Tech Tips & Timely Tidbits
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Tech Tips and Timely Tidbits by Heather Loy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Odds & Ends (04/25/08)
First up, I would like to share a wonderful example of Voicethread AND a short explanation on why we should all learn and use a little bit of Web 2.0 in our schools. It was created by Library Media Specialist Fran Bullington. I’m attempting to embed it in this post, but if it doesn’t appear you can access it here.
I thought some of you might find inspiration from the following post “Making Connections With History” by loonyhiker of the Successful Teaching Blog, about creating a classroom timeline to help students identify with concepts, discoveries, important people in context with other notable events from the same time/era.
More Anne Frank news from BBC News: “Anne Frank Greeting Card Found”
A few news items from CNN.com:
- “Conflict follows device that drives away teen loiterers” Remember a while back I posted a link regarding the Mosquito ringtone that only young adults are able to hear? Well there is a teen repellent device, oddly enough, called the Mosquito that emits the tone and deters teens from loitering outside of places people don’t want them. As a teen advocate, this disturbs me greatly. I understand there are SOME teens out there who are “bad” but this punishes all teens. The sad thing is that the article mentions a SC school district that uses the device!
- “Harry Potter case brings the law into the Internet age” Another sad story. A former librarian is being sued by J.K. Rowling over a Harry Potter encyclopedia he’s trying to get published. Not sure who’s side I’m on, especially since as long as it was online and free, Ms. Rowling seemed to like the website, but now that the guy wants to make money off of his work compiling Potter facts she’s saying no can do. So far I think both sides are wrong: librarian for not seeking permission first and Rowling for letting the website exist is she wanted to be the only one to produce the “definitive guide to Harry Potter.”
- “How to raise financially savvy kids” I liked this idea: “Her 3-year-old son has a piggy bank. But it’s no ordinary piggy bank. The modern kids’ saving tool has four chambers for coins — one for saving, one for spending, one for donating and one for investing.” Get them started on money management early! Wish I’d done this as a child and then I’d be more financially responsible today!
That’s all for today. I hope to have a post up soon about the ETV Technology Workshops I attended this week.
April 25th, 2008 at 9:28 pm
Heather,
I am honored that you have shared my first attempt with VoiceThread. I hope others who read this will try it – it is not only fun, but also VERY simple.
Maybe I need to move my blog over to edublogs. I was unable to embed my VT in my blog on wordpress.
April 25th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
@Fran No, thank you for allowing me to share your Voicethread. It says what I wanted to convey about the need to use Web 2.0 to engage students and as you said shows how easy Voicethread is to use.
This was also my first attempt at embedding. Edublogs is (I believe) a version of WordPress so moving wouldn’t really change anything. Although I have to say I’ve not been disappointed with Edublogs and it is the only one not blocked by my district.
I found help on @dswaters Edublogger page http://theedublogger.edublogs.org the March 27, 2008 post on “Embedding Videos from Video Sharing Web Sites.” As she said, write your blog, tag it, and after everything else is done, go to the code view and past the code from Voicethread where you want it to appear and then hit publish. It took a few tries as I was pushing save and trying to see if it worked BEFORE I published it and it never worked. That was when I read her post and figured out what was wrong. When I copied it that last time, I also noticed some extra code (img code) at the end of the copied text so I deleted it (basically, everything after the object> tag. It worked beautifully after that.
April 13th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
[...] classes and instead get to classes on time. I’ve written previously about this machine here and the mosquito ringtone here. I am opposed to this device being used, especially INSIDE a [...]