Monday, January 18, 2010

red-tailed hawk


red-tailed hawk
Originally uploaded by profiles of nature
Just an example from Flickr. There are so many beautiful pictures on Flickr, available for teaching or just for admiring. Personally this one, with flight, action, colours, and good technique felt perfect for me on this grey winter day.

(Written March 2)  Of course the photographs are sometimes removed from Flickr and then you get a "photo is currently unavailable" notice.

 Not to worry - just go to Flickr and search for "red-tailed hawk" and you'll find hundreds of other images!

Friday, January 15, 2010

The web is now much more Readable!


   You can make this text,      look like this!


Example text from Aftonbladet Jan 15, 2010

Do you spend a lot of time reading text from the web?  I mean slightly longer texts such as newspaper articles, scientific texts, books, long instructions, or course material. If so you may want to check out the Readability tool, which removes all clutter and leaves only text!
It all works via the web, and there is nothing to download.  You follow the link to Readability, make a few basic choices about layout and colouring using the example text, drag a bookmarklet onto your bookmarks bar, and hey Presto you are ready to go.

By the way, this tool can be very useful not only for reading but also for printing.


Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Using Internet Resources for Teaching - Perspective (art)


After a request from my wife I started looking for teaching resources to help with drawing in perspective.  I thought this type of subject which is not simple but does follow rules, would be ideal for internet and I was right.  There is a lot of material.

Sources for slide presentations includes slideshare and slideboom, and of course there was some very useful material on YouTube.  Strangely enough Wikipedia was not so useful on this occasion, which is unusual.  The above picture is one of my own. The following is the shortest useful presentation I found on YouTube.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Write or Die!

Found a fun tool for anyone wanting to write and needing something to get them going. I wrote something to check how it worked and this is what came out...
OK, I'm writing and if I stop writing the program does evil things to my text. I paused just now and it all went red round the edges. So I carried on writing. I wrote "edges" a few times and then waited. It got redder and redder, and them my words started to DISAPPEAR!!!!! This is the kamikaze setting. This is fun! Och man kan skriver på svenska också.

Give it a try!  You can get a badge like this...

 

or like this...



depending upon your aim in your writing.

(Thanks to Terry Freedman and Dr Wicked)