Recently Tagged 093008

Sites I have recently tagged in my delicious account:

• Math Snacks: short videos by some elementary teachers demonstrating various math principles
• Betchablog: Getting Kids to Blog: a post about starting students blogging. It has a great chart on blogging prompts that incorporates science and social studies threads with Bloom’s taxonomy.
• Tag Galaxy: Type in a word for a photo you want to find, and watch the galaxy form. The sun links to the Flickr photos with your tag. (Click to view them). Related tags show up as planets revolving around the sun. (Click on to further refine your search.) This is not your typical display of photo search results.  Just try it. This Flickr mashup is a diploma thesis project by Steven Wood.
• Flowgram: Create presentations by combining web pages, photos, PowerPoint and more. Include your voice, notes, and highlight text. Surprisingly, viewers of the presentation can interact with displayed webpages by scrolling and clicking on links. Like a screencast, but different. ;>) Check out this flowgram: 21st Century Information Literacy Skills. I will be trying this out soon. In fact, I could have made a flowgram instead of writing this blog post.
• Jackson Pollock by Miltos Manetas: Looks like an empty page, but wait, move your mouse across the screen, try a click.

Using DES Images and Videos in Your Projects

I recently participated in the Discovery Education Streaming Streamathon, attending Steve Dembo’s Profoundly Spectacular and Amazing Web2.0 Tools session.

Two important takeaways:

1. ALL the images at DES are all public domain, which means you can use them on your class websites and blogs.
2. You can download editable videos (look for edit button or use the advanced search to locate), then edit them in Windows Movie Maker and upload your new production to a password protected webpage.

After downloading an image from DES, we had fun editing it with Speechable, a free site to add text bubbles and then use the provided code to embed or link to your edited image. We created a motivational poster at Big Huge Labs using a tiger image from DES. Steve introduced Glogster, a free online tool for creating interactive, multimedia posters. Glogster looks like a lot of fun, but the displayed projects by other users is sometime inappropriate. However, Glogster has just introduced a version for educators. They tell me that in October there will be more privacy controls, until then I wouldn’t use it with students. See this embedded example of how a student used Glogster to publish an Environmental Heroes poster. Steve also mentioned Animoto, which now offers Animoto for Educators. Educators and their students can have a free, all access account, a $30 value. This is a great site for easily creating presentations with your images, and selecting music and animation from the provided library. You can view some examples at the Voices of the World Blog. He also mentioned CuePrompter.com, a free, web-based teleprompter service. This could be a good podcasting resource, as well as video publishing tool. Jumpcut, a free online video editing site, was also recommended.

I’m glad these events are archived at Den Blog Network, since I am not able to attend all the presentations live. You can also download the presentations and not have to stream them.

For more information on using Discovery Education Streaming, including handouts and screencasts, see my Fusion workshop webpage.

Image Credit: Paul Fuqua. “Cat, old gray.”
unitedstreaming: http://streaming.discoveryeducation.com/

Flickr’s New and Improved Slideshow

Flickr recently updated their slideshow feature. You can find the slideshow button on photostream pages, sets, tag pages, groups pools, and search results pages. If there are videos in the set or group, you can now watch those within the slideshow. There is also a button in the bottom right corner of the slideshow to view the show in full screen mode. You can access code to embed a slideshow, or a direct link to a show, using the Share link in the top right corner of the slideshow. This share button is available if the owner has set his/her privacy permissions to allow you to share his/her images. I appreciate the convenience of this share link and think that teachers will also. Yes, there are a vast array of mashups to embed flickr slideshows, but that is just one more tool/step for teachers to use. Keep it simple. Make it fun. (Favorite saying of one of my college professors.)

Currently the slideshow embed code won’t work in a WordPress.com blog post. But that might change. Flickr has already partnered with WordPress.com to provide shortcut to embed Flickr videos.

If you have an account at Flickr, you may want to update your permissions for “Who can share your photos and videos.” This applies to your public images. You can use the direct link option as I did above.

Image Credit: flickr Badges on Flickr by poolie CC Attribution 2.0