Videos!

Looking through some of the video sites today brought me back to my teacher days of sorting through online resources — many were low-quality and not that useful, but occasionally you would find a gem. YouTube and TeacherTube have a lot of videos that aren't that useful to the classroom. Even the few I watched from the Top 100 YouTube videos for the classroom were of questionable value. However, I bet if you search carefully enough, you will find some gems. I also took note of one of the articles we read that said that YouTube's "value lies less in the content itself than in the networks of learners that form around content and support one another in learning goals".

I enjoyed the iCue site. It is intended to be used as an educational site so of course it is more immediately useful to teachers. The site is very easy to navigate and is comprehensive.

For the classroom, I think many of the videos found on any of these sites are good as introductions to a topic or as review. They can be an effective way to get students thinking about a topic or excited to learn more.

I am not as sure about uses for Primary Source and I would love to hear others' ideas about this. We already use Vimeo, I think, when we post short videos on our web site. It's excellent that we can post video without using our own bandwidth. What ideas do other people have?

Networking and More Networking

It still feels intimidating to me to "join" online networks. All of the sudden you are part of a group! As soon as I get that first Welcome! email, I feel a slight twinge of panic. I know this is ridiculous, but it is true.

Anyway, after joining the Global Education Collaborative, getting welcomed, getting invited to two meetings, and having a slight panic, I looked around some more for other networks. I didn't join another one yet, but I enjoyed looking around at the Teaching Digital History site. The site "is focused on ideas and resources for teaching using digital historical resources" and it was started by a professor at North Carolina State. Maybe some of you have already checked out this network? It appears to focus on American History, and it looks like a site that our teachers should know about. I would love it if someone else would take a look and see if they think it is worthwhile.

Tagging, Wikis and More

OK, this week is where I'm really feeling the generation gap between myself and those who are younger than me.  So far in my "12 Things" exploration, I have felt pretty comfortable with the activities, sites, tools, etc.  Lots of things were new to me, but in an exciting way. This week, I feel a bit overwhelmed.  Since I don't do any kind of social networking (at least not in a formal way, i.e. Facebook, etc.), the idea of "social bookmarking" is intimidating to me.  There is clearly a whole new way to interact with the web and to make better use of the gobs of information out there, but I'm a bit stuck in the old way.  So it might take me a bit longer to feel comfortable with things like Delicious.  

In terms of wikis, I can totally see the value of those for classrooms and for PS.  I would like to explore more classroom uses of wikis to see how teachers and students are getting the most out of them.  To be honest, some of the links to wiki sites (correct term?) in "12 Things" were also intimidating for me.  There is so much on a single page that I don't know where to begin!  It might be fun to have a brown bag lunch or other discussion about wikis.  There is no question that we could use them in our programs.

New Sites

There are some really cool sites and tools on the list of Web 2.0 Award winners. A few were familiar to me: Kayak, UrbanSpoon, Pandora. Most were brand new to me and it was difficult to decide on one or two sites to explore. I ended up joining Zoho.com, which has a bunch of office applications which can be accessed via the web. Basically, you can word process documents, create spreadsheets and even visual presentations via web applications which can be accessed from any computer. The interactive part is that you can invite others to edit right into your document, you can chat with others WHILE editing a document, etc. It seems like this kind of thing would be useful to almost anyone (teachers and students among them) just from an access point of view but also for the collaboration in document editing/creation that it allows. There are also notetaking tools and much more.

Google Reader

One of the videos in our "12 Things" exercise about RSS feeds warned about how addictive news readers can be.  After a short exploration, I can TOTALLY understand that sentiment.  It's really cool!  Anyway, one of the things I subscribed to is called "Intelligent Travel".  One of the posts included a link to "One Shot China", which is part of the National Geographic web site.  Take a look.  I think teachers could use this...

Flickr

I just spent some time exploring Flickr. What is amazing to me is the sheer quantity of photos that are posted there. A search under the word "Taiwan" brings up more than 2.5 million photos. Wow! It's a treasure trove (and a bit mind boggling). Anyway, I decided to post a photo here of Sun Moon Lake in Taiwan (photo by Harry Huang) since it's one of my favorite places there. I'll be traveling to Taiwan in late November/early December, but I don't know if there will be time to visit the lake this time around. At least I now know where to find thousands of pictures of it!

Travel

I decided to occasionally share some links or other information related to travel so that this blog might actually have something interesting on it. Today I discovered www.worldhum.com, which seems to be a collection of writings about almost any aspect of traveling you can imagine - cuisine, the environment, places to visit, etc. Take a look!