Bits and Bytes

Archive for March, 2009

Artweaver is a simple Freeware program for creative painting. You can create sketches from photos and experiment with a wide range of brushes. The brush simulation is as realistic as possible.

Advantages of Artweaver

• Support of many different digital brushes e.g. chalk, charcoal, pencils…
• Standard image editing tools like gradient, crop, fill and selection tools.
• Transparency and Layers support.
• Effect filters like sharpen, blur, emboss and mosaic.
• Support for the most common file formats like AWD (Artweaver), BMP, GIF, JPEG, PCX, TGA, TIFF, PNG, and PSD.
• Pen Tablet support
• Support for many languages
• Artweaver is Freeware.
• And much more…

International Futures (IFs) is a large-scale, long-term, integrated global modeling system. It represents demographic, economic, energy, agricultural, socio-political, and environmental subsystems for 183 countries interacting in the global system. The central purpose of IFs is to facilitate exploration of global futures through alternative scenarios. The model is integrated with a large database containing values for its many foundational data series since 1960. Through this web site IFs is freely available to users both on-line and in downloadable form.

http://www.ifs.du.edu/

SAM Animation is software designed to allow students to create stop-action animations to share their ideas and understanding. The application provides a unique experience for students to show their understanding of projects in mathematics, science, english languge arts, social studies and more. Best of all it’s free!

Platforms – Windows and Mac

http://www.samanimation.com/

Shape Collage creates a collage by taking a collection of photos and arranging them so that they form a shape (defined by an image or the text you enter). When arranging the photos, they will be spread apart as far as possible so that one can see each photo.

Download (329 kb)

I used WSD as the template for the collage, click on the thumbnail to see the complete image.

Differentiated instruction is a nice idea, but what happens when it comes to assessing and grading students in K-12 classrooms? What’s both fair and leads to real student learning? Rick Wormeli offers the latest research and common sense thinking that teachers and administrators seek when it comes to assessment and grading in differentiated classes. Rick will deal with thorny assessment questions such as:

• Should we grade homework?
• How can we set up grade books and report cards to reflect differentiated
  practices?
• What are the principles of successful assessment?
• How might we create useful and fair test questions and grade them
  efficiently?
• Should we allow students to re-do assessments for full credit?

This is the second part of the morning presentation by Rick Wormeli in Winnipeg, MB, Canada (February 19, 2009) . Part 2 is approximately 75 minutes long.

Download – (podcast is approximately 34 mb)

This segment is approximately 133 minutes in length.

Download (podcast is approximately 60 mb)

This tiny application installs a number of very useful plugins for Paint.Net. By no means should this be considered as “the installer” for Paint.Net plugins, it is a merely a collection of plugins that I have personally found useful. There are many other plugins available on the Paint.Net plugin forum located at:

http://paintdotnet.forumer.com/viewforum.php?f=16

Download:

• Paint.Net Plugins Installer (1 MB)

The default installation path is to C:Program Files\Paint.Net\effects, if you are installing this on a Vista computer you will need to run the installer as Administrator.

Plagiarism in Cyberspace:Learning the Rules of Recycling Content with a View Towards Nurturing Academic Trust in an Electronic World

LSS Pathfinder: Challenging Plagiarism This is a listing of LSS resources including a DVD  which is available for loan Ethics: Cheating and Plagiarism which talks with students and teachers about cheating and plagiarism and gives some suggestions for working with students.

Writing History: A Video Discussion about Plagiarism between several history professors

Plagiarism in Medical Studies reported in the Winnipeg Free Press March 6, 2009

Plagiarism Scandal news story about  an author, a student from Harvard, whose book contained over 40 similarities to another author’s work.

An Educator’s Guide to Post-Modern Authorship and Literacy in the Classroom
“Blog Post Summary: Teachers hold a unique and powerful position in the debate about what constitutes authorship and plagiarism. These debates are important because they shape the future of scholarship and art. When a teacher sets an intellectual boundary for what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable work, they are molding the intellectual processes of students. Educators must help students understand the rights and responsibilities of authorship while allowing for innovative acts of assemblage.”

2020 Vision

(All data for this video came from International Futures)

http://blogs.wsd1.org/etr/files/2020_vision_large.flv

Download – 2020 Vision Large (10 Mb)