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.

Mathcasts 500 Project from Math Playground

Tuesday evening with Women of Web 2, yielded the usual rich chat room conversation and engaging speaker content. Colleen King a math teacher/consultant and the host of Math Playground talked about the Mathcast 500 Project. Her tagline rings true for me, “When students become teachers, learning become inevitable.” The Mathcast concept makes full use of Voicethreads technology. User friendly, this web-based teaching tool can turn students into effective peer teachers. This new project promises to become a repository of student created resources. I did some experimenting today and my students seem to be very receptive to recoding their reflections about math activities. I did run into a technical glitch. In some cases the recording cut off after only several seconds so I wasn’t able to complete the project. Here is an example of what some students created to explain how they use Rocket Math. If Voicethreads can be this effective for math, just imagine the numerous other ways it could be used by students to reinforce and extend learning. Colleen’s Math Playground is deep and wide. I plan to return regularly for the latest math tools.

Project Honey Pot – Webmaster Alert

I’ll be honest, I’m not sure how I’m going to use this but it sounds like an excellent service. They are dedicated to minimizing spammers and spambots. A honey pot attracts insects, pest like spammers. Therefore, I think you bait your site to attract the spammers and then the Honey Pot Project follows the trail back to the source. The script you use is handled automatically by the Honey Pot Project so you won’t have to worry about increased traffic or bandwidth issues as a result of offering the Honey Pot bait. Check it out.

clipped from www.projecthoneypot.org Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website. Using the Project Honey Pot system you can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site. If one of these addresses begins receiving email we not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it.

tags:
edtech, education, kathy shields, ripplingpond,spam,Project Honey Pot

Friend or better still . . . foe

Future of Education, unconference link

When is foe better than friend? When foe is the tag for the Future of Education unconference held last week. I was on vacation and unable to participate live but the conference attendr.com map clearly illustrates the global-breadth of the unconference attendees. Below is a clip from presenter Jay Cross. Just reading this paragraph should give you the sense that interactivity and conversation are essential elements of this conference. You will not hear or detect any hint of monologue, diatribe, lecture or any other form of lopsided conversations. This isn’t an unloading of acquired knowledge but rather a synthesis and building of something unexpected and new. It’s open and it’s exciting.

The depth of this unconference can fairly be measured by close examination of the international session-leader list, which I invite you to do, and by observing the distinctive leadership style of unconference director, George Siemens of The University of Manitoba in Canada. Thanks to an elearning partnership with Elluminate Live, all of the conference speakers and interactive chat room conversation was captured and is available at the click of your mouse. The best part is that although you may have missed the live sessions, you may participate in real time with followup conversations in the forums.

George Siemens is reaching out to the world. His approach to online learning is the epitome of the connectivist philosophy he espouses. He lives and breathes connectivism and it is contagious.

If you enjoy thinking out of the box and long to be connected to a global educational network, then you really owe it to yourself to listen and learn. I will warn you, however, that the adrenalin rush of experiencing this unconventional open access to knowledge is as whimsical as watching new cloud formations take shape, it may become habit forming! Whether or not you agree with or take issue with some of the revolutionary ideas discussed in The Future of Education unconference, please blog about your thoughts and add to the formation of knowledge.

clipped from ltc.umanitoba.ca Presenter: Jay Cross Education is empowered as never before. Web 2.0 connects people the world over and encourages active participation. Incoming students have no fear of technology and are self-reliant “entrepeneurial learners.” Let’s blend these elements and brainstorm the possibilities. What will globally interconnected education look like? David Snowden’s remarks on brain plasticity in children made me want to get every six-year old a phone pal with whom to speak another language. Each one teach one. Reflect on this, and come prepared to share your ideas. Conference resources (for those unable to attend the session, or those wanting to share with colleagues):Attendr: http://attendr.com/foe Moodle: http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/moodle/course/view.php?id=12 Pageflakes link: http://www.pageflakes.com/ltc/10987119 Twitter site: http://twitter.com/foe2007 Conference Podcast feed: http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/foe-2007/podcast/index.xml

tags:
edtech, education, kathy shields, ripplingpond, foe 2007,educast,elluminate

How to become a Google Educator

Weekly webcasts by WOW 2.0 reached a new high when Google Guru Cristen Frodella joined the discussion. A chat archive complete with links accompanies the podcast for this fast paced webcast. If you are an educator you owe it to yourself to drop in on these cutting edge conversations about edtech every Tuesday from 9-10 EST on the Education Bridges site.

clipped from www.edtechtalk.com Join Jen, Vicki, Sharon and Cheryl as we chat with Cristin Frodella from Google. Learn about the new and exciting things happening with Google Educators. Also, you will be amazed at Dr. Cheri Toledo’s class of doctoral students who had their final in the chat room. Over 43 participated in the chat room and 20 of them belonged to Cheri’s class. It was a blast. The Women of Web 2.0 gave out A’s for class participation.

tags:
edtech, education, kathy shields, ripplingpond, k12,ripplingpond,Google

It pays to visit Technorati more than I do!

So I was on technorati checking links to my small voices podcast and it led me to an recent post by Daniel Kuropatwa! To say that he is merely a Canadian math teacher would be a supreme understatement. He is a clear and present voice in the educational technology movement, a person I admire and respect from afar. Our common denominator is Women of Web 2 webcasting live from the Education Bridges Network every Tuesday evening at 9 PM EST.

I am proud of my small voices podcast and now I’m very motivated to post a new episode if it can inspire other educators to pursue more edtech. Yesterday, attempted to convert a photostory 3 file to mpeg4 but it was too large to do on-line and I don’t own any conversion software on my laptop. My kinder class did a wonderful job annotating pictures from our field trip to the Chattahoochee Nature Center. They read their journal entries over the images they had selected. Actually, I have some usable footage I shot for a 5th grade teacher I recently collaborated with to create her own classroom podcast. She calls it WBEC-FM and there are 8 episodes! Look for The Making of WBEC-FM to be my latest episode. I may have to redo the Nature Center project using Pinnacle. Just more time. Practice makes perfect!

Lesson learned, stay informed, cover all your bases and never, never go to sleep. After all, there is so much to do to keep up your on-line image! I applaud those who have mastered the art of on-line persona by creating a consistent persona throughout blog, wiki, web page, 2nd life and whatever else is out there.

Thank you Darren for including small voices on your slide show! You made me aware of another notable, Kathy Cassidy. You are both now officially on my blog roll.

tags:
edtech, education, kathy shields, ripplingpond, k12,Darren Kuropatwa,small voices