• Legality of using YouTube video’s
• Why we use them
• Tips for finding good video’s
• Ways to Download them locally
• Tools for Remixing them
• Ways to incorporate them into our teaching

Area’s covered in the article:

• Office Replacements
• Notetaking
• Mind Mapping
• Studying
• Bookmarking
• Collaboration
• Calendar’s
• Calculation
• Other Tools

Check it out!

Now just imagine what you could do with this in education! Students keeping track of not only notes but all of their online content… video’s, RSS reads, webpages (marked up), audio, embedded html (like an online calendar) that automatically updates… WOW! Beyond all that, it is accessible everywhere and backed up on Zoho’s servers!

Teachers can use all of the same features, but the beauty really come in when you realize you can share it with others (chat online with them) and even publish it online for your students. Publish just a part of a lesson, publish a lesson plan for other teachers, heck, you can even embed it in a webpage. Wow! I’ll have to explore more when I am a little more rested (see previous post).

1. Make the Final Product SHAREABLE!

If a student knows that their work is going to a larger audience they will naturally take more time to work on it. The easiest way to do that is use Web 2.0 technologies like blogs, wiki’s, podcasts, and online video. Of course, you will need to be comfortable with those technologies yourself.

2. PROJECT’S, not Assignments!

Don’t give students a bunch of assignments, give them one larger project with a end result that students can see. Although this may take longer, students will naturally get more involved. They will want to be involved with the topic beyond the end of class.

3. Encourage students to use POPULAR TECHNOLOGIES they are familiar with!

The latest and greatest technology is more than likely taking over your student’s life’s. Encourage them to find educational uses for it. Almost every new web startup, or tech gadget can be used in an educational way. If you encourage the students to use these technologies they will come up with ideas that you could never have thought of yourself. (Oh, and they will think you’re cool because you encourage them to use their iPod in class. )

4. Give the Student’s OPTIONS!

Don’t limit your students to any specific medium of transfer. Some digital natives love music and would make an amazing music video, or write an amazing song. Others would do better with video like the example below.

EXAMPLE of a Great Project!

This morning I was reading the Infinite Thinking Machine, a blog I highly recommend, and I came across a video produced by some 12th grade students for an English project. The project is called MacBeth Wars and can be seen below.

From the introduction on Google Video:

This movie was done for a 12th grade english project, parodying Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” with a Star Wars style. It features the majority of the Macbeth storyline, and includes a 3-minute lightsaber duel between Macbeth and Macduff near the end.

Then the most amazing part…

We hope to release Macbeth Wars II, a project purely for our own fun, by summer 2007.

Wow! You don’t have to watch the whole production to realize that this project was probably WELL beyond what was required of them for the class. It has great digital effects, sounds effects, multiple video shots in each scene and appropriate background music. This project surely took hundreds of hours to complete AND they want to do another one in their FREE time! Now that is a good project!

What other things have you done, or seen done that really get student’s involved? What other projects have you seen that are just amazing? Do share in the comments!

Click To Play

There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don’t. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don’t know where to start.

A while ago I also blogged about why RSS is going to change the academic community. That might be of some interest to some of you too. Cheers!

UPDATE: Just in case you were wondering… I do have a feed for my blog too. You can see several ways to subscribe on the right… and even see that 77 (as of today) others have subscribed as well.

I know most of you use RSS already, but if you have not and would like to get into it… NOW IS THE TIME.  Here is a great introduction, including a link to an even longer and more comprehensive introduction by Will Richardson. 

I have long wanted to write a blog entry about how to do some of these things and I probably will still do that to some extent but tonight I came across this AMAZING Research 2.0 wiki (Thanks to Vicki Davis).  This is probably the best resource I have ever seen to show how the internet has changed research.  I particually recommend the Changing your Research Mindset section.  There are links to everything!

[On a sidenote... I am still amazed at how much blogging and instructional technology has motivated me.  Here it is 12:30 at night.  I should have been in bed a long time ago, but I couldn't go to bed without writing about this... and this... and this...  There is so much out there! Man, I love technology!  ]

A slightly related way of thinking about how to choose web projects is to take something that everyone does with their friends and make it public and permanent.

This is a great synopsis of what motivates students to use technology today.  They have something they normally do with their friends and make it public and permanent. 

Often (for good or bad) we as educators take over and try to take this ‘something that everybody does with their friends’ that is not ‘public and permanent’ and apply it to the classroom.  Sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn’t.  I will leave the examples up to the reader’s mind this time (I have to actually get some work done around here), but the article points out four good Web 2.0 examples… Blogger, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube.  I know at least three of them have been applied to education… still not sure about Twitter…

Top 10 list includes:

1. Book Finder
2. MynoteIT
   
3. Ottobib
4. Google Docs
5. Tada List
6. Meebo
7. Wikipedia
8. Zoho Show
9. Google Reader
10. Del.icio.us

Probably the best and most concise article I read was one written by Dan Farber on ZDNet blogs called “From semantic Web (3.0) to WebOS (4.0).”  In this article he includes an evolutionary diagram for the Web that I find very intriguing.  According to his article and the diagram, we are already on the far side of Web 2.0 with technologies like mashups, office 2.0 and social networking.

Web 3.0

What will the web be like in 5 or 10 years? Looking at how the internet
has already evolved and changed in just the past 5 years is very exciting for a techie like me.  According to this article, the next evolution is the ‘Semantic Web.’  For those who haven’t heard of this (like me) here is a short definition from Wikipedia:

“The Semantic Web is an evolution of the World Wide Web in which information is machine processable (rather than being only human oriented), thus permitting browsers or other software agents to find, share and combine information more easily.”

This sounds both amazing and scary.  Technology is finally getting to the point where we can take that final step into that fantasy realm where computers gain artificial intelligence.  One can’t help but to think of “I, Robot.”

How close are we?

The way I see it, one of the major goals in using technology in education is to manage the information we are processing day in and day out.

The web is already an amazing tool for combing the mountains and mountains of information out there, but we still have to learn how to search.  We use amazing tools like RSS readers, and widgitized webpages to pull information from all over the world.  But we are still left with a smaller mountain to sift through to find the most important and relevant information for us.

With the advent of the semantic web the information we are looking for will be increasingly more relevant and useful to us. 

Web 4.0

What I find most intriguing about the article is their vision Web 4.0 as a WebOS (operating system).  We are already moving that direction with Office 2.0 and so much of what we are doing already being online.  Think back to the last time your network went down and you didn’t know what to do…  

Read/Write Web posted an article about some evolutions coming with the Firefox 3.0.  The biggest development is support for offline applications through the web-browser.  This means that all that previously unavailable offline content will no longer be an issue. 

Predicting the Future?

Predicting what the web will be like in 10-15 years is very difficult.  There are very few people that saw what the web would be like today 15 years ago.    Has it changed the way we teach, learn and live… ABSOLUTELY. 

Will everything change in the future as well?  I think so… maybe not in the ways described in the article, but it will certainly change somehow.  What about you?  How could a semantic web, or a web operating system change your teaching and more importantly, your learning?   Do you see Web 3.0, 4.0 as something similar or different?