PONderings

For the second summer in a row, a crew from Regina travelled to attend Dean Shareski’s trilogy of STF workshops. This year, we engaged in geocaching, podcasting, and digital storytelling. Thanks once again, Dean, for allowing me to share your workshop ideas. Your ideas from last year’s workshops continue to influence me through my continued [...]

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In my post about working around YouTube blocking, I gave a recipe on how to upload video from blocked sites. One of the key components was the use of Zamzar.
To simply the conversion of online video, Zamzar has created a very convenient button that automates this process. Check it out at http://www.zamzar.com/tools.

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One of the most valuable resources I create are instructional videos. The tool I use for screencasting on my MacBook is iShowU. Apart from being one of the only screencasting tools available for OS X Tiger, its price is very reasonable – $20.00 USD.
Here’s one of the first screencasts I’ve made:

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Another gem from Joyce Valenza’s blog, this video from Michael Wesch explains how Web 2.0 has revolutionized our ways of thinking.
I’m going to use it with my Lunching with Laptops group.

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I just stumbled across a podcast from School Library Journal that speaks to providing PD to busy professionals in regards to Web 2.0. Helene Blowers created a tool through a blog entitled Learning 2.0 that encourages users to explore Web 2.0 tools on their own.
This model is described in Blowers’ podcast. In learning through this open and collaborative [...]

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On Monday, I attended a BER seminar on the use of technology for K-2 presented by Judi Wolf. This seminar was broken into several categories, such as teacher tools, kid-friendly search engines, emerging literacy, and online stories. Here is the link to the entire list of web sites.
One link that is of particular interest to [...]

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Wesley Fryer’s blog introduced me to the The Read Write Think web site. This site is filled with many online tools that can kickstart even hesitant teachers into using web-based tools.
As a fan of comic books (a.k.a. graphic novels), I am enjoying playing with the Comic Creator as an alternative to our well-used KidPix program. [...]

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