Saturday, February 11, 2006

Blogs for Education

Blogs are making their way into classrooms as a means of educating and communicating with today's schoolage generation. One blog site offers free blogs to educators. I took a look at some of the blog links they have and found some useful information. Have you ever used a blog in a class you've taken that isn't an online class? If so, how did the teacher work it into the class? Was it useful? Did you like using it? What did you think of it in general?

Here's the blog link for the free one for educators: http://www.21publish.com/.

Friday, February 10, 2006

Streaming Knowledge to You

Everytime I go online and research something, in fact, just about anything, I come across something new. The technology growth and change never cease to amaze me. I've been aware of streaming media for awhile now, but I'm really starting to see its use in education and industry. For example, at Francis Tuttle I've been working with an instructor who had our audio/visual professional convert nearly 100 VHS tapes to streaming media so that his students could have online access to them. As I can't give you a link to view any of them because it would violate copyright laws (and you'd have to have a login ID and password anyway), I'm including a link to a business I found that is using streaming media to promote their company. It's kind of interesting to watch it, but what impresses me the most is how clean it is.

Here's the link, but either before or after you take a look about it, please share with me what you see as the benefits or drawbacks of using streaming media to educate today's youth and adults. Do you think it's more just another way to push something down our throats (like advertisements) or do you see real value in it in at least some ways? If you have children, do they like to watch streaming media on the Internet? Do you watch news casts and such that are done in streaming media format?

http://www.modevity.com/commercial/console.html

Saturday, February 04, 2006

Sharing the Knowledge by Linking


As I spend more time blogging in addition to online reading and studying, I'm finding there is a great deal out there about education and online learning. There are several blogs on blogger.com that discuss online learning. I thought I'd share here in my blog a few links to some of the ones that I found particularly interesting. Let me know what you think.

I'm also learning how to make blogs more interesting. One of the students (Minnie) in the class I'm taking suggested adding animations to blogs. I liked her idea, but had no idea how to do it. So I did some Internet research and found andreas.com where there's a good web page with info (http://www.andreas.com/faq-animate.html). And then I tried it. What do you think? Does this lava lamp work? (I won't be able to tell until I publish, so here goes...)