Here’s an 8-minute promo movie I made for my school over the last few hours. I share it in case anyone wants a resource that talks through a couple of class projects we did last year in my grade 9 history and English classes – and shamelessly boasts about how special my school is for [...]

I’ve been up all night catching up on my reading, which these days means feed-reading, more than anything. Two that struck a chord: 1. That LearnerBlogosphere Idea Sylvia Martinez on the red-hot GenYES blog writes several posts about getting teens to use Web 2.0 independently – like we adult edubloggers do – to develop their [...]

Awake and refreshed now. Neurons still firing from a heady mental cocktail blending the Shanghai Learning 2.0 Conference, my RSS subscription to Crooks and Liars (my favorite political blog), the creative potential of iLife for student-people and teacher-people alike and, five minutes ago, a dash of eureka inspired by reader comments to a week-old and [...]

The Fischbowl: What Free Software Should We Install? Karl’s readers are amazing on this one. Christmas in June. – post by cburell NickTech.org – Free Software Excellent list of free software links, with descriptions, for both Mac and PC. (I didn’t know there was a more convenient alternative to OpenOffice for Mac OSX!) Thanks to [...]

New Tools for Schools David Jakes‘ excellent intro to web 2.0 for teachers wiki. – post by cburell

Wimba Integrates with Moodle: Podcasting, Voice, Live Classroom Annotated Note to self: follow up on this. From the article: Wimba integration gives Moodle users the ability to: Add a Live Classroom, Voice Board, Voice Presentation Tool, or Wimba Podcaster to any Moodle course from the ‘Add An Activity Module’ drop-down menu Configure Live Classroom and [...]

Screencast-O-Matic Create screencasts online. Java-based. Still in beta, but a great tool. Resolution much higher than what I’ve been able to achieve with SnapzPro on my Mac. And yes, it’s cross-platform! So far, you can’t embed, though you can download as Quicktime, upload to Google Video or YouTube, etc, and embed from there, I guess–which [...]

Confession: I’m behind in my unit planning for history. I’m doing too much administrative stuff to stay abreast of my course-work. But an interesting thing just happened. Faced with a history class in 2 hours and no unit plan for World War I to World War II, I found myself setting up a new Wikispace–”A [...]

EyePod (Revised)Originally uploaded by LeggNet. Real quick: for the 1001 Flat World Tales project, we had each writer record and podcast him/herself reading the first draft for an audience of one: him/herself (gender pronouns stink). Podcasting for self-criticism. I know it’s not new, but it’s so easy now. And it seemed to help the young [...]

Regular readers have met Jessica (grade 9) before, in a post featuring her experiment with teaching a grammatically stylistic sentence pattern via a YouTube presentation. She’s the first, now, of all 130 of the 1001 Flat World Tales writers, to learn how to podcast and embed her own reading of her own second revision of [...]