Things # 12 & 13 Discovering and Using You Tube

YouTube is a powerful tool in education.  As I often say " if a picture is worth a thousand words, then how many words is a video worth?"  It's use is beyond comparison to most other forms.  What I like best about YouTube is its ease of use. Almost everyone who uses the Internet has seen a video from YouTube.  I have even heard students and teachers refer to a video as a YouTube just like we do with Kleenex.   I choose a YouTube of  Dr. Tina Seelig at Stanford. She teaches a course on innovation and entrepreneurial thinking. Since I first saw this video, I have sought out several more of her.  I find myself asking how I can use her message to instill persistence in our students.

An assignment from my tool box is to ask students to define a certain idea, word, process, or object by using a YouTube video.  For example define how mirrored triangles can be used to show the height of a three story building in feet and you can't leave the ground.  Well this was such a common task that I found dozens of videos.  Some were terrible and some were good and a few were excellent.  Then next time I proposed this assignment,  I suggested students to find three good videos and a fourth excellent one.  Then to write a paragraph about why one stood out from the other.  So in the tool box goes, define an item with there good videos, and one great video, then write what stands out, that made the fourth so much better.


For a new twist, make your own video.  With almost any digital camera sold today, you are able to record at least 720 P video.  Or you can take still pictures like I have done here and create a video of those pictures.

YouTube makes video easy.  Once you create a log in and password, you are able to up load you video file.  Youtube then indicates where that video is located. For example HTTP://youtu.be/uF7W7DeY3Jo is the actual address for the video on the left. YouTube also has a B blogger icon that sends the video straight to your blogg and creates a new live post or a hidden edit ready post.  With blogger.com you can also use the insert video command and choose youtube as a source for your video file.

Video is so easy to use that teachers ought to create lessons that create alternative mapping routes in the brain to where the brain has stored the information you want them to remember.  Think TPACK and think pedagogically as you create a lessons around video.  The Tina Seelig video above has taught me about innovation and creativity.  Her lesson is easier for me to remember than the same out line if it were printed.

Thing # 11 Web 2.0 Tools

What came before the "Store" in Windows 8 or the iTunes Store for the iPad? Plan old web browser based web 2.0 tools. In the past the trick was to find the gems out there.  Google has apps listed and many bloggers compiled their own lists.  Some sites popped up to cash in on those of us searching for a variety of tools.  Go2Web20 is such a site. I found Mindomo in and educational trade journal.  I have made several mind maps this way.  The interface is one of the best that I have found.  But what if you need to make a mind map in a hurry and have smaller tools like an iPad mini.  Go2web20 recommends Text 2 Mind. I made the Text 2 Mind map below with just a list of terms in the form of a bulleted list.  This tool could be invaluable to teach some learners who are more visual than others how to see a bulleted list in terms of one items relationship to another. The ease of use of Text 2 Mind means that it is attainable by the youngest users.  The map begins forming in an intriguing and entertaining animation sequence.

It is my opinion that may of the sits listed were programmed simply and were long on promise and short on delivery. There were also some wolves in sheep's clothing. For example under the Tag screencast I found free screen capture tool that promised to capture my movements as I demonstrated how to do something on the computer.  But when I tried to create a demo for this class, the free site passed me to Camtasia which is a superior albeit costly tool to use.  As an educator, we don't have time to waste on bait and switch sites.

I found sites that recommend tools that I appeal to me to be listed by some of the educational trade journals that I subscribe to like Discovery Education which recommended Slideshare which makes slide presentations available to everyone with a browser.  This is a great way to share you power point slides with students who may not own a computer and rely on public access computers.

Teach Learning is another periodical that I read regularly and that offers several web 2.0 lists. Teach Learning is written and hosted by teachers and former teachers who imbue there lists with pedagogically sound suggestions and age appropriate tools.

Purdue Edu has a great list of tools in an accessible format. They use a wiki to enable student teachers to prune the list as tools fade and appear over time. They also offer a screen shot of the site and detailed reviews that help one find the most proven tools.

I spent hours looking at the Purdue wiki for cool sites to use when I realized that I was picking up some very good suggestions on how to use these tools in class. 



Thing # 10 Online Productivity Tools

By online productivity tools I mean doing your typical cannon of office related tools. The word processor, spreadsheet, email, and  presentation. In the early, 1990's word processing, spreadsheets, and relational data bases were just getting the gui or WYSIWYG interfaces. Word Perfect Word were the two biggies in the family and every other year there was a new set of features and options. Email was added in the late 90s along with desktop publishing. Then in the late 1990's the tablet PC started gaining ground in vertical markets like Patient care and Parcel Package delivery. Just after the turn of the century the smart phone improved the palm held devices and solidified the love for touch screen devices.

With improvements in Solid Stat Hard Drives, Touch Screens, Styluses, light weight processors like the ATOM chip, Wifi and Cellular access points almost everywhere,  Aluminum bodies and gorilla glass ushered in the need for fast, compact, devices.  These new devices used smaller hard drives; however, they promised quick and reliable connections.  So what was once on giant sets of hard drives are now on the cloud.

The Online Productivity tools business has taken off.  Microsoft moved word in to its Skydrive as win 360.  The once feature rich and cluttered word processor lost weight and became less distractive.
With the new set of Intel Chips shipping in Apple computers the need for a common file type was observed.  The Cloud offered operating system and or manufacturer independent use. In other words, I log on to me Android, iOS, Windows, or OS X device and I can type in a app on my Skydrive using win 360.

Win 360 at first had some challenges when used by educators and to on a dark cloud.  Most educators in a room of students with a wall projector on will tell you that having an astatic interface is second to reliability. Google's raise as a search engine enabled it to quickly adopt schools who wanted a word processor and collaborative tools but on the low cost side. At almost no cost, Google quickly absorbed much of Microsoft's business with Google Docs. 

As a user of many devices, I gravitate towards the tool that is cross platform, reliable, networkable, and doesn't care where, who, or what I am using.  It is just there.  Google Docs is just that.  But is it really? Don't you find its cursor annoying? I used Google docs a lot this morning and could not tolerate the fact the curse holds the last character and seems to float over the previous character.  So where do I insert an semi forgotten letter or adjust for the double "i" that I just typed.  I was grateful to end that assignment and move to BlogSpot which has a really nice interface and the rectangle cursor shows me exactly where I am.
I used Google Docs just this morning as I shared my thoughts in a collaboratively written assignment.
It was not half bad, bit as the batteries weakened in my blue-tooth keyboard, my keystrokes were misrepresented and that cursor slowed me down a lot.

So I tried ZoHo.doc come, a lesser known tool.  It is a blend between the three.  One can log in using a Google account and link the two activities.  The interface is a awkward to move from home page to your first word document. It becomes better once a document is opened in the word processor.  Ditto for the spread sheet and presentation tool. True to its online character, ZoHo is in the cloud and does work across almost any browser.

On- the- go users, and the user like me who seems to use only borrowed or company issued computers, online tools are the only way to go. Zoho makes it easy to invite collaborators by sending them an email invitation with a direct link to the shared document.  I sometimes use these email links to quickly access and open shared projects.  The shared document is significantly faster to open from and invitation than through a browser.While some people debate which is better, the disc loaded word processor or the online word processor, I can only ask, "when was the last time you saw an iPad or tablet PC with an installed CD Drive?  So CD's will be something you tell your kids about, much like my memories of vinyl records and 8 Track cassettes.  Files these days are much bigger.  I can remember when Adobe fit its popular apps on a DVD. Now it takes over 7 similar discs, or an hour online to download the whole set. Industry can make hardware lighter and less expensive, if it is web based. The Microsoft Surface RT is under $300 to educators and the Google Chrome Book is similarly priced. 

I included screen shots of three popular online word processors in this blog so that you can see, they are remarkably clean, intuitive and similar.  There is another niche feature common to all three that will impress the old traditional HD saved users.  Each tool offers a downloadable hence installable application that mirrors the online storage for your account.  Google Drive, Zoho Docs, and Skydrive all synchronize files between your computer and in the cloud they reside.  This helps protect you from nasty lost data accidents. I find it helpful but not necessary.  These synchronized drives are like pacifiers or training wheels, they are just stepping stones for the conservative. By experience, I have toasted more hard drives and lost data than I have had lost data online.  What see more often is, people forget their user name and hence lose their files.  Having them on you hard drive is comforting.

In the classroom, there can no debate, online tools like Google docs are so popular because they work incredibly well.  The teacher can track which users have participated, students learn to cooperate, share and produce collaborative work much like they will in the business world where many are headed.