Web Search Strategies in Plain English from The Common Craft Show!

Another basic, yet great explanation, not to mention timely. I just had a teacher asking about this very topic the other day so I hope she'll find this useful for her lesson.


Web Search Strategies in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.

Podcasting in Plain English

I admit it. I get all excited when they publish something new. This time it's Podcasting in Plain English.

Twitter in Plain English

Courtesy of the Common Craft Show - Twitter explained. If you prefer the version without subtitles, you can go directly to their website.

They're at it again! Blogs in Plain English

Another great video from Common Craft

Taking a day for my own professional learning

I decided to take today at work for some professional learning and research time. So, I hid in our computer lab at the central office and spend the first part of my day playing around with a tutorial for the Promethean Board's ActivStudio software. I realize for many school systems incorporating interactive whiteboards is yesterday's news, but for us, it began late last year and our schools are slowly investing their own funds on the boards.

I've had a Promethean board available for my use for a couple of years now, but never felt the pressure to learn the software until now. It's fairly intuitive once you get pas the myriad of options on the tool bar. I will definitely work on incorporating the board into professional learning sessions I do. I think I haven't approached using it before because we have two ceiling mounted projectors with drop down screens and to set up the board, I have to use an overhead on a cart and stretch cord from here to eternity and hope I don't trip over them.

But that isn't what really prompted me to write this entry. While nosing around for some "cool tools" to post on my wiki for teachers, I ran across this blog in my del.icio.us links and she had a link to Sketchcast. I have to admit right off that the concept looked like fun, so I created an account and spend way too much time creating the video I embedded below. I won't go into what Sketchcast is, because my video explains it. However, I will say that the noises you'll hear are my tablet pen I was using. It's annoying, but I was too pressed for time to try another drawing method other than on my tablet screen, which is next to my internal microphone. I'll also say that I was a bit frustrated with the product. I couldn't rewind and write "over" something I didn't like, thus forcing me to start completely over. Not happy about that. Also, you can't draw what you want and then add audio. I would have preferred to orate later, but I wasn't given that option. Regardless, it's a fun tool and I'll leave the judgment about it's educational applications for our students up to you. You'll hear what I have to say about it.

Asterpix Interactive Video

Stumbled across the link to this site in one of the blogs I read. Sorry, but I got so excited to try it out that I forgot the check which one is was in my RSS reader. I'll add it later if I can track it down. Anyway, this site called Asterpix allows you to load videos from just about anywhere on the web and make them interactive. I pulled a Common Craft video from You tube and made a couple quick and sadly, not very good annotations. Hey, it's late (midnight) and I just wanted to try this out. You can place hot spots on the video with annotation and weblinks. When the viewer mouses over the box, the video pauses. I can see all kinds of opportunities that this presents with instructional videos, especially in science. Here the one I tried below.

Oh, and the panel on the left that partially covers the video are the notes that are embedded. You can click on them individually at any time. Can't wait to see what everyone else comes up with!