Wonderful Project HP & Brian C Smith Support Teacher Innovation

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/mst-portal

This is a wonderful example of what children can be motivated to produce with guidance from motivated teachers! This is by far the best example I have see thus far of teacher,

student and technology integration/collaboration at the elementary level. I am very encouraged by Brian’s work on this project and plan to get more details from him, show parts of the recorded video to my staff and hopefully inspire this kind of innovation at my own school.

Brian’s project also has a wiki:
http://pondpartners.wikispaces.com/

This incredible collaboration shows teachers how they can develop a strong interest in science investigation among students, compassion for the environment, the use tech tools such as probes to collect data, ELA skills of documentation, the excitement of project based learning and collaboration across grade levels.

This is possible. This is what we should be striving for. Please, can we move beyond dioramas and posters. Think big! Use Multi-media and empower students to educate the world!

Podcamp NYC

I’ll be there, will you?

Mogulus – Become a TV Producer

Yesterday my husband and I treated my son and his girlfriend to lunch at a well know Atlanta hotspot, The Flying Biscuit. They are both college freshman. Catherine would like to get into TV production but freshman year is all about required core courses so I suggested uStreamtv.com. It’s a great way to get experience producing your own program. It is surprising how this simple free application hasn’t made the rounds in many college scenes. In this post I will list and describe the live streaming video options available for free and how they differ.

Tech Crunch just made my job easy. On the left you can see a list of options posted in on the Tech Crunch blog . The title of the post is YouCastr: Live Podcasting for Sports Fans so pleas add YouCastr to your list of options. This is their logo, click to link. I signed up for blog TV which has Twitter integration, easy to use and has clear user guidelines rejecting the over PG13 material which plagues the likes of JustinTV which I do not care to join or revisit. UStreamTV lets you stream audio only or both A/V and one that was not on the list but should be is the recent Yahoo entry called Yahoo Live. It is similar to uStreamtv. The only very different approach to streamingtv is Mogulus. Why? Well it allows you to create programming playlists. There is a YouTube search just above the user interface. You search and drag clips into your playlist. You can also stream live or produce a show with live and archived clips from YouTube or whatever you happen to have uploaded. I like it. The only drawback that I can see is the embed limitations. They want you to use myspace and give only one alternate script for other webpages. Of course you can just post the link to your channel but embedding is more immediate, less clicking around for your viewers. One more option left off the list is MeBeam. I discovered this in January but in its’ infancy it had a major problem, live video chat with no restrictions, not good. I did write and was not alone in my complaints to the forum. Since then the offending button has been removed and now it is ridiculously simple to create a a video conference live stream for free. No registration needed. It does not archive but sometimes you don’t need that. Of course skype can do this but MeBeam allows more than one webcam on display at a time. I think it will stream up to 8. As the number of webcam windows increases the size of the image decreases.

So you may ask, Kathy, do you have a show? Well kind of, I did post some live streams of the Florida EdTech conference from my ripplingpond channel on uStream but beware the audio will deafen you due to some initial interference. Like anything else it’s a commitment. I find text blogging a little easier to manage at the moment. When you visit uStream I think you’ll find it is the most professional of the bunch. Hey even Hannah Montana uStreamed!

Thanks to Edtech Talk they are forever exploring new forms of live webcasting and last night Jeff Lebow experimented with Yahoo Live. Thanks to Tech Crunch for highlighting YouCastr. BTW YouCastr is cool because it’s all sports. Want to be a sportscaster? A childhood dream perhaps? Now if we could get a site that was all EDUCATION then we’d really be in business. As things stand now the practicality and safety of using these tools in school, elementary anyway is limited at best.

uStreaming, Listening and Blogging

Alan Taylor is now talking about Moodle. I have been trying to uStream when possible but I have some technical limitations. I think I’ll take a photo of my set up and you will understand. Alan seems to be very knowledgeable about the Moodle but he actually likes LoTi as an assessment of teacher tech skills. Personally I haven’t found it to be very accurate. People either over state or understate their abilities. He is giving some excellent reading resources materials which are listed on his website.

Prior to this I was a in a Discovery Ed session with Hall Davidson. (Link contains his ppt which is a large file)He wants teachers to create 2-5 second sound bytes of critical info so that like commercials, if played frequently the students will retain the information. He thinks multi-media is the key to retention and keeping students engaged.

Yesterday, the e-mission group staged a mission to evacuate Montserrat. It was a wonderful simulation using teams, roles, communications, math, LA skills. I don’t know how much it costs but at first glance it’s just a wonderful program for 3rd grade and up. They offer a variety of modules.