WETOKU

Wetoku is a nifty little Internet app that sets up two talking heads--the interviewer and the interviewee. This is perfect for many classroom activities. The introductory video below (5 min. +) gives some tips on doing a good interview, so it's a nice way to get students started using the program.

The Bases for a Personal Learning Network

These are excerpts from a Kim Cofino fireside talk at WorldBridges, as edited by Vance Stevens.

Her main points form the basis for a Personal Learning Network--what every teacher really needs in the Digital Age:

Tools
- RSS feed - find out what other professionals are thinking about and stay up to date
- Join an education social network - learn and share with other teachers
- Start a blog - express yourself and monitor your own growth as a professional
- Use Skype to share and connect with other professionals
- Attend online conferences - both synchronously and asynchronously [WorldBridges is a good place to catch up and get into conferences]
- Use Twitter - find professionals and make connections [Vance's own anecdotes are clear illustrations of how useful this can be]
- Design global online interactions for your students [e.g., iEarn, GLOBE, or your own class-to-class project]

Attitudes
- Be more flexible and try out more collaborative approaches
- Allow for student-led processes, and learning from peers
- Learn, create, and share with your students
- Use the Internet to let your students connect with other students--and teachers--around the world
- Students in developing countries already have "global attitudes" - multicultural and multilingual perspectives, so take advantage of these

Pranav Mistry's Sixth Sense Technology

These wearable technologies were seen about 10 yrs ago at the MIT Media Lab, but this goes even farther (and smaller). Clever, and Mistry wants them to be open source. (About 13 min., but a must-see.)



Thanks to Webhead Andy Picon for the tip!

iSpeech Voice and Podcaster

I've been trying to get a newer, better look for my blog, but wound up back with the old style, but the new interface. Alas, my old blog is gone.

But this looks a little newer and crisper, I've got a new photo up, and I finally found a new text-to-speech reader in iSpeech. Et voilá! it is also a podcaster, so I'm feeling up to date. You click on the little icon to hear the text read, or go to the Podcast in the sidebar to start the feed.

The interface at the iSpeech site was simplicity itself to use:

I didn't even have to get a registration key. Interestingly, it is a dot org.

Let's hope it is as good as it looks--it does try to read a little too fast, but that may just be my processor speed or the server speed today.

The Christmas Challenge VoiceThread

A nice holiday student project where cultural concepts of Christmas and personal greetings and wishes are recorded. A nice use for VoiceThread, which can also be downloaded to a desktop as an archive for listening practice.

The Christmas Challenge
by Alex G. Francisco

A collaborative project developed by Esayan Armenian High School in Turkey and Escola Básica e Secundária Gonçalves Zarco in Portugal, Dec 7, 2009.

WallWisher

WallWisher is not as useful pedagogically as other social networking tools I can think of.

You can add a picture (from a URL), or video, or audio file, but it doesn't have a way to put a URL into the text (without using up the tiny letter count), so that users can easily go visit the site. If you want to illustrate your sticky, you need another place/server/or knowledge of how to get an image location to stick it in. You can post to Facebook, et al., and link to pictures in Flickr.

The limited number of words/letters on a sticky means you can't say much--this is probably an advantage for young learners, but not necessarily for their education. A blog or wiki would give them the opportunity to be more expansive.


You could have a main sticky and then ask students to respond to it. But there is no way to organize the stickies besides moving them around physically. So this means the teacher/owner of the wall must do the work of organization, or let things happen at random. (See Nik Peachey's wall of teacher tools for social networking.)

So on the whole, I like the idea of a communal blog or wiki better: more opportunity to write expansively, ways to comment, RSS feed, easy ways to include URLs and lots of pictures, and esp. with a wiki, ways to organize pages.

But I can see Wallwisher as a way to make comments on an event or single Web page. You might have students visit a page or view a video (or put one into a head sticky), and then make a short comment on a Wallwisher page. If you have only 15-30 students, they could all read each other's comments (but if they then make more comments, you've quickly got a huge, disorganized mess...) If you use WallWisher the way it was intended, perhaps to wish a class member happy birthday, or to congratulate someone on getting citizenship, or to make a wish list, or to put up reminders for a project, then it's a nifty application.

Archival Video Sites

Both OurMedia and the Internet Archive are unbelievably slow and have made their interfaces much more difficult to use. OurMedia just transferred my video to a new address without telling me, and I can't find it at all on the Internet Archive. In OurMedia, a search for tags and for titles and for owner--none of them--didn't come up with the video, but it was still there. Go figure!

I also tried to edit the description in OurMedia to include the Web address of the wiki that also contains the presentation, but with no luck. I was asked to join a group before I could edit my own work--couldn't find any with "education" through the search engine, though I could see a few with that word in the title from a list. I then was told I hadn't completed the CSID (the test of human user), but that box wasn't available at the page where I was doing the editing. No win!

I hope to get the video from the 2008 TESOL presentation embedded here in the blog below. We'll see how long it lasts as a real link!

The address is now http://www.ourmedia.org/node/88432



Another video archive site, AuthorStream is also very slow. My presentation there (no audio) is at
http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/ElizabethHS-224813-effect-tech-sla-entertainment-ppt-powerpoint/. The sound version apparently has just vanished or was never accepted as an unload because it was too large or the wrong format.

Blip.tv still has the presentation, and seemed to load about the fastest. Unfortunately, it's not a place to take the children...

These sites are very frustrating, and I'm glad I uploaded the presentation to multiple venues. With the economic downturn in 2009, there has been a lot of moving and shaking, and I think there will be more changes in store in early 2010.

Animoto

Animoto is easy to use and a lot of fun! You can upload photos and video, and the app puts them together in a kaleidoscope of shapes and forms. You can also add music from your desktop or purchase something from iTunes. Once the video is completed, you can edit it, and share via email or embedding your blog or Website, as I have done here:



The free version of this editing tool is only 30 seconds long (about 12 photos). For $3 US you can upgrade to an any length video, or for $30, you can make any length videos for a year. Ronaldo Lima's school uses the latter option, and students use Animoto extensively as a way of publishing their projects.

To use the program, students would take and select photos and video of their project, arrange and upload the shots, and select appropriate music. (There is very little writing involved, unlike other programs where there might be titling on each photo.) I believe students could, however, create a desktop recording (e.g., with Audacity) describing the photos as they flash by, and use that file instead of the "music" accompaniment. For an additional $5 per video, you can make a higher resolution or MPG4 version that can be downloaded and/or burned to a DVD.

Thanks to Ronaldo Lima of the Webheads for mentioning this app.