On Wednesday we spent much of our time trouble shooting and embedding our videos into our websites (a very useful skill to know). Now we'll watch the academy award nominees for best infomercial, and even watch a cool commercial by a student in another section that used camtasia to spruce up her Jing video.
Wait, there's more...
Before we begin our Think Like a Teacher activity next week, we need to learn about a few more tools we didn’t have time to discuss.
Blogs are a tool I use to communicate with you every class. I use Blogger because it's quick and easy and looks nice. I've also used WordPress for other blogs, and other EDIT 2000 teachers use it because they can access previous posts with the calendar. My brother uses a paid tool for his professional blog about parenting. There are blogs for everything – just do a Google search for your favorite topic and add the word “blogs” (ex: news blogs). You’ll find a long list of interesting sites.
Wikis are tools that allow you to collaborate on a website with other people. Your Google Site that you are using in our class could be considered a wiki if you chose to add collaborators. Here’s a video for more information about wikis. Everyone's familiar with Wikipedia, but have you ever contributed to an article?
Podcasts allow you to record or listen to audio from a class, an event, a renowned speaker, etc. If it includes video it is often called a “vodcast.” Searching iTunes will show you a huge list of what is available. You can view this video for more information.
An important part of blogs and podcasting is RSS (really simple syndication). This really simple tool allows you to create an RSS reader that can search the internet for you, and bring in updates from your favorite blogs, podcasts and news sites while you are off sleeping, going to a football game, eating out with friends....Don't understand what I mean? Here, we'll watch a video. A good rss reader is google reader, and the good news is you already have an account.
We didn't have a chance to visit the Go Web 2.0 site. This is a great place to find even more tools for all sorts of activities. You may want to bookmark this in your Delicious account in case you need some ideas for your project. Consider the “kids,” “collaboration,” and/or “communication” tabs for your first Think Like a Teacher activity.
For Monday
1. Read chapter 3 and complete the reading guide.
2. Play around with some of the new tools you learned about today to prepare for the TLAT project next week.
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