281 - Larry

Day 281. Today's create is a sketch of Google cofounder, Larry Page. It was made using Adobe Sketch and a Jot Pro Stylus, and it did use a photo as the guide. It was then cropped and changed to Black and White using the Noir filter in the standard iPad photo editor.

266 - Sweet As Bro

Day 266. Today was the second day of the Sydney Google Teacher Academy, and there was a sizeable contingent of New Zealanders there. I offered to take a group photo for them, and deliberately took this sequence of shots, suspecting that Google+ would automatically turn them into the animated gif file, known in G+ as an AutoAwesome. My suspicions were correct and it did, and here is the result. So is this my creation? Or just a random thing made by a Google algorithm?

253 - Custom Form, Custom Quiz

Day 253. I've been teaching a lot of Scratch to my Year 5 classes lately and the teachers of those classes were keen for me to come up with some kind of assessment item for it. I haven't normally worried about assessing Scratch work because it always feels like something the kids want to do simply for the pure joy of learning rather than to earn a mark, but I came up with something anyway just to keep everyone happy. I would have liked it to be a purely practical task made in Scratch, but the marking and grading of that would have been rather impractical and far too time consuming. So instead I decided to create a 15 question quiz using the updated Google Forms and the Flubaroo Add-On script to make it self marking.

If you know any Scratch, feel free to have a go of the quiz...  this is a copy so you won't do any damage to my real one. I'll run the Flubaroo script on it later and send you a copy of your results.

The new changes to Google Forms are just fantastic and you can now make all sorts of customisations and changes to the look of the forms.

237 - Searching for Creativity

Day 237. A student of mine visited the Museum of Contemporary Art recently and showed me a series of photos she took there with her new fisheye lens.I particularly liked this one, so I thought I'd make something similar, because, well, everything is a remix.  So I printed this page of Google Search results for the word "creativity" then got a ruler, pencil, scissors and glue, cut up the paper and glued it back together like this. Then I photographed it with my Nexus 5, manipulated it a bit in Photoshop, and here is the result.

228 - Googling in Melbourne

Day 228. One of the many hats I wear is being a member of the global EdTechTeam, the folk responsible for running the Google in Education Summits. Along with my colleagues Jim, Wes and Kimberley, we look after Summits in the Asia Pacific region. The next one we have planned is for Melbourne in September, and part of my role is to create the promotions for the event. So I created this flyer using a web 2.0 tool called Piktograph. It's easy to use and does a pretty nice job of helping make decent looking flyers.

As an aside, getting the word out about these events is always a challenge. No matter how much we try to get the information out, we inevitably run into people who have never heard about the event. Or worse, they hear about it after it's over and then say "if only I'd known!"  So if you're near Melbourne, and you know a teacher who might be interested in a fun filled two days of Google goodness, can you pass this post on?  Thanks.

186 - Summit Stuff

Day 186. I present workshops at quite a few Google Summit events and I always try to make sure I provide my workshop participants with a useful collection of resources and links afterwards so they can refer back to them later. I started a Google Site quite a while ago for this purpose, and it's continued to grow over time into quite a good resource for Google related stuff.

With a couple of Summits coming up soon I'm doing some brand new workshops so I have been adding more content to the site and generally sprucing it up a little. There is still more to add, but I'm claiming the update so far as today's daily create.

You can check out the actual site at www.summitstuff.com

185 - Screencast of a Screencast

Day 185. I'm running a session at next week's Queensland Summit about screencasting and I wanted to make a screencast demonstrating how to make a screencast using the new Snagit for Google Chrome. But to do that I needed to make a screencast of myself making a screencast, if you see what I mean. So I wondered if you could use Camtasia for Mac to capture the whole screen while you were in turn using Snagit for Chrome to capture it's own screencast activity.

Turns out the answer is yes.



Next experiment will be to see if I can make a screeencast of a screencast of a screencast...

178 - Accept or Reject

Day 178. Google just announced a whole bunch of new features for Drive this week, and today's create is a short video explaining the new commenting features in Docs. Although I say in the video that this brings parity to the two tools, I actually think this is even better than the Track Changes in Word.

171 - A Gaggle of Googlers

Day 171. This photo was taken a couple of weeks ago, but I was playing around with an app called Paper Camera tonight and used it to apply some filter fun to the image. I then brought it back to the camera roil on the iPad and made a few more adjustments to it there. Looks quite cartoonish.

101 - Summit View

Day 101. Next week my school plays host to the Sydney Google in Education Summit, and we have a whole bunch of teacher coming to visit. Although it's holiday time, I thought it would be nice to get the students to welcome out visitors and tell them a little about how we use Google Apps at PLC, so I put together this very short welcome video.

If you're coming to the Summit, spoiler alert, you will see this again there. If not, here'a a word from the kids...

095 - Fifty Searches

Day 95. Google voice search is pretty amazing. Not only can it actually understand the sound of your voice to convert it to words - often no mean feat in itself - it can also then return answers to your questions in mere milliseconds. For today's create I asked Google Search 50 questions using nothing but voice. The speed and accuracy of the answers are pretty stunning, and a great example of why we need to be asking our students to be doing much more than simply recalling facts.

012 - Google Q&A

Day 12. Today is a video I helped make that was produced by a team of Google Certified Teachers (and one actual Googler) answering some user-submitted questions about Google, its education products, and a glimpse into the future and what's coming down the pipeline.

Geeky? Yes, of course!



This was recorded at 1:30am (ah, timezones!)

008 - Easy Image Mapping

Day 8. Today I'm posting a photo with an image map. Image maps are when you can mouse over different parts of the image and they act as "hotspots" that link to different URLs. If you click on individual people in this photo you'll find it will take you to their Google+ profile page.

Image maps are not a new thing. I learnt how to make them way back when I started making webpages in the 90s using Adobe PageMill. But this one was made using Google Drawings and then adding transparent linked shapes to it. Tomorrow's daily create will be a video showing you how to make this.



I hadn't really considered how these could be made so easily using Google Drawings. Thanks to my fellow GCTs Adrian Francis, Jay Atwood and Juan DeLuca for raising the idea on the GCT forums and prompting me to discover how to make these.

What classroom uses can you think of for image maps?