On Friday night at 9pm I was sitting on my couch, kids in bed, husband away, feeling very sleepy when I felt what was like a huge gust of wind hitting the house and all the windows started rattling. I wondered what it was and then realised hey wait a minute I think that’s an earthquake! I had actually been through a couple when I was a kid as we lived a few hundred metres away from a fault line. However it was still  an incredibly unnearving feeling, especially as I was home alone!

So after all the ‘oh my goodness is it the end of the world?, What do I do with the kids?’ type thoughts went through my brain, I decided to jump on Twitter and Facebook to see if I was the only one! Well I definitely wasn’t the only one as many others certainly had the same idea and there were people tweeting and changing their statuses on Facebook at an amazing rate!

It seemed that the quake had affected people from Gippsland right out to the southern and eastern suburbs of Melbourne and the Mornington Peninsula. It was only about 15 mins after the quake that a link was tweeted to the US earthquake site which had the size (4.7) and epicentre (10km’s below Korumburra) reported.

So I thought just for interests sake was was happening in the mainstream media as Twitter and Facebook seemed to have a pretty good handle on it. The Age website at about 9:20 had not a mention of it, The Herald Sun had a very brief article saying that there was an earthquake and interestingly had a link to tweetscan, channel 7 newsbreak at 9:30 had no mention of it, Sky News and the ABC had some mention of it reasonably quickly but still not as quick or as thorough as Twitter. So this is the power of social media, people on the spot reporting the news as it happens. What an incredibly powerful force. It was said that the reports were using Twitter to research their articles. Made me wonder if we need reporters at all?

Interesting implications for education, we have traditionally been focussed on finding and analysing news from the mainstream news sources mainly the print versions, rarely is news footage used unless it is on a video that is produced months later. Imagaine if a major issue was being studied and went spent the period on twitter with our kids actually making the news by addiing their insightful comments on what is going on, including links to relevant websites and being part of the gloabl conversation? That would be powerful teaching and learning! Imagine if the quake had been during school hours and the students immeduatly got on twitter to report their observations and feelings? Then researched and presented on earthquakes, found out the nearest fault lines, contacted some geoscientists, saw a richter scale in action, looked at myths of earthquakes, biblical references presented it all on a wiki that others could contribute to. Powerful Just in time learning! With Twitter being banned in most schools at this time I suppose this is just a pipe dream!!

Photostory is a fabulous program that is sooo simple to use. It allows you to put together still images (photos, scanned drawings, scanned images) music, voice and text to make a simple “movie” or story. It is on our college network and is available as a free download from the Microsoft website here.

A user guide is microsoft20photo20story20320introduction

Some ideas of how this could be used in the classroom:

• Visual representation of an historical figure
• Alternative way to present an assignment
• A verbal book review with appropriate images
• Creating an advertisement
• A group story
• A different way for kids to share what happened on the holidays/excursion/incursion
• Presentation of a concept, e.g. what Australia means to me, instructions on how to play netball

The output can be viewed on screen, emailed, burnt to DVD, and even sent to a mobile phone!