Digital Storytelling (Module 5)

Pod, Vods, Videos and Web 2.0

We were asked to explore iTunes and visit videos sites such as YouTube.
 
Internally, I remain skeptical about the necessity for everyone to blog about everything. Particularly when people are exploring and their depth of understanding is evolving. My fear is that the confident with pollute the ether with misconception and superficial trite whilst the truly knowledgeable may hold back given all the rubbish currently freely available on the web. Maybe this blog post is the case in point. Even worse had I turned on the webcam and chose to share the message by way of a vodcast.
 
I've experimented with Vodcasting in the classroom and found it a great way to aid learning. Students have created such works as Newtons First Law - Recut, Prelim Chemistry Metals and Year 10 meets the Flip. Unfortunately these were hosted on TeacherTube and whilst my account still survives the video footage was lost by them during an upgrade (a lesson for us all there).
 
YouTube is fantastic for class for that 3-4 minute grab that might be used to engage, consolidate, pace or simply wind down a lesson. I really like the screened resources recommended by NeoK12. I keep some of the videos that I like collated in a group strangely enough called YouTube Videos I Like, with 128 videos favourited in my YouTube account. My students will all tell you that I like playing Gregorian Chants whilst they complete practicals.




Despite my earlier comments, I like the way Greg Whitby the Executive Director of Schools of the Parramatta Catholic Education uses YouTube. See below an example from Greg's site.




Prof Stephen Heppell is an informed and revolutionary educator. The work put up by my students on TeacherTube was strewn with misconception. There is also the wealth of information being made available as opencourseware. I particularly like the free nnline course materials made available at MIT OpenCourseWare and the professional development potential of Teachers.TV a rich source of education video resources, lesson plans, inspiration and ideas to use in classroom.

We need to ensure that our students are armed with the skills to discern whether the information presented is from a credible source and likely to be correct, but that will be the subject of a later post.

Flickr and Creative Commons (Module 4)

Flickr shows great potential for use in the classroom. One high potential idea is to have students load up photographs as they complete all mandatory practicals. The idea being that the photograph would aid their recall as they revise for the HSC.

See a shot from my Flickr account below. It's a tad blurry as a student took the shot.



One of my favorite bloggers is Alvin Trusty. Alvin is an Assistant Professor in the College of Education and the Director of the Educational Technology Program at the University of Findlay. See his professional bio here. He has shared a number of quality presentations on a range of contemporary EdTech issues, his PowerPoints have been skilfully compiled and are generally first rate.




Presenter's Guide to Copyright from Alvin Trusty on Vimeo.

Module 4 done.

Google docs (Module 3)

Google docs is a wonderful tool for use within and outside the classroom.

I have used it several different ways:
- collaborative documents when working on a project,
- forms to survey a class and collate the data,
- folders to share documents with a conference audience.

There is also the capability to spreadsheet, create presentations and draw. A truly powerful tool. I enjoyed writing this post as I took the opportunity to visit the docs area of my two active Google profiles and seeing the information stored there brought back some fond memories.

Along similar lines, I also have a Windows Live Sky Drive, but more on that in a later post.