Objective 13 - Yippee for YouTube

YouTube is a video sharing website on which users can upload and share videos. YouTube was started by three former PayPal employees in February 2005 (this fact alone is amazing to me). By November 2006, YouTube was part of the Google family. YouTube is free and available to everyone on the Internet.

TeacherTube is an online community for sharing instructional videos; a mixture of classroom teaching resource as well as others designed to aid teacher training. TeacherTube was launched in March 2007 and was initiated by Jason Smith, a veteran teacher from McKinney, Texas. TeacherTube is a free resource and seems to be mostly geared for teachers.

Launched in November 2006, SchoolTube is a teacher monitored video sharing website. It is dedicated to supporting educational institutions and all of their students to broadcast, and share original videos through a web experience. SchoolTube provides many opportunities including: free SchoolTube Channel for your classroom as well as video hosting for educational and scholastic organizations. You can sign up for a free SchoolTube account. This site has a different “feel” than TeacherTube. There seems to be more content dedicated or created by students.

Discovery Education Streaming has 5,000 full-length videos segmented into 41,000 content-specific clips tied directly state and national standards. Discovery Education Streaming requires an annual subscription; the Academy has such a subscription. When you view a video there are several tabs – segments, related materials, citation of the video, and quick access to more videos in the series (if there are any). Teachers can save a video (or segments), create lessons, writing prompts, and quizzes which students can access via a uniquely created URL.

TED is a small nonprofit devoted to “Ideas Worth Spreading”. This movement began in 1984 as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: “Technology, Entertainment, Design.” TED Talks, widely disseminated on the internet, are subject to a strict time limit of 18 minutes. I found many TED Talks on YouTube. More than 500 TED Talks are provided for free viewing online; I found many TED Talks on YouTube.

I have used all of these resources plus Google videos and Yahoo videos to supplement my classroom teaching and my professional development. I know many people are concerned with the content on YouTube – some is disturbing, but here in the US we operate under the right to free speech. If I come across content that I do not want to see then I stop the video. Sites like TeacherTube and SchoolTube have content that is monitored. Discovery Education Streaming content is of high quality plus there are many tools that educators can utilize to enhance the viewing. I have a high opinion of TED Talks. These are my personal free professional development opportunities. The fact that our school does not block these sites is a testament to our belief in Goal V – “personal growth in an atmosphere of wise freedom.”

If you did not take the time to watch An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube – you should do so at some point. I found the video very informative. I was fascinated by this comprehensive study of people and their interactions with YouTube.

My blog is written and now I need to decide which of my favorite videos to embed in my blog plus determine whether if am willing to try my hand in uploading a video. I thought about which videos I wanted to share with this audience…there are several. First I thought about some of my favorite Tex Avery cartoons: Symphony in Slang, The Farm of Tomorrow, The House of Tomorrow, Car of Tomorrow, TV of Tomorrow – but many of the readers of this blog are too young to even know about these classics. Then I thought about some of the powerful message videos: Did You Know 1.0, Did You Know 2.0, Did You Know 3.0, Did You Know 4.0, Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us, and If the World Were a Village. Or I could just do something for fun like: Honda Commercial - Choir FX or the Honda Civic Musical Road or Sound of Music in Belguim. I finally decided on a TED Talk by one of my favorite authors, Daniel Pink. I was able to find this video on YouTube and TED. Pink is talking about the surprising science of motivation; this is the heart of his latest book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, a fabulous read.

Objective 12 - A Whopping Wealth of Web 2.0

Of the listed Web 2.0 tools in Thing 12, I have used several: Gliffy, Glogster EDU, SlideShare, Weebly, and Wordle. I played and explored many of the others: MixBook, Picnik, Pikistrips, PollDaddy, Quizlet, Ta-da List, Timetoast, ToonDoo, and Writeboard. There are other Web 2.0 tools that I have used that are not a part of this list:

• Diigo - Diigo is a social bookmarking website. It allows users to highlight any part of a webpage and attach sticky notes to specific highlights or to a whole page.
• Doodle - Doodle helps scheduling meetings and other appointments. Doodle is simple, quick, free, and requires no registration.
• iKeepBookmarks – iKeepBookmarks is a web-based bookmarks manager.
• jott – Jott’s voice-to-text services let you capture thoughts & reminders, send emails & text messages.
• Line Rider - Line Rider is a fun online game where you draw tracks and ride the lines.
• mosaickr - mosaickr is an online service which allows creating great looking mosaics from flickr photos, download them or even print them on posters.
• My50 – My50 allows you to create a list of things that you wish to do in your lifetime, set deadlines, add pictures and descriptions, read our suggestions and other peoples lists.
• Prezi - Prezi is a zooming presentation editor.
• Protopage - Protopage is a free RSS news reader and start page.
• rockyou - rockyou.com is a social media site that allows photo sharing by adding music in slideshow format.
• Thumbstacks - Thumbstacks is a bare bones but functional application that allows users to build presentations online and present them via a permanent URL.
• Vyew - Vyew is a live collaboration and web conferencing tool.
• Wetpaint - Wetpaint is a web page that a group can edit together.

One of new favorite Web 2.0 tools is JigZone. Completing the digital jigsaw puzzles allows me a few moments to forget what I actually should be doing and relax doing something I really enjoy – jigsaw puzzles.

Objective 11 - Delightfully Delicious

I feel like the 23 Things project was created so that I could achieve some of my personal goals. It seems like all of the “Things” that I have put on my to-do list are part of the 23 Things. Such is the case with Delicious. I love exploring the Internet and finding websites to share with my colleagues on their current topic of study. I have tried a couple of ways of sharing my wealth of sites. Years ago I exported my sites to a word document and emailed them to the appropriate people. They spanned so many pages that it really was a cumbersome document. Then I tried an online bookkeeping site, ikeepbookmarks. The problem with this site is that I still had the bookmarks on my personal computer and only uploaded to ikeepbookmarks periodically. During the Christmas break of 2008 my husband bought me a new personal computer and I upgraded to Office 2007. To move all of my favorites from the old system to the new system he stored them on my external hard drive. I thought – this is it, my time to organize my bookmarks in a usable way. As with many of my little pet organizational projects, something more urgent trumped the process. I started keeping track of the sites I wanted to bookmark in a word document (it is not 192 pages long) – truly not efficient. I played with Delicious for only a few minutes and I was hooked. This is exactly what I wanted. Up until watching the video, I could not articulate my personal need for tags. I have so many sites that fall into several categories (in my mind). In my past methods of tracking my bookmarks I would bookmark the same site under different categories. Delicious is so easy to use. I immediately started with a set of sites I found in the latest issue of Tech & Learning, Web Tools for Enhancing Collaboration.

Now all I need to do is share my Delicious page with my friends.

Objective 10 - Making Meaning Out of Mashups

It is sad, but true, that I did not understand the concept “mashup” prior to completing Thing 10. I have played with many of the Flickr toys in Big Huge Labs in the past as well as Spell with Flickr, but I did not understand these were mashups. One can easily get trapped in these two sites playing with photos (at least I did). I envision students using some of these tools to really spice up some of their projects. I discovered applications that I emailed to friends and I was able to sketch out some future gift ideas for family members. I thought that Flickr Color Pickr and some of the items in Flickrbits.com were interesting, but I could not see a use for them. In exploring the non-Flickr related mashups I found the similar results. Taking up the challenge to find my own mashup, I discovered Obamiconme. This site allows users to make images in the style of Shepard Fairey's iconic "Hope" poster.

Here are samples of my mashups:

Spell with Flickr

Big Huge Labs

Dumpr

Flickr Color Pickr

Obamiconme

Objective 9 - Fun with Flickr

Creating a Flickr account and uploading pictures was so easy! Uploading my personal pictures to Flickr may be an obsession for me. The Common Craft video outlined one of my worries for our family pictures. Until my son was sevenish we took pictures the “old way”. I have eight albums full of pictures of him and then we went digital, every couple of years upgrading our cameras. Now everyone in the family has a digital camera and there are never limits on the number of pictures we take for any and every occasion. We have traveled to some amazing places and taken some great photos – all of which are stored on my external hard drive. We have not shared these and rarely look through them – what a shame! On my list of things to do is to scan the printed pictures so all photos are digital. Uploading to a site like Flickr can be part two of this task.

Both Compfight and Morguefile are excellent places to locate pictures for classroom presentations. These are also great places to direct students who are looking for images. So many times students simply go to Google Images. There are other choices; we simply need to share this with them.

Kitty

Kitty
Originally uploaded by Angie Saylor

I cannot put a picture of Astro on my blog without one of Kitty. Yes, my cat's name is Kitty. When she was a kitten and my son was little, we simply referred to her as the kitty. So, that became her name!

Astro

Astro
Originally uploaded by Angie Saylor

The notorious Astro perched on the arm of chair in the family room. If his tail was showing it would be wagging away.