More Than YouTube

As you already know, the Internet is a wealth of information, but sometimes it is too much information to wade through. I am going to bring your attention to a few specific sites today that will be useful to you when you are gathering instructional resources. Multimedia resources have become a significant part of life in the 21st Century. With the introduction of YouTube and online video streaming students have access to more video clips than ever. Educators can take advantage of many of these free resources and open a window to the outside world for their students.

Video clips are great instructional tools when used appropriately. Make sure that when you show a video you set the purpose for your students and ask them to draw conclusions from the video. Many instructional strategies can be used while students watch a video. (Think-pair-share, similarities and differences, graphic organizers, summarizing and note taking etc.)

If you like the idea of YouTube but you’re looking for something with an educational focus here are some free video sharing/hosting websites:

www.techertube.com
www.schooltube.com
www.video.google.com
www.snagfilms.com/films/
www.kidsknowit.com/interactive-educational-movies/index.php
www.teachers.tv/

Some other sites that may have resources for your content area are TV network sites such as Discovery Channel and The History Channel. Check these out and see what you can find this week. You may want to show one to grab the student’s attention at the beginning of the lesson. Or maybe you want to add it t your blog or webpage so students can view it on their own time and submit a response as homework. As always if you need help planning or implementing one of these ideas, contact your ITRT!

Remember everything.

It's no secret I love Delicious bookmarking. Since it's web-based I can get to it from any Internet connection. Delicious is sharable, sociable (meaning also a social network of sorts), and search-able by hash tags. With that being said, LET me tell you about Evernote.

Evernote has the strength of the Delicious bookmark but Evernote enables the same connectedness with EVERYTHING you could possibly want to save, not just bookmarks.

Things you can gather/add/tag/save into Evernote:

• bookmarks (that's where Delicious stops)
• clips of web pages
• notes (Google docs are free, MS Office docs offered in Premium service)
• PDFs
• scanned documents
• wav files
• images
• emails
• text messages
• Tweets
• photos taken of white-board notes, which Evernote can then scan for text in the picture :0

All this information can be synchronized/synched between your laptop, desktop, iPad, iPod, Droid, or the Web.

You categorize the items/things listed above as individual "notes" into notebooks, and you can assign one or more tags to each note. Then you can search the text in the title, the note itself or as one of the tags.

You may have heard the term, 'cloud computing' before. The term is usually associated with hosting information, data, or files on-line with a third-party vendor. Evernote can be considered a 'cloud' application because it's all kept electronically online.

Evernote notebooks are sharable by email invitations and the sharing of a web link as well as embedding a widget into any web page. There is a limit of 100 notebooks.

Did I mention this application and/or service is FREE???

~Liz Goodwin

Evernote links to checkout:

My 'Notebook' on this blog post!

http://www.evernote.com/pub/goodwies/evernote

Getting Started

http://www.evernote.com/about/support/getting_started.php

Evernote Blog

http://blog.evernote.com/

The Trunk

http://www.evernote.com/about/trunk/

Teaching PowerPoint of Evernote

http://www.slideshare.net/theunquietlibrary/introduction-to-evernote-fall-2010

Some New Year's Learning Fun...

I'm going to start the year off on a light note...

As a student, I was never one to voluntarily speak up in class and oral reports were a huge source of stress for me. In college I was required to take a public speaking course and all my speeches were recorded and to this day, I cannot watch them. Even now, speaking to a group of students does not bother me but a group of adults gives me butterflies in my stomach for days beforehand.

Knowing there are students like me in my classes, I find myself drawn towards finding activities for students to replace the stand-in-front-of-the-class-and-talk speech on topics they have researched. Of course PowerPoint and presentation software are great tools and now free movie making software is available but sometimes I just want something that is a bit more on the lighthearted side... where you might laugh the first time you see it but then you want to listen to it again.

Here is one of those sites (middle school teachers if this looks familiar it is because I shared it last year via email): http://blabberize.com/.

I found the opening video funny though I do want to warn you that it includes a conversation about peeing in one’s pants in case you are in a room full of students taking a test or something at the moment. While this site certainly was not designed exclusively for the academic world, there are definitely ways to use its features in a classroom setting.

For example, here is a clip I made with a picture and information about Susan B. Anthony (the opposite extreme from the intro. video; I went serious) ~ it took only a few minutes to create:

If you don't have a place to embed your video, that is okay. Blabberize will give you a link to share with everyone. You can see the above one here.

What a fun way to make a famous person in history share information about his or her self, or to have a character in a book talk about the conflict in his or her life, or to give a small group of students at a station directions on an assignment while you are working with other students.

Here is a link to a blog entry about Blabberize that describes several ways to use it in an academic setting: http://blog.learningtoday.com/blog/bid/27337/Blab-On-Interactive-Classroom-Tool?source=Blog_Email_[Blab+On!+–+Interacti]

Have fun! Happy New Year!