I am working on creating some sight word videos from the word lists at FreeReading. (If you haven’t seen this site, it is a phenomenal resources for early literacy.) Before I crank out more of these, I’m looking for input from early literacy teachers.
* How is the music? Too distracting or ok?
* How is the timing?
* Does the “pointing finger” idea work?
Any input anyone has is appreciated. I’m hoping to produce a whole library of these to match the FreeReading lists over the next few months. The intent is that they could be used on the web or on mobile devices, such as Palms, PSPs, etc.
Also, my mashup this month features audio from black history, as well as some great music. Give it a listen, and make sure to check out the free offer for a lucky listener on the site.
Also, on the mashup page is a list of multimedia resources you can use in your own classroom. Many of these are open, sharable resources that you can use with students to create your own mashups or other multimedia projects.
Creative Commons today announced the formation of a new division, ccLearn. This group is “dedicated to realizing the full potential of the Internet to support open learning and open educational resources” and has a stated mission “to minimize barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials — legal barriers, technical barriers, and social barriers.”
That’s very exciting. If you’ve heard me speaklately, you know that I am a very big advocate of the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement. I believe that this movement coupled with massive collaboration has the opportunity to reshape education by providing valuable resources needed to differentiate instruction.
There are versions for the desktop, various handhelds, iPods, and even a Mobipocket ebook version. (One of the not-fun things about creating video is all the format issues. I think we’ve put about everything up here, but let me know if anything’s been missed.)
If you haven’t ventured into the world of contributing to wikis, Wikijunior is a great place to start. (Try the Human Body book or Ancient Civilizations.) The more people who contribute to these free “copyleft” resources, the better they will be. If you’re not sure how to start, try something small like fixing an error or just adding a couple sentences. It’s a lot of fun!
At NECC last week, I presented a session called “Using Mobile Technology to Differentiate and Enrich Instruction.” The ISTE folks had wanted to podcast the session, but I wasn’t crazy about the legal agreement they were using. (It wasn’t Creative Commons and gave pretty extensive rights to Apple.)
So….I created my own digital version of this session for folks to download:
If anyone is interested in a higher resolution version to share with folks who weren’t able to attend, email me, and I’ll try to send you a CD.
For those who are interested, I audio recorded this with a very inexpensive Olympus WS-100 pocket recorder. I edited the audio in Audacity and brought it all into Windows Movie Maker for editing. The visuals included exported jpgs from my presentation slides and screen-capture videos made with Camstudio. I used HandShare to create the Palm movies (which is the same software I used to present). Creating the whole thing took about 4 hours.
It was a lot of fun making this and was a good way to reflect on my own style of presenting (and hopefully refine it for upcoming events).
Every day, I am becoming a bigger advocate for copyleft licensing options for content. Copyleft licenses lets the creator maintain ownership (and copyright), while allowing others to share the content under terms specified by the creator.
If you are looking for images to use in presentations, copyleft content offers you a legal option for free content. If you are creating content, consider sharing it with others under a copyleft agreement.
The next episode of Karen’s Mashups is up, and this is my favorite show so far! In it, I highlight a variety of sources for “copyleft” audio content that can be used free of charge in your own podcasts, movies, PowerPoint presentations, etc. The post includes links for all the sources used plus more.
The next show will feature similar copyleft visual content (photos, clip art, videos). I’m also presenting a session called “Using Mobile Technology to Differentiate and Enrich Instruction” at NECC. This presentation will include how to create and use this kind of content. If you’re at NECC, stop by and say hi!
However [rant coming]…the wide variety of video formats, codecs, etc. is driving me crazy! The more time I spend with video, the more time I spend with conversion tools and help pages about what device and software use what format and what codec, and the more time I spend mumbling about why this *%#%&*(# video won’t play right.
One tool I’ve found really useful for this though is Zamzar. This is a free online converter that works not only with video, but also with images, docs, and audio. One really useful thing this tool does very well is to convert videos from YouTube and TeacherTube, so that you can view them on a variety of devices such as iPods and handhelds. You just upload the video (or a link) and select the format you want. Then they email you a link for the converted file. (They do seem to have some DNS problems with their email system, but I’ve found it works well with gmail accounts, so if you have problems getting an email, try that.)
As with all web-based content, make sure to watch for copyright and attribution issues. And with all Web 2.0 services, you should read the Terms of Service.
And for those who are curious, the name is a take-off on Gregor Samsa, intended to connote transformation.
If you haven’t started using Google’s Web 2.0 tools, check them out! They let you create word processed documents, spreadsheets, and more in a browser — no Office suite required. A really cool side benefit of these tools is that you can access your documents from any browser and even collaborate on documents with others. Oh yeah, and they’re free.
I was initially pretty skeptical [my normal frame of mind] about the potential of Web 2.0 type tools to replace Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Now that I’ve used them though, the idea is growing on me.
Another critital piece that is apparently in the works is the ability to sync documents to the desktop for offline use. This is a pretty important piece for schools (many of which still don’t have 100% reliable connectivity) and for those of us who spend a lot of time on planes.
Every time I’m in a school and hear a kid telling some variation on the “the-computer-ate-my-homework” story (”My document was here and I have no idea what happened to it,” “I forgot my USB drive,” etc.), I think about the potential of these tools. Pretty exciting stuff. And did I mention that they’re free?
[Image credit: Image courtesy of Google Inc. GOOGLE is a trademark of Google Inc. ]
TCPMP is a great free mobile audio and video player for Palms that we’ve recommended in the past. You may have noticed that the old web page for the TCPMP hasn’t been up lately.
Apparently, like other projects, TCPMP’s CoreCodec group has branched off to create a commercial product. We haven’t evaluated the commerical product yet, but we suspect it has some useful features. (Money coming in tends to help product development.)
If you’d still like to use and download the old free Open Source version though, we now have a link to it on our site that you can use.
If anyone knows more “scoop” on what’s going on with the Open Source version TCPMP (is anyone still maintaining it?), please post your comments.
