Yesterday the world watched as our nation’s 44th President was sworn into duty! On his way to the office, President Obama utilized a huge a variety of 21st century tools – including things like Twitter, blogs, Facebook, texting, and more – to mobilize his base and get his message out. During his campaign he stated, [...]
Just like some aging celebrities, CNN got a botox like injection of youth from the ever growing facebook yesterday. ”This is CNN”. Isn’t the same without hearing James Earl Jones’ booming voice resonating the real message, “This is THE NEWS.” For many, including me, CNN has been just that, THE NEWS. It’s the channel to [...]
Ok guys this is THE way to start the year off! For the second year in the row I’ve had the opportunity to attend and be a part of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia Tech Conference and, I have to say, it was awesome…dare I say one of the best! Will Richardson kicked things off and [...]
Add Mike_Bryant’s channel to your page The above embed comes from SplashCast. I’ve played around with this service for about a month now, unable to decide if it’s any better than some other tools out there. On one hand, SplashCast allows you to throw a lot of different file types into a single presentation. This [...]
Video, as we all know, offers instant access to student attention. Video takes you across time, across boundaries, include microscopic and macroscopic boundaries. But video can also slow time and bend it to reveal physical phenomenon laying under day to day experiences. To see what I mean, visit the website for Discovery’s program Time Warp. [...]
Year in E-View. For the first post of the new year, I thought I would share some favorite posts from the DEN blogosphere from 2008. I took some informal polls, did some serious review and, wow: Note : Trolling great, old posts is a dangerous thing. The DEN home site is like the Brothers Grimm [...]
Take a Roman holiday–a Roman Empire holiday! I got an email from Googler AnnaBishop. She processes the Google Earth Pro requests from educators and wants them to keep on coming! So take advantage of that special offer by emailing GEEC@google.com (educators only! Everybody else pays the $400). She also let me know about the new [...]
If newspapers are old school, and aggregators are new school, then consider Tabbloid the rest area on the highway between the two. Tabbloid is a simple Web 2.0 application that allows you to submit a set of RSS feeds along with an email address, and then have sent to you a newsletter via email that [...]
Ok so the GEEKYBIRD was searching the net the other day in search of interactive, neat, easy, and free templates that you could use in your classroom. Here is a five of the coolest ones that he found: EclipseCrossword.com With over 2,000,000 downloads it goes without saying…this tool is pretty cool. EclipseCrossword is a fast, [...]
This is a fun one. It is the “ChromaKeyYou’veGottaHaveHeart” effect, but think of it as an X-Ray machine. It turns a 3×5 notebook card into an “X-Ray” machine that sees inside the human body– with a few video tricks. Remember the X-Ray Glasses ad from kids’ magazines? It’s that! For this, you need: A) Videos [...]
An exploding mind can be a good thing. I was asked to work with the faculty at the School of Education at Johns Hopkins on the topic of educational technology. This was an important group by itself– and representative of an extremely important segment in education: the teacher preparation programs across the country. They monitor, [...]
I think the title says it all. Sometimes, the best Web 2.0 sites are the simplest! Speechable let’s you upload your images and add bubbles to them. That’s it. Wham bam, done. When you’ve finished one, you can either use their embed code to put it in your blog/website or just download it yourself. I [...]
The YouTube video of “Dino Dude’s ‘The People Whisper’” is now reposted in the entry below. I had initially posted it with a limit of 25 views, which was a blunder. It is now up for everyone. And, no, I didn’t break YouTube. . When it’s ready, I’ll also post the PowerPoint and step bystep [...]
This is the video we built. The one that no one could see in the fabulous StreamAthon. I realize it went fast. Here are the tools and sites I used for “Ten Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do With Video (and Two You Did).” With one exception, all the tools and sites are free. [...]
This is post/paste from YouTube. We are demonstrating Web 2.0 at the fabulous Encyclo-media conference.
There’s more to share about using camcorders–and their great lens–for web cams. I’ve used the camcorder in the post below with Skype, iChat, and other apps, and will try a dead digital still camera next. But first! This message from Finland, via Steve Dembo’s Nokia cellphone. Not a bad “web cam” all by itself. The [...]
Warning: This site is pretty raw still, but it seems to function as advertised in my testing. Ever start having a great conversation on Twitter and realize that you have WAY more to say than you can fit into 140 characters? Or that you’re going back and forth with somebody, and you’d be better of [...]
There’s plenty of sites that will allow you to update dozens of your social sites at once (Ping.fm, hellotext.com, upcoming.me) which is handy to broadcast your messages all over the social web. However, what’s more difficult is maintaining each of those different sites and ensuring that your information is accurate! How many profiles do you [...]
Without a doubt, Twitter has taken the education community by storm. However, there really aren’t all that many people who are using it in the classroom. Let’s face it, it just isn’t designed to be used in a teacher/student environment. Edmodo is. Jeffrey O’Hara is the network administrator/webmaster for Community Unit School District 200 in Wheaton, Illinois. I [...]
I was video chatting with a colleague on the other coast last week and was frustrated with the limitation of my webcam. In this case, I was using the built-in camera in the Mac PowerBook, but the same is true of typical webcams on the PC side. They have a fixed focal length and have [...]
The ironically titled site SmartTeaching.org” blogged a list claiming “100 Best YouTube Videos for Teachers.“ Say it ain’t so. While there are some old favorites and familiar gems in the 100, there are also some terrible choices, videos that don’t serve teachers at all. Worse, old middle school teacher that I am, I am hard [...]
I’m almost embarrassed to admit this, but I really don’t understand Flash. I’ve sat in on a couple of workshops to learn how to use it, but there’s just something about “Tweens” and stuff that I just don’t get. Because of that, I’ve constrained myself to comic strips and the like. On a friend’s reccomendation, [...]
We’ve partnered with Animoto in the past, culminating in them giving free access to every DEN teacher during Teacher Appreciation Week. But now they’ve just gone over the top. We’re pleased to announce a new service exclusively for teachers. Animoto for Education (http://education.animoto.com) gives teachers, grades K-12, unlimited access to the full range of Animoto’s [...]
There’s a million Flickr hacks, and about half of those are different ways to view slideshows. But every once in a while you see one that just makes you grin in a silly way. For me, that’s Picsviewr. It may not be the most powerful, it may not have the most features, but gosh darn [...]
Okay, if you were lucky (or unlucky) enough to see the brief post from a day or so, you know that the “Latest Webinar in the Known World” refers to a little webinar malfunction we had in the DEN series. It was a perfect conspiracy of time zone changes, a dead computer, and vanished codes. [...]
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