Finally…

I’ve had a lot of fun over the last couple of days.  I’m worn out at the end of the day, but it’s a good feeling.  I’ve been helping a high school social studies teacher integrate technology in her world history classes.  I created a wiki on wikispaces where I put their assignments along with links to help them in their searches.  I created a custom search for Google on the French Revolution and the students are creating Powerpoint presentations from their research.  Baby steps yes, but big ‘ol steps in the right direction!!  I even bought a flip video camera.  If you don’t have one of these you need to check it out.  Not too expensive and pretty good quality if I must say so myself.  I’ve let the students video each other and play around with the camera.  They seem to be enjoying their assignment.  They are working collaboratively and doing a really good job of it.  I’m proud of them.

Online Meetings

I’ve been looking for some online meeting software, and I’ve discovered a couple that are worth a look.  Of course, I’m referring to the free kind.  So far I’ve found WebHuddle and Vyew.  They both look pretty promising, and I tried out WebHuddle today and it seemed to work ok.  See what you think about them.

Why do I need online meeting software?  Well, my day gets pretty hectic, and all the traveling around I have to do at times gets a little old–particularly with the price of gas as it is.  Oh, I can get reimbursed for mileage so that’s not a problem.  I guess one of the main reasons I need it is to just play around with it so other folks can see how it works, and they might like to use it some as well.

Any thoughts?

Cool Tool

Back during Christmas I found a neat little website called Animoto.  It’s a page where you can take pictures and upload them.  Animoto will then use their special software to render a video for you.   You can create a video short of 30 seconds for free or you can choose to make a longer video if you subscribe for a year.  The subscription cost is $30.  I think this could be very useful in creating short videos for classroom review in various subjects.  Think of the stuff you could do with this on Ancient Egypt or World War II!  Hey, even the Greenhouse Effect could be rendered in a short video.  It could be a useful alternative to the Powerpoint slide show!