Digital Passports

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 remember meeting him at a TechCocktail event and spending a few hours talking with him about what worked and what didn’t when it came to Web 2.0 in education.  He shared with me a crazy idea for taking the Twitter concept spinning it around so it would suit a school’s needs.  

Fast forward to a few days ago and his nutty idea has become a reality, and I couldn’t be more happy for him.  And to be honest, for teachers as well.  It’s really a great tool to add to your web 2.0 arsenal, and one that you can use immediately with your students.While I do compare it to Twitter, the comparison really does Edmodo a disservice because it does so much more.  At it’s heart, people can create short messages (140 characters or less) and blast them out.  But here’s where it starts to deviate from Twitter already.  Those messages don’t get blasted out to the world, they get sent out to individuals, groups of people, or multiple groups.   You have much more control over who sees specific messages, instead of just sending them to everybody and anybody.  If people choose to respond to your post, their replies are threaded with the original, making it easy to follow conversations.

Of course, if you were to send out an assignment, you might want to send a handout or resource along with it.  With Edmodo, you can.  You are able to attach files, embed links, or even turn a basic post into an assignment or event complete with date metadata.   Very easy to send out an assignment along with attachment out to a specific class of your students.   Or you could send  your contact information and office hours to ALL of your classes.  Or send a video to your after school club for them to enjoy.  You get the idea.  Lots of control here. 

Need more?  You got it.  There’s even public pages available, complete with RSS feeds!   So if you have something that you DO want to share with the entire world, it will support that as well.  Students can save specific messages in their ‘locker’ to refer back to later.  Assignments and events hang around and will appear conveniently in the sidebar when their associated dates are coming up.  

If you see the value of microblogging and have ever thought to yourself, “This’d be perfect for class EXCEPT….”  then you’ll definitely want to check out Edmodo.  It’s not only a great way to introduce microblogging to students in a safe environment, but it’s also a great communication tool.  Gets my seal of approval!

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, I checked out GoAnimate and was pretty impressed with just how easy it was to create a decent looking animation.  They have a library of stock characters and backgrounds to choose from, along with sound effects, songs and more.  Choose a background, choose an object or chacter to put into it, and away you go!

I went with the classic classroom setting, populated it with students and noticed that if I clicked on a character, a contextual menu popped up.  Choices included movement (walking or sliding to a new location), or choosing one of about 20-25 animations (happy, sad, crying, laughing, and of course a few sophmoric ones).  I could also add callouts and captions as desired.  So I set a few up, and then clicked on Add Frame, which duplicated the current state minus all the callouts/captions.  Then I could add new actions or callouts.  String a bunch together and you have an animated story!

It took me about ten minutes to create that one. Honestly the hardest part was realizing that when I added Hall’s picture in, I added it as a background. This prevented me from cropping or resizing it. Once I made it an object, I was golden.

This brings me to my favorite part about it, which is that you can upload your own backgrounds, your own objects, faces, sound effects and so on. So you can grab backgrounds or clip art from DE streaming’s image library and use them to make animations. You have access to thousands of high rez images and sound effects to use in your animations. Just imagine what your students could come up with!

How about creating an animated example of the food chain? Or the rain cycle, using real images? Or maybe record the students singing “I know an old woman who swallowed a fly” and have the students create visuals to go with the song? Or have them create digital stories, or animate their traditional stories? Or perhaps you could do an animated Spelling Bee to help them learn new vocabulary words?

Just a few ideas off the top of my head, I’m sure you can think of more! Oh yeah, and if you do, share them by leaving a comment!

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 services, both standard and premium, for free.

Can’t beat that, can you?  For those of you that aren’t familiar with Animoto, it’s an incredibly easy way to make a sleek animated video out of your photo sets.  The whole thing is set to music, so it feels almost like a music video.   Checkout this Animoto created by the DEN in SL team featuring photos from their Halloween party!

So what does this mean for educators?  For one thing, they can make as many videos as they like, and that’s the full length videos, not the short ones.  You can upload your own music, add in voice overs, and import photos from Flickr, Facebook and other social sites.  BUT the best part is that with Animoto for Education, you are allowed to give your students access and let them create their own videos.

One feature that they added fairly recently was offline Animotos.  You could always email them out or embed them into your site, but now you can actually download them and watch them offline.   If you really want to go crazy, for $5 bucks you can have them create a DVD quality video that you can download and burn, or for $20 they’ll send a DVD directly to you.

Oh yeah, and as you’ll see on the front page, it’s even endorsed by Lance Rougeux

 Animoto is one of the marvels of Web 2.0…  It is a wonderful initiative and a true benefit to teachers and students.”

‘Nuff said!

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 is it ever pretty.  They really did a slick job of putting together some beautful ways to share your images.  While many people could argue over whether Flickr should be used with students in the classroom, I think we can all agree that it’s a heck of a good way to share images that you take at school.  Combine it with tools like Picsviewr and you’ve got an incredibly flashy way to share the learning.  I’m hoping that they add a way to directly link to specific image sets or tags soon, as well as a way to embed a live version of it into your own blog or site.  Not bad for a newcomer tho!

Check out this example displaying photos uploaded to the DEN account.

Got a favorite way to display Flickr photos?  Share it below!

This post was actually just an example of how to embed objects into the DEN blogs, but since some people enjoyed it, I’ll leave it up!

Learned about this from Scott’s blog, and thought it might be pretty useful.  Particularly if you use your cell phone as a video recording device!

Basically, FixMyMovie.com is an all in one movie cleaner upper.  Too dark?  It brightens it.  Too shaky?  It steadies it.  Seemed to do a decent job on their blog in their demo videos, but in my own test it didn’t work too great.    I’ve embedded two videos below, one uploaded straight to YouTube and the other run through FixMyMovie.

Original:

“Fixed” Movie:

I deliberately did it in low light and then in no light.  Unfortunately neither really came out.  I’ll be doing more tests, but I’m curious to know if anybody else has any ‘too dark’ videos and wants to try it out.  If you do, leave me some links!  Love the idea in theory, and hope it works in practice.

I am constantly amazed by how sophisticated some Web2.0 applications can be. Take for example, Mogulus. While there are several sites that allow you to broadcast live video streams, this really takes things a step further. And then another step further. And then yet another step further!

At its most basic level, Mogulus allows you to hook up a webcam and stream video to the internet. Click broadcast and you’re live! Easy enough right? However, what if you want to do something fancier… Well, with just a couple of clicks you can add text to the bottom of the page. So if you want to add a caption (who is on camera, what their blog URL is), you can just overlay that right on. You can also set up multiple messages, and change them on the fly.

That’s not the only thing you can overlay onto the screen though. You can insert in over the shoulder graphics (images only, no live video feeds over the shoulder), display full screen titles and text, but the one I really love is the Ticker. Just like CNN, you can put in a ticker along the bottom of the screen that is populated by text you designate OR you can even designate RSS feeds for it to display! Yes, that’s right, it will display your recent blog post titles. Best of all, they’re even clickable! Try that with MSNBC.

Need to integrate in some previously recorded video? Couldn’t be easier. Just import your clips in from YouTube, upload them yourself directly to Mogulus or just provide a URL to the video and it’ll snag it. Organize them into storyboards for easy access and then you can immediately cue up any clip and insert it into your live broadcast. Simple and intuitive.

Of course, nobody is online 24/7. So what happens to your channel when you aren’t there? Most channels just sit there. With Mogulus, you can queue up previously recorded broadcasts and imported clips and put them on a continuous loop! Then, when you go live it will just cut out the recording and put you on camera. You can even set up specific videos to be available on demand.

It really is an absolutely amazing service.  And even more amazing that it’s free.  They do insert in some short, unobtrusive ads, but in the options pages, you have the ability to opt out of them.  No hoops to jump through, you just need to say “No Thanks”.  Incredibly cool.

While I don’t know the details for certain, I’m thinking that this may wind up getting some extensive use at NECC this year.  What do you think, do we need a DEN TV channel?

One of the biggest challenges new bloggers face is finding an audience. It’s easy to say, “If you write it, they will come” but the reality is it just isn’t that simple. Everybody wants an audience. If you’re going to be putting the time in, you want your work to be seen.

One of my goals has always been to find a good way to share blog posts from other amongst the DEN community, to raise awareness of each other’s individual blogs as well as to provide a way for us to support each other. I think I’ve found a site that may allow us to do that in a very clean way that looks like it has a ton of upside.

I know many of you are probably thinking that RSS is the no-brainer way to do this. There’s two problems with doing it via RSS. The first is that it doesn’t distinguish one post from another. Let’s face it, there are some posts that we’re more proud of than others. If I were going to send somebody to my site and recommend they read something, it just might not be my most recent post. The other thing that RSS doesn’t handle well is frequency. When you aggregate dozens of feeds together, the people who post more often typically will dominate the RSS feed. Or the inverse happens, where you restrict how many items can be in the feed based on a number per blog, and some items wind up becoming stale because they aren’t being replaced by a new post.

So with all that in mind, I’ve been pretty excited by the upside I see in Adoptic.com. Essentially, it creates a widget that will scroll through recent posts by other blogs in the communities you choose to be a part of. However, as the blog owner, you have complete control over which exact posts will be pushed out into people’s widgets. You can decide which are worth promoting and which you might like to leave off. Not only that, you can assign a frequency to each post, allowing you to decide that you want certain posts to be displayed more often than others. Since there is only a limited amount of space available, for each post you must ensure that the title is brief and the summary is no more than 140 characters (Twitter users have PLENTY of experience confining themselves to that limit).

That’s all there is to it. Once you choose a few articles and join a community, your posts will then start appearing on other people’s blogs that are members of the same community. You can also hand pick members that you’d like to promote your posts on outside of your community. As I understand it, there are also ways to block specific people from promoting their posts on your blog, but I wasn’t able to find that feature when I looked.

I think this could be a great way to learn about each others blogs and to help raise awareness of the great work each of you do. So I requested that the people behind Adoptic create a Discovery Educator Network group and they agreed to!

The site is still in alpha, so dont’ be surprised if you find a few bugs. However, the great thing about being involved so early is that you have a chance to help mold the product into something that’s really relevant to your needs. It’s by invitation only right now, but if you leave a comment here I’ll send you an invitation so you can join in. As it stands right now, if you join the Discovery Educator Network community there, at the minimum your posts will be displayed on the DEN National Blog as well as Teach42.com. Of course, the more people that register, the wider a net we’ll be throwing. So help me spread the word!

Sample Adoptic widget

Thanks to Mike for sharing this one with me today.

I’ve played around with many a Timeline creator, but this one truly seems to stand out. Dipity.com can serve as a traditional timeliner, and it will work well, but it can also become your FriendFeed with benefits.

The basic view is exactly what you’d expect. Click and scroll, zoom in and zoom out, click on an event to pop up more details. However, that’s only the first tab. Second tab is list view, which just lists everything out with thumbnails in chronological order. Very clean, very easy to read. Third tab is Flip book style. Think Apple’s Coverflow. Just click and flip through events visually. Finally, the last tab is map view. That’s right, if you geotag y our posts, it’ll map them all out.

Just think about how handy that last one would be for doing timelines of biographies or historical events. The revolutionary war, both as a a timeline and then with another click you can see a map of where all the events happened. Would certainly help put things in perspective for those students who are geographically challenged.

Of course, those are available for every timeline. Dipity goes the Web 2.0 route all the way, and allows a timeline to automatically import feeds from Flickr, YouTube, WordPress, Twitter, Picassa, and any other RSS feed you care to submit. Why’s that so significant? Because if your students are studying Mark Twain, they can do blogs about his various characters and import in the posts. It can include images of them re-enacting classic scenes from his stories. It can audio of students reading aloud or discussing the book, videos of them honing their acting skills, Tweets between @NotHuckFinn and @NotTomSawyer. And so on. Use the tools that make the most sense, and then use Dipity to aggregate them all together visually. Not bad at all!

Oh, and just to go all the way with the Web 2.0 features, it assigns each post a level of relevance, and the posts that are most relevant are displayed prominently. I’m not sure about the formula it uses, but any visitor can vote an item up or down by click on on a teeny thumb.

Of course, a timeline can have multiple editors and can even have multiple people contributing at the same time. You can also choose to keep things totally private or open to the world. Very minimal learning curve. It took me about 10 minutes to create the timeline below, which highlights blog entries from the DEN teams’ blogs as well as posts from the Leadership Councils.

Stretch your thinking, how could you use a flexible timeliner like this in your classroom?

Via Cindy Lane

As I’ve often said, sometimes the simplest sites are the best. WakerUpper.com only does one thing and it does it well. You put in your phone number, date, time and message, and it’ll call you with it at that time. That’s it! Tadaaaaahhhh!

And yet, its simplicity is its brilliance. I do a fair amount of traveling, and use hotel wake up calls quite a bit. I’m always looking for a backup tho. I can’t depend on the alarm clock on the end table. After all, I still screw my own alarm up at home, and I’ve been using it for years! I hate the alarm on my cell phone. Either I’m constantly doing it wrong, or it just chooses when it wants to go off. So the idea of just setting another wakeup call is sheer brilliance to me.

It will also read aloud to you a message that you type in, making it perfect for reminders as well. Or, if you really need to get out of that meeting, I suppose you could always set it to call you at a convenient time.

Oh yeah, no signup or login is necessary either, which is really nice. However, you can choose to register for their beta and get access to features like snooze and recurring calls. There’s a mobile version of the site, but in order to use it you need to login. So it looks like it may be part of the beta right now as well.

Neat site and one I’ll definitely be using often!