fun or useful image. Another thing to get it where you need it. With Skitch, you either use the drag tab to drag the image to any folder or document you need. You can send it to iPhoto or .Mac or Mail. You can also, after a simple configuration process, click the upload button to automatically post it to mySkitch.com, flickr.com or any other blog or web site you have access to.
• mySkitch for sharing – mySkitch.com is your home base for your ‘Skitched’ images – from there, you can easily grab the link or code you need to post the image anywhere you need it.

So, the whole other side of Skitch is what you do with it. That is up to you. As for me, I find it great for creating quick icons and casual images, for annotating a screen shot to provide a quick and easy how-to, for adding effects to maps, diagrams and other images for use in presentations, and for fun, decorative effects on photos. My kids like to add effects to their stop-frame animations, and none of us are beyond a goofy session with PhotoBooth and Skitch. See my Flickr ‘Skitch’ set for examples of each.

Wow… Alan Levine has done us all a great service by compiling a list of fifty online tools for storytelling, from slideshows to timeline tools to sites that let you combine text and diverse media formats. In addition, he’s used each tool to tell the same “Dominoe story” and often links to other examples. This provides a great means of comparison. Don’t miss this fabulous resource!

Chauncey Rucker’s ConnSense Bulletin has long been a favorite of mine for news, reviews and updates related to assistive technology. It’s quality stuff, and he taps into key issues. In addition to online articles and an e-mail bulletin, ConnSense also has begun providing podcasts. Maybe I’m a luddite, but I’ve never quite figured out how or when to listen to podcasts. Still, I began browsing the ConnSense podcasts on iTunes, and quickly decided I wanted to see what they were talking about. After a quick google, I had onscreen references to what the podcast was discussing, each informing the other. For some reason, this really worked for me, and takes me a step beyond listening to podcasts as I drive.

Two of my favorite sites for families struggling with learning disabilities are closing. On September 21, Charles and Helen Schwab announced they will no longer maintain operation of their web sites, SchwabLearning.org and Sparktop.org. Instead they will focus on selective grant-making to other organizations.
I am grateful for the wonderful work that the Schwabs have done and their contributions toward greater understanding of and success for students with learning disabilities. I trust their change in focus will continue to allow them to make significant contributions in this arena.
In the meantime, let’s hope that the Schwabs can make good on their efforts to make their significant resources available through other organizations.