Uploading photos

Lizzie wrote in the previous post, about her difficulties with uploading photos to this blog and sometimes, to Flickr. I have had similar problems in the past and can share one or two thoughts which might be of help.

Firstly, sometimes the photo doesn't upload because of a problem with Blogger - or Flickr - in some remote place, not on your computer. We tend to think that any problem we encounter must be down to something we are doing ourselves and that's not always the case. Web-based services such as these often have problems of their own. You can check if this is the case on their central website - I think there's a link from the Blogger sign in page - where sometimes, they report service interruptions.

Another possible reason is that the file you are trying to upload is too large. If the photos are only to be viewed on screen, then there's no need for them to be anything larger than about 100kb. Next question, how to reduce the file size...(cue Jane Carter-Dunn!)

Another thing could simply be that your own internet connection is busy. Might be worth trying again at a different time of day. Early evening and late afternoon is often the worst time, when all the schoolchildren are home and checking their email and playing games online. Try sometime mid afternoon, perhaps, or early morning.

Of course, you may still have problems....in which case I'm probably no help at all! But of course, I'll always encourage you to keep trying and exercise max patience (something which I find extremely difficult!!)

Go, see, now!

Just reading Sara's post below about her work prompts me to remind readers to visit the AdEd Interest Flickr Group which has got more than 600 photographs of the most amazing work done by learners over the last couple of years.

The work seems to get more inspiring by the day and is such a valuable record of what is happening in Gloucestershire.

If you visit, do leave a comment, won't you?

Interactive Whiteboards

069 of 366days
Originally uploaded by LJMoo

Have just linked the AdEd Interest Blog to my Flickr account which means I can now search for photos and put them on the blog easily just by clicking "Share this" and the Blog it. This image is to tell you that we had training on the Interactive Whiteboard yesterday evening. I've asked someone else to post about the training so I'm just posting an image for now. How clever is that - I've noticed that it automatically attributes the photo and includes a link so you can visit the original on Flickr.

Using Images from the Internet

I have just worked through this tutorial about finding free to use images on the internet. I think this is a really useful resource for tutors teaching IT and demonstrating how to download images as we have a duty to make our learners aware of copyright issues, anyone looking for images to use in documents/handouts/advertising, tutors using Flickr - do learners understand how their images could be used - are they making informed choices?

Personally I found this tutorial really useful and I think parts of it (particularly the images on Google activity) could be used with learners to make the point.

(The image above is by Thomas Hawk and was downloaded from Flickr under the Creative Commons BY licence)

Let me know what you think.