The Techno Cheetah

Many students love using Pixie 2 in technology class.  Pixie 2 makes it easy for students to combine drawing, photos, audio recordings and text into video files as well as printed files with layouts such as comic books, trading cards, and greeting cards.

With support from Tech4Learning, Bellows Spring is able to offer Pixie 2 for students to use at home.  Parents can purchase a home license for $35 (plus tax).  This is a huge discount over the regular price of $54.95.  Plus, the Bellows Spring technology department gets $10 for every license purchased!  The funds our school receives will be used to enhance the educational software and hardware for teachers and students.

Look for the Pixie 2 ordering form in September 18’s Friday folder or download the form by clicking here.  Orders are due no later than October 15.

On Tuesday January 20, 2009 at 12:01 pm, one minute after Barack Obama officially became our 44th president, the White House website changed to reflect the new administration.

Some of the new features on the redesigned website include a blog, a weekly video address, and slideshows (here’s a cute one of presidential pets).

The picture below shows the transition the website went through.  You can view the evolution of the White House website, or any website, using the Way Back Machine, on archive.org.

Image Source: Before & After: WhiteHouse.gov

Students in all grade levels got to a chance to use Pixie on the new laptop computers this year. Pixie is a program where students can paint and manipulate pictures to design their own artwork. Over the summer, the latest version of Pixie, Pixie 2, will be installed on the tech teacher laptop computers.

Pixie 2 has some exciting new features including:

• the ability to export multiple Pixie slides as a movie or podcast
• take a picture using the built in iSight camera and drag it to your artwork
• more clip art pictures
• the ability to record narration on each slide

Below is an example of a video podcast I made with my 2 1/2 year old daughter, Morgan, using Pixie 2. This example demonstrates the ability to record narration on each slide and combine the slides together in a video. Morgan choose the pictures and recorded the audio (dad helped, of course).
Download

The One Laptop Per Child Foundation, whose mission is to distribute laptops for education into lesser-developed countries at a low cost, showed off it’s next generation laptop at a conference yesterday. The laptop, called the XO-2, can be used by two students at once and doubles as an eBook.

I hope it works as well as it looks as it really looks like a cool piece of technology. You can read more about the XO-2 here.

^{Image Source:
http://blog.laptopmag.com/
first-look-olpc-xo-generation-20}