Digital Passports

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 just may be the downside.  The presentation still seems a little, cluttered.  SplashCast is free (NO LONGER FREE :(  )and integrates seemlessly with FaceBook, Flickr, Twitter and YouTube.  Take a look at the above presentation I’ve put together and let me know your thoughts.

UPDATE!!

SueH provided some great feedback, exactly what i was looking for. Thanks SueH.

(1) Re: free? In their blog, Mike (CEO) states they have decided to discontinue their free accounts for user generated content as of Feb.11. On Feb.5, he announces they will extend that service for existing users for a few more months while they determine whether there is enough demand for a subscription-based service.
(2) Re your sample Splashcast? I thought that the pictures would be linked to the podcast. Clicking them did not take me forward or backward through what you were saying. Also, when I clicked the sound button at the end, it restarted the podcast over top of the automatic one that was already playing and I could not find a way to turn that off. Even on full screen, I found the documents hard to read. I would have been interested to see video quality.
(3) I tried to view several of their sample ‘webisodes’, but apparently Canada is blacked out. All I got is: “The requested video cannot be displayed in my region.”
(4) I’m always a little leary of a website that does not publish their prices where I can easily find them.

The above presentation combines, a podcast(mp3), DE streaming Training Guide(PDF) and photos from the Kankakee Event(via Flickr).

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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 aggregates together all the recent postings from those blogs.

Why would you want to do this?  Think about that administrator that you’re trying to get to drink the Kool-Aid but doesn’t quite get why blogs are important.  Gather a set of feeds that you think would appeal to them and create a custom newspaper.  Then, either forward it to their email, or if you don’t think they’d read that, print the darn thing out and stick it in their email box!  Repeat that on a regular basis as needed.  That may help put them in touch with newer thinkers, but in a format that they’re already comfortable with… print.

Why else might you use it?  Perhaps you might want to share a few of your favorite bloggers and drop the newsletter off in the teachers lounge every week.  Or pass along to your colleagues a digest of your blog and others in your district.  Maybe you’d like to create a digest of all your student bloggers to send him periodically, especially for non-tech savvy parents.  I think it could make a great midway step, for people who are ready for Web 1.5 perhaps.

I made a quick demo of how it works so you can see it for yourself.  Or just visit Tabbloid.com and give a it a whirl!

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 mentioned this site during the Streamathon and a few days later I got an email from Laurie Sullivan.  She shared a blog entry where she used the site to create some images that she plans to use with her students!  Check them out!

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 just… TALKING to them.  Well, that’s where Phweet means to step in.

When you boil it down, it is basically YackPack announced on Twitter, combined with a handy permalink and message board.  Phweets can be 1:1 and sent directly to somebody, or they can be open to the general public.  In fact, a non-directed Phweet can even hang around and exist after the host has left the room.  Anybody who joins in will be able to talk directly to each other.  I’m not sure how many people it supports.

The owner of the Phweet can approve people joining or set the site to auto approve incoming people.  You can also kick people out if things get too heated.  Combine that with message board support and you have a nice little system for turning a disjointed series of tweets into an actual conversation.

I’m not sure just how widespread this one is going to become, but I love the idea and it worked just fine in my test. I’m impressed to say the least and recommend that you  keep this one handy.  If you use Twitter, you’ll know when it’s time to break it out.

 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 have that have an old URL for your blog?  Or don’t have your current job listed?  Or even your corret marital status!  Yes, that has happened to me.

AtomKeep attempts to rectify that problem.   It supports a laundry list of sites including Twitter, Ning, Plurk, Technorati, Linked In, Facebook, Digg, Flickr, YouTube and more.  Noticeably absent is MySpace.  Whenever you add one of these sites, you have the option of importing the information there or merging it with your existing information.  From then on, you’ll be able to sync that information across all of those social sites.

For example, LinkedIn is one of the few sites that I really make it a priority to keep as up to date as possible.  So when I added it to AtomKeep, I specified that i wanted the information in LinkedIn to overwrite any other profile information I had.  Then, by clicking the sync button, you can sync up that information to any or all of the sites you have profiles on.  Some sites have information that’s unique to that site and you can update that within AtomKeep as well.I tried this and it works great!

Possibly too well though.  For example, I keep my professional photo on LinkedIn, but use an image of my son on Twitter as my avatar.  When I sync’ed up, it overwrote my Twitter avatar and replaced it with my professional headshot.  It also overwrote my bio, replacing it with what I use on LinkedIn.  Not a big deal, but you have to remember that when you click sync, it’s gonna sync ALL your information! I wouldn’t mind have the ability to opt out of certain fields I guess, but on the whole I think the benefits outweight the issues.

So if the madness of trying to keep up with your social sites has you pulling your hair out at the roots, give AtomKeep a try.  It has helped me stop feeling like I have multiple personalities and get back to being just one person with a few accounts.

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!

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.