Uploading a GIF!

So, Blogger does not support images of GIF format, so you may be finding it hard to upload your pictures from todays lesson! I have found away around this! So here we go.

Go to Tinypic.com.
Click upload and locate your picture! Make sure it's the GIF image and not the animation (red symbol).
When you've found it click open,and then upload. Make sure the "image" box is selected.
A Captcha box should open, so all you have to do is enter in the characters you see.
You should then get several codes ready to be copied. Make sure you select the first one (suitable for websites), copy it.
Then all you have to do is simply post it into a New Post. And yes! You can write under the code!

Have fun!

Today we set up a Delicious account so we could save useful links and share them with our classmates! I think this will be useful as I'm constantly losing useful websites.
Later we used the 2Simple programme to create animations of catchphrases and as you can see I chose too infinity and beyond.

Sharks Singing - I died.

This is where evolution will take us next.

Reading Week

So, last week was reading week and it went pretty fast. But, staying on the ICT topic, my group made a start on our wiki page and started researching our topic "Education Today". My sub-topic was Technology within education, so I started with the basics, (computer, whiteboard, etc.), and eventually progressed on to the more complex ideas, (Forums, podcasts, etc.). To make our wiki more aesthetically pleasing we embedded a youtube video into some of the pages, and added images to illustrate the points we had made. Now hopefully people will take the time to stop and read what the ideas we've come up with.
Anyway, I also started thinking about the project we have for ICT. I'm kind of going along the lines of artists, such as Roy Lichtenstein or Andy Warhol. Although I may take advantage of that photography course I did in college and base my project on a photographer.
Anyway, I'll leave you with this cat picture to keep you occupied.

Change your theme & add variety to your blog.

Some of you may have noticed that I've changed my theme and moved away from the basic layouts that Blogger offers, so I thought I'd share my methods with you all, so you too can give your blog a vamp.

So to start off you have to find a theme you want. For mine I used the site .

Flick through the pages, find the theme you want for your blog and click on it. I have selected the theme "Trendy Tube" as my example.

A new page will be opened, you need to select "Download", a pop-up box will appear and you should save the compressed file.

Now you need to locate the file on your desktop and open it, and the second file inside. Within the second file locate the XML File, and copy and paste it from the compressed file, into "My Documents".

Now go to your Blogger dashboard and select "Design" and then Edit HTML as shown below. This will open up the page where you are able to upload your theme. Select "Choose File",locate the XML File in my documents and click "Open" followed by "Upload".

When the file has uploaded you should get a confirmation box (as shown below) asking if you'd like to remove widgets, select "Keep Widgets" and voilà your new theme should be in place.

I know this might seem tedious and lengthy but once you've got the hang of it you'll be changing your theme weekly, and if you do find yourself stressing out just watch this image of a cheerleader falling over. It's guaranteed to cheer you up.

Reflection

So, in my last lesson we mind-mapped as a class and in small groups, what we thought reflective learning is. After we had collaborated our ideas, we went to the site bubbl.us, (which I highly recommend by the way, if you're doing any presentations), and created a kind of interactive mind map online, we then posted our mind maps to our blogs, as you can see in my previous post.

After we'd completed our mind maps and uploaded them to our blogs, we went on to search the internet for blogs related to education that were interesting AND useful. We then added a widget called "My blog list" to share the blogs we'd found with our "followers" or general blog viewers, so they too could view the incredible talents we'd unmasked. I'm not sure exactly how useful my blogs will be to the course, but I'm aiming to keep updating my list with more blogs as I go along.

On a side note, it's halloween on monday, so here are some costume ideas that I fell in love with this week.

What is Reflective Learning?

The Process of Webpage Evaluating.

So, when it comes to writing an essay or doing an assignment, we'll all have to carry out research in libraries, and online. But how can we be sure the sites we're using are genuine?
This is a topic we looked into during an ICT class in University. Over the course of an hour small groups of us had to choose a website, and then check the validity of that website and present it to the class. We chose to use Sign Language websites to carry out our investigation, and specifically we used two websites:

• British-Sign.co.uk

and

  

• Signpostbsl.com

One technique we used to check the validity of the sites was site colon. By applying a site colon search in google we could ensure that the links within the website only lead back to itself or to related sites with an equivalent reputation, and related subject.
Both of these websites proved to be authentic as far as this was concerned.
However, we began to question the authenticity of the SignPost BSL website because of the "apparent" relation to ITV. Under further investigation, through the official ITV website we were able to establish a distant relation between the two websites which satisfied any concerns we had towards the authenticity.
We also used Easy Who Is to determine who owned the website which also helped to validate the authenticity.
The final step to checking the validity of the website was to try and determine when the site was last updated. Britsh-Sign was updated in late 2010, where as SignPost BSL was updated in 2006.

Hello, I'm Lydia. I'm 19 years old and studying Education Studies in Swansea, with the aim of becoming a primary school teacher. I'm staying in a private house with 5 other students of Swansea and Swansea Met Universities and I love them all.

In my spare time I cycle a lot, and before moving down to Swansea I was a figure skater. Moving here unfortunately meant I had to stop skating, but it's nice to have a break from getting up at 5 in the morning every Sunday to get to the ice rink.

Apart from cycling and ice skating I also spend a lot of time listening to music as well as playing it on the piano. My favourite genre is Indie and for my last birthday my friend Tom tracked down the latest album of an Indie band called "Lydia". 

Another of my hobbies is travelling and I have recently spent the last few Summers in America, specifically, Phillidelphia, New York, Washington and Florida. I spend a lot of this time taking advantage of my one-off photography course, and spend all my time snapping pictures of EVERYTHING.