Post by Matthew Ragan - -

As I mentioned in the “YouTube is my Homework?!” presentation on 1/14/10,  there are tremendous resources available on the net for video. These have great potential both in and out of the classroom, but the hard part becomes finding and distributing these pieces of media. Finding something relevant can be as easy and simple as a Google search, or it may take some more time to find the piece of media that illustrates your point (or counterpoint). To help you along in the process of finding some of the good stuff, here are a few places to start the search:

NASA
http://www.nasa.gov/

National Geographic
http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/index.html

The Internet Archive
http://www.archive.org/index.php

PBS
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/programs/index.html

The Discovery Channel
http://dsc.discovery.com/videos/

TED
http://www.ted.com/

Teacher Tube
http://www.teachertube.com/

Calculus on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/user/patrickJMT#g/c/58C7BA6C14FD8F48

Research Channel
http://researchchannel.org/prog/

YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/edu

The Smithsonian
http://www.smithsonianchannel.com/site/smithsonian/video/

Book Videos
Interviews with Authors
http://www.bookvideos.tv/

National Archives
http://video.google.com/nara.html

Teacher’s TV
http://www.teachers.tv/video

University of California Television
http://www.uctv.tv/

Academic Earth
Courses from Yale, Columbia, UCLA, and MIT
http://www.academicearth.org/

Video Lectures
http://videolectures.net/

Harvard at Home
http://athome.harvard.edu/

Open Courses at Yale
http://oyc.yale.edu/

Georgetown University
http://webcast.georgetown.edu/

Cornell University
http://www.cornell.edu/video/

What makes a fair trade athletic shoe company better for the environment? What is certification in fair trade and when does it matter? How can a company regain control of its inventory?

Students in Tamara Stenn’s Integrated Quantitative Literacy class, Measuring Fair Trade, are answering these and other questions for real fair trade businesses.

Stenn chose the topic of fair trade based on discussions with her management students. Those students recommended fair trade as a topic that interested them. Stenn then interviewed 12 companies to see if they would be a good fit to work with students. She chose six, based on whether the company was open to suggestions and whether the managers were available to work with students.

Student teams worked with company staff to choose an issue or problem to work on.  Teams displayed their results in a website that they create using Google Sites. Some  of the companies will be linking to this student work from their own websites.

Tamara talks about the results of the student projects, both for students and the businesses.

Student Lauren Vignola’s enthusiasm for the class is obvious. She loved the project, working in a team and learning about fair trade from the inside out.

Let’s imagine that you’re correcting a student paper and you note an error.  You wish your student was right there so you could just talk briefly to her… but you can’t, so you pick up your pen and start to write in the margin. You note her mistake and ask a few probing questions to try and help her for her next version of her draft.

STOP!  You can provide meaningful auditory feedback to your student by using Jing desktop video tool.  You can record your comments (you will need an external microphone or your computer must have a built in microphone)  and upload the video with one click.  Your student will get her paper with a url embedded as a comment near the the area that needs attention. Now she can hear your feedback in the context of the problem.

Jim Glading, adjunct professor at Southern NH University and Daniel Webster College used a Jing video to give feedback to a student who needed help with a citation for a paper.

Jing is s a desktop video program that takes a video of what is happening on your computer screen and allows you to do a voice over at the same time. There are many uses for Jing videos. You might use it to:

• Tour a great website and point out areas that might warrant special attention. Example: http://screencast.com/t/OaPnTE68s

• Explain project directions – Writing succinct directions can be difficult but when you add a supplementary video with voice over you’ve made a complex task simple.  Just display the written instructions that you already have and talk your way through them.  Providing a mix of audio, video, and text ensures that you’re instructions are understood by a greater number. Example: http://screencast.com/t/GPiHjq70Aet

• Create a talking PowerPoint – Display the show and do a voice over. Example: http://screencast.com/t/MAxmb1NPUy

And you can use Jing to free up class time. For instance you might want to address mistakes students are making while solving a particular math equation or you might want to introduce a new color correction technique, and so on. In any of these examples you can use Jing so that valuable class time can be used to focus on other areas.

You can post the urls to your Jing presentations in your BlackBoard course site.

Desktop video isn’t new but this tool has several advantages:
• It’s very easy to use
• You can store your videos on the Jing server and just paste the small url in an email, on your class web site, etc.
• It’s free and downloadable by anyone at http://www.jingproject.com/ !

If you would like to learn more about Jing, you can watch this 1 minute introductory video:
http://blog.jingproject.com/assets-jing/gettingstarted/index.html

If you have specific questions about Jing, please contact Judy Brophy (jbrophy@keene.edu).

Social Bookmarking: A personal and group organization tool

Social bookmarking sites such as Delicious are powerful web 2.0 applications used for storing, sharing, and discovering web sites. We all know that finding valuable web resources takes time and it can be difficult to organize sites in manner in which they can be used at a later date. Delicious is a social bookmarking website (very different from a social networking site like Facebook) where the real utility comes when users find creative ways to leverage the collaborative nature of the web to build a community of practice. Join Betsy Street and Steve Bigaj as they discuss how they conceptualized and organized a Delicious site to share resources across the state for the Monadnock Center for Successful Transitions (MCST).

Date: Tuesday 9/15/09
Time: Noon
Location: Student Center 309