Thing 21--Podcasting, Vidcasting, and Me!

I attended a session on podcasting at our spring tech coordinator's conference presented by our keynote speaker, Miguel Guhlin of San Antonio ISD. Since then I've planned to do a podcast of one of this year's Bluebonnet books, but haven't found (made!) the time. So, once again, the 23 Things is providing the motivation for me to do something that I've wanted to do! Yeah! I hope that I can create podcasts for all 20 books on this year's list, but that might be a slightly lofty goal...maybe a better goal would be to do five books this year. I have used Photostory a few times since learning about it last summer at a workshop and I love it! It gives such a professional look to a presentation and is SO user friendly. I also like the fact that you can make it as simple or complex as you choose: there are many 'bells and whistles' that you can add to your story to make it even more attractive, or you can just stick with pictures and music. Either way it still comes out great! I have the absolute minimal amount of experience with Audacity, but I would love to be able to spend some more time with it. It has lots of capabilites for audio editing that aren't available in PhotoStory so I hope to get more familiar with it. Maybe I should make that another of my goals for this year! Here is my vidcast of a booktalk for 'Crossing Bok Chitto: A Choctaw Tale of Friendship & Freedom' by Tim Tingle. This is a fantastic story, and I predict, this year's winner of the Texas Bluebonnet Award!

Thing 20 or YouTube, TeacherTube, We all Tube Together!

When I searched using the term 'library' I found this cute Sesame Street skit with Cookie Monster, who happens to be my favorite SS character. I plan to use it to kick off my kindergarten classes this year!

No Cookies in the Library




I also saw this video on The Faculty Room Blog, which I subscribed to on my Google Reader, and since it is so apropos to our course, I'm adding it here.

Learning to Change--Changing to Learn



Life Cycles is a major topic in science for kindergarten as well as 2nd grade so I searched for videos on that subject. I found this video about the life cycle of a butterfly, which would be a great introduction for kindergartners.

Life Cycle of a Butterfly



I'm very glad to find out about Zamzar because YouTube is blocked in my district so it will be nice to have a way around that barrier. Our district subscribes to United Streaming so we do have access to many great educational videos through that resource. It is great to have access to so many videos online (and brief ones, at that!) because you can often show the students something that will get the point across much quicker than many words might do. Hmmmm....makes me think that I probably shouldn't spend any $$$ on new DVDs to add to the video collection!

Thing 19--Backpack

In looking through the web 2.0 awards, I came across an organizational site known as Backpack. While it is a 'paid' site, it offers some really neat, user-friendly tools for a small group Intranet site. It includes a shared calendar, easy-to-make pages, to-do lists, a newsroom for group communication, reminders, a journal, and many other useful features. The pricing is fairly reasonable--$99/month for up to 40 users, $49/month for up to 15 users, $24/month for up to 6 users--but with so many other tools available that can accomlish the same tasks, I doubt many school districts would choose to spend their limited budgets on a subscription. We did have an Intranet when I first started working in FWISD and it was a great way to keep our library department connected. We have since transitioned to using Outlook and while it is not as user friendly as our previous application (and nowhere near as sexy as Backpack!) it does get the job done. I could see Backpack being very useful in a situation where there was a small group working together remotely. It is a very nice, well-planned site that offers an easy-to-create and use Intranet for small groups. I would much prefer to use a site like this, with its colorful, clean layout, but alas, unlimited budgets are still a far-off dream, at least in my district!