Karen’s Mashups

We’re back! I can’t believe the summer has gone by, and it’s been months since I’ve done a mashup — but it’s with good reason.

This summer I focused all my spare time on a new project: the Kids Open Dictionary. This dictionary is intended for kids, though it can certainly be used for adult learners as well. As words are completed, they will be reviewed for quality and appropriateness and ultimately “frozen” for export into a variety of formats, including text, PDF, ebooks, wikis, web, etc., for use on a variety of devices.

This is a public domain resource that anyone can use for any purpose. We hope that it will be used by teachers, students, publishers, hardware manufacturers, VARs, and others. The site includes a build-your-own-glossary tool that allows users to construct glossaries for their own books, units, courses, or web sites and export them to text, html, rtf, pdf, or wikitext.

This is a mass collaboration project, and we hope that many people around the world will jump in and add a definition or two.

So, this mashup is featuring videos from TeacherTube, a great video-sharing site for education. (It’s like YouTube for schools, and, thankfully, isn’t blocked in most districts.) Teachers and students from around the world create and upload videos on topics that cover almost every curriculum area you can imaging. There are even great professional development videos.

(Note: This is a large file, so you may have to wait a while depending on your connection speed. An embedded version, which may load faster, is available here.)

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One trick for using TeacherTube: If you want to download videos, you need to be signed in, and then the download link will show up on the right side of the screen under Video Details.

If you produce your own videos, consider sharing them with others on TeacherTube. This site also provides a great authentic publishing opportunity for students. Imagine how motivating it is to know that over 10,000 people have watched your video! (Just make sure you have the necessary parent permissions.)

And, as always, feel free to share this mashup with others. I think it will be particularly useful in workshops to show teachers all the great free multimedia resources out there.

Include in this show are the following:

Animal Alphabet by K12 Handhelds with content from Wikijunior

Letter Writing Accuracy by FreeReading

Learning Words by K12 Handhelds with content from FreeReading

Tales from the Yard by Mathew Needleman of Video in the Classroom

Tech Tip for Reluctant Writers (Elementary Level) by Karen Janowski

Book Review: “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes (Anna) by an 8th grade student with teacher Roxana Butler

How to Use the Apostrophe by T.L. Brink

Learn Your 7s with a Rock Song! by Rockin’ the Standards

Math Proof: Triangles Sum to 180 Degrees by Philip Brocoum

9 Multiplication Tables HipHop Music Video by Ms. Robinson

Springfield Map (Cartography) by Mr. Miller

Underground Railroad by American Institute for History Education

Water Cycle Song by David Bydlowski

A Solar System Review by Mr. Tim Thompson

Dr. Loopy Discusses Electromagnetism by Dr. Loopy

LCF BABELZONE – A quelle heure part le train? (French train times) by BabelZone

Practice Foreign Languages in Second Life by Avatar Languages

Thanks to all of these people and to everyone sharing their videos on TeacherTube! And special thanks to Jason Smith and his team for making this great service available.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 at 3:14 pm and is filed under Kids, Parents, Professional dev. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.