Horse talk (2)

I used Comic Creator from ImageGenerator.org to add speech bubbles to my own photo.
Looks small on the screen so I enlarged it a little. Still too small to read the dialogue on the blog screen, but the photos clicks large and looks quite good.
Quite an easy tool to use.

Photo edit gadget

iGoogle

Looks like Google values the health of their employees; really works at keeping valued employees. It would really appeal to young people just finishing university.
They need to be made aware of caring for their physical health if they spend all their work time in front of a keyboard and screen.
Personally, I couldn't tolerate that work place/style for long.

I added a Word of the Day gadget to my igoogle home page; could be a good stimulus for an English class each day.
The amount of ready reference material linked to the igoogle home page is amazing, but I found the downloads got increasingly slow the more I used it!! Could just be that I was using the Internet in primetime and service to my residential area could be better.

Google Books

Another useful resource for finding reading material for reluctant readers. The school librarian uses this resource to check reviews of possible purchases.

Google Maps

Amazing to see one's own property so accessable from a satellite perspective.
Local directions were very easy to follow, but local-knowledge detours /"fast routes" can't all be archived.
Directions from country addresses into city suburbs would be easy to follow for travellers, or overseas visitors, but the routes within the city limits followed highways and freeways, not giving cross-country local-knowledge options again. Fair enough!! It would be hard to prioritise a route to choose without some local knowledge...and highways /freeways were developed to take volumes of traffic out of the suburbs.
Cameras everywhere!! so visual cues to turn-offs should save a driver from getting lost.

I was hoping to create a Cloze exercise for a class tomorrow but couldn't find a template for such. It's probably out there somewhere but I haven't got time to search further at the moment.
I did find a Resume format which I revised as a Proforma for data collection for incoming students with Special Needs. Could be quite useful, but I still prefer to interview incoming parents and students with a paper format, rather than typing info on-line. When one is meeting a student for the first time at age 16 or 17, and this student has been through numerous assessments over the course of their life to date, I find the need to 'engage' in a non-threatening environment outweighs the efficiency of record-keeping from behind a computer in an interview situaion. I can still enter data, post-interview!

I think I can still produce Cloze documents as quickly as necessary, using Word, but would like to investigate Google tools further.

Building synapses

Thoughts:"Blogging and the wisdom of crowds"
We've come a long way since my high school days in the 60s when we dreaded 1984 and the intrusions of Big Brother.
Just goes to prove the value of education; the more educated the populace is, the more likely it is that the combined (hyperlinked) knlowledge will overwhelm the subterfuge of the negatives/hackers/pessimists!