Sorry I missed the presentations last week. I am watching them now and decided to post a wiki with comments and ideas you all have inspired.
WIKI's IN THE CLASSROOM
This was great Marla! After your presentation, I have decided to us wiki's for group projects instead of discussion boards and blogs. I teach a Storytelling for Interactive Games course, and one of the projects is they have to do a collaborative story where, one person on the team writes a paragraph, and then another student adds on to it and so on, and so on. It will provide easier reading than in a discussion board posting. I really liked your ideas on the textbook editing. I was thinking, that since I teach a software class, students know lots of different ways to do things, so I am going to post up a "tips and tricks" wiki for them to use and refer to. When I saw you mail carrier project, I thought, "how cool would that be to somehow turn it into an interactive game where the students could solve the problem." Great stuff!
--Jason
SECOND LIFE
I see you love to dance, Ruby! I can only dance in SL. In RL, I have no rhythm. My son came in during the "I like to move it, move it" song. He remembers it from Madagascar. That was an excellent video. I don't know if you heard recently, but there was talk about removing casinos from SL. SL provides a lot of opportunity for education and presentations. I was thinking about the video you did and how neat it would be to incorporate that video idea with your Play Lesson Plan. SL has a video recorder built into it. Students could actually create a virtual movie...with no rain delays. You mentioned Teen Second Life, if parents or educators are concerned, here is a link to their information for parents, http://teen.secondlife.com/parents Really nice job Ruby. Our school is getting closer to getting an island and I just bought some books on how to create things in SL. I make some clothes that you can get for free, just in case you don't get your referrals :).
Also, I came across this the other day. Wii + Second Life = New Training Simulator
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/news/2007/07/wiimote
-- Jason
Being a Marketing Major I see almost endless potential for SL. Companies are using this for sure. I think companies will begin to use this to train employees all over the world without having to send a trainer. The same can be applied to the classroom to really engage students in the classroom using interactive video. I really enjoyed the 3-D effects of the presentation. This can also be used by students to build real world knowledge by visiting places they would otherwise not be able to. Students can collaborate on projects with students all over. This is so amazing to me that you can interact in a virtual world. So much can be learned, because this expands the network of individuals you can gain knowledge from. I am truly impressed and thanks so much for this information. I am really looking forward to using SL.
--Daniel
GOOGLE TOOLS
Google to replace Mac OS, say it ain't so! It is amazing the amount of stuff that you can do with google. I have to agree with Daniel and others on this, it is definitely not just a search engine. What is amazing is that it seems to hold the same philisophy of open source sharing that we talked about in the creative commons' discussion. This could be a huge financial relief to many schools on a strapped budget for software. I wonder if google as on OS would be more stable than Vista? What I like is the amount of feedback or beta versions it gives out for folks to test for them. Although with all the cameras around, could google be "Big Brother?" Anyway, really neat information. Sorry there were technical difficulties. And for what it's worth, I liked the hip music in the background, Daniel.
-- Jason
YOU TUBE
What cracks me up is that they have a copyright thing for folks to agree to and the bulk of the videos are all copyright infringed on! There are some really great videos out there though. And what is neat is folks sharing their videos. This generation is known for it's virtual socializing and sharing and I think YouTube is a reflection of that culture. There are some great videos on Science experiments and such and how cool would it be for a class assignment to do a video on a subject and post it up on YouTube? I saw some folks looking for a YouTube Video converter, my students told me about, http://vixy.net It's free and it will give you multiple choices for formats like AVI, MOV, MP4, etc. The one Luis provided is great for Flash videos because the video player is free. I know it was mentioned in the presentation about the YouTube debates. This seems to a be an incredible way to get more young adults and college students involved in politics. It will be interesting to see how it plays out in the end. I remember the controversy about Nixon and Kennedy on TV. How Nixon looked so much older and haggard compared to the young and vibrant Kennedy. Don't cameras add 10 pounds to you? Poor Nixon. Visually, he didn't have a chance. A sure case of Facial Discrimination.
--Jason
POD CASTING
What a great voice Millie! Very soothing. Good lesson and I really liked the first video. I know our school looked into iTunes University, but I haven't heard of anything since. What was nice was the faculty could make a lot of podcasts and store on Apple's Server instead of the district's. I think it was for both audio and video podcasts. This is a great tool for foreign language and ESL classes. For distance learning, I would like to see a video podcast or at least have an audio podcast with sound effects or music, like for history. I love having the history channel videos on my ipod. Even if I am not looking at them, the audio is so good I can still imagine what is going on. It would be interesting to see what types of projects students could come up with using it. I don't know what class you could use it in, but maybe have them do a FOLEY excercise, which means to add original (not downloaded) sound effects like in the old days of the Radio Shows. Students could work as teams researching old radio shows from 1930s-1950. After having researched and listening to a few, students will write their own 5-minute script and conduct an audio recording in the style of the old radio shows. They will be responsible for researching out the type of materials that were used to create the vast amount of sound effects for some of the early programs and then use original objects to create sound FX. These could be recorded with the audio software like audacity.
- - Jason
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