Comments on: Showcasing New Technologies

By: Jim

Jim — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 00:21:56 +0000

My first reaction was social bookmarking sites like Furl and Jots. Next I thought about Skype. However, when I thought about it more I really thought about community. I think I would want to talk about weak links and how important blogs, Skype, Furl, and others bring people together. I think the concept is more important than one site.

Jim

By: David Warlick

David Warlick — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 07:38:21 +0000

For fun, take them to the San Fernando Education Technology Teams site, where iCan 6 videos are out. I got a real kick out of Beast Boy.

By: Chris Lehmann

Chris Lehmann — Sun, 04 Sep 2005 23:28:24 +0000

I would show them how iTunes (since so many kids have iPods) can be used to get podcasts. It could be a very cool way to get kids listening to — and creating — some of the best podcasts out there.

By: John Lustig

John Lustig — Sat, 03 Sep 2005 09:47:04 +0000

I would include Internet Archive (www.archive.org)and lulu.com with others also suggested. These are great resources for both contributing and getting materials, ideas, etc.

By: swilmarth

swilmarth — Sat, 03 Sep 2005 09:19:25 +0000

I would add:

* social bookmarking (i.e., flicr, del.icio.us)
* CMS (i.e., dotLRN, Moodle)
* Learning activity management systems (i.e., LAMS)

By: John Evans

John Evans — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 19:52:43 +0000

After having heard Alan November in May and then sitting on on Will’s excellent session at BLC 05, I took the big step and gave my first Bloglines/RSS workshop to my fellow administrators this past week. Feedback was very positive from the 20 plus in the room. I think if you can show them how easy and useful it is it would be received very well. And who better to do it than Will!?

By: John Evans

John Evans — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 19:52:36 +0000

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 19:09:35 +0000

Just showing some of the features available in Mozilla Firefox would be helpful to many teachers. Sharing the integration of RSS, the search bar, tabbed browsing, and some of the extensions would be useful to my staff, and perhaps yours as well.

By the way, concerning Wikipedia, my colleagues and students were amazed when I showed them the history on the Hurricane Katrina page. They couldn’t not believe how many people were involved in collaboration and how quickly.

Dave

By: Janice Friesen

Janice Friesen — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 17:46:52 +0000

This suggestion is sort of out of the realm that most people have been talking about, but Bernie Dodge has just come out with QuestGarden which is a new tool to help people create WebQuests online without having to http://FTP. I have not tried it yet and cannot vouch for it’s helpfulness, but I think it is an interesting tool that teachers should know exists.

Janice

By: Sean FitzGerald

Sean FitzGerald — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 17:31:31 +0000

I’m currently involved in a project introducing teachers to podcasting - http://www.groups.edna.edu.au/course/view.php?id=273 - and I find they are blown away when they see how easily and quickly you can record your voice and save it as an MP3 file using Audacity - http://audacity.sourceforge.net/.

It takes a while to teach how to use Audacity, but if you just want to do a demo you can show them how it works in minutes.

This could introduce them to the whole idea that it is now really easy for students to create their own multimedia content (for free).

By: Robert Paterson

Robert Paterson — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 16:30:30 +0000

Hi Will
How about setting up a bloglines account as a specific research tool - a quasi text book showing a number of feeds that focus on a topic

My students all get Skype immediately

If you use Wikpedia - you can go to Katrina or another immediate issue - that I have found wroks well - go back in history and show how the page developed and how many edits have occurred from how many diverse source - show the guts of how it works.

By: Jason Green

Jason Green — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 15:53:22 +0000

I like to do multimedia stuff, but trying to do podcasting in a big session isn’t the most practical thing. You might consider WorldWind from NASA instead of/in addition to Google Earth. I’ve also been doing a lot of screencasting projects recently, but I suppose that’s most applicable to technologists and computer instructors.

By: Alan Levine

Alan Levine — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 15:43:41 +0000

In similar places, I’ve gotten the most bang/buck with demo-ing flickr.

There’s overhead with Bloglines/RSS (you have to explain it all) and people need to get passed their fears with Wikipedia (though showing them WikiTravel, WikiBooks helps click)

There is a natrual hook for flickr because nearly all have interest in photos, most have digital photos. You can go sideways into the elegance / pwer of the interface (in start contrast to the admin interfaces they likely deal with), or better the power of the Creative Commons collection, the shear neat ness of the third party site that creates logos from flickr.

My short list of examples is listed at:
http://cogdog.wikispaces.org/CollabTools

And maybe especially is the overlap with Google maps on the Digital Scrapbook Collection (http://flickr.com/groups/memorymaps/) — use Google Maps to do a screen shot of where you grew up, load to flickr, and then use the Notes feature to annotate with memories.

I’ve never had a bored audience with flickr.

By: Christopher Harris

Christopher Harris — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 14:53:12 +0000

Another possible area to explore is free VOIP like http://www.gizmoproject.com. I know you are coming to my neck of the woods on Oct. 13th for the e-learning symposium, and I think these technologies have a great potential to bring e-learning/distance learning down to a very basic, easy to use level.

I am looking at using these to offer staff development to member libraries in an 1800 sq mile region. I “attended” a great online conference using VOIP put on by Planet Library [http://www.planetlibrary.info/] was amazed at the potential for the format. Amazing how inter-connected learning can become in a flat world!

Looking forward to meeting you and getting a chance to blog more about e-learning as it relates to our school libraries.

By: Rebecca Hedreen

Rebecca Hedreen — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 14:35:33 +0000

We have an educational technology workshop every summer where faculty can create websites or other course related materials. This year I did Library Services for Online/Distance Faculty site, and I included a Recommended Sites and Services page: http://home.southernct.edu/~hedreenr1/online.html which covers the same idea. I included Flickr, blogging, del.icio.us, WebCollaborator, wikis, etc.