Haugen’s Tech Tips Blog

As I approach a new session of my after school publishing program, I decided to use a wiki to see if I could help make the process clearer to students and give them more opportunities to work independently. My Edison Student Publishers Wiki includes information about the program, and tips to help my 3rd-5th grade students:

• Choose a Project – news, reviews, interviews, puzzles, comics, jokes, etc.
• Find News or Information – web sites, people, papers, etc.
• Find Help with Writing – news, poetry, fiction, more
• Find or Make Images – photos, drawings, online tools, more
• Make a Puzzle – links to puzzlemaker, our puzzle starters and more
• Work on Layout – under construction

I’m excited about how this program is evolving and the wonderful, creative work kids can do. I’m new to wikis and I think this may be the first one I’ve done that approaches being useful! I’d love any feedback or suggestions on improving this kind of resource.

With student publishing projects in mind, and my own projects as well, I was recently reminded of one very cool site, Lulu.com , which lets you self-publish your own books in a way that books are produced and shipped ‘as needed.’  I have a dream of putting together many of the resources I’ve developed over the years into just such a book.  One of the appeals of on-demand publishing, I think, is bridging the gap between print and digital tools.  In an on-demand environment, I can more easily update time-sensitive writing, especially on technology topics.  However, that does beg the question of what is a book, when it can change so easily!  So many (fun) new problems to solve!

In response to a query from a teacher on behalf of her first grader who wants to ‘get into publishing,’ here are some links to online sites that encourage or allow students to publish their work online:

• Tips for children publishing on the Internet. | NetAlert – From the Australian government, a helpful set of safety and design tips for any students who would like to publish their creations on the web.
• Young Writer’s Clubhouse – The young writer’s clubhouse gives you tips on how to be a writer, from author Deborah Morris. Join the Critique Group to share poems and stories you’ve written and share feedback with other kid writers.
• KidPub – Read stories other kids have written, or join KidPub (for a fee) to publish your stories online.
• Stone Soup – Read what kids write or submit your own stories to this classy magazine.
• Young Writers Association – this is a local stop for those of us in Eugene, OR.

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!