Instant Messenger Services: Yahoo! Instant Messenger http://messenger.yahoo.com/ : Use this service to communicate real time with your group members. (Or MSN IM)
Blogs: Use any of the free blogging services to maintain a personal journal of your project experiences. Let you group members know about this blog so that they can read and make comments.
You can use blogging software as a website/communication portal for parents and students.
Some free blogs are:
http://www.edublogs.org/
http://www.blogger.com
Podcasting: Record meetings you have, save the audio file to your web server, and link to your blog. You can user feedburner (http://feedburner.com/fb/a/home) to create a feed to your blog, so that people can subscribe to it using iTunes. As an alternative, if you have GarageBand3 and a mac.com account, it’s very quick and easy to create and publish podcasts.
Wikis: Wikis are web pages that really represent how we think. They encourage non-linear thinking and how concepts/words relate. Others can edit and contribute to a wiki. A huge example of a collaborative wiki is http://wikipedia.org An easy, and free, wiki service is available at http://PBwiki.com It’s so easy . . . really.
You can use a wiki to create a course web site. (Most wikis allow you to “protect” you sheets so that others can’t edit them. But you might want to be REALLY revolutionary and let others edit your materials, make comments, etc.)
Concept Mapping: Use Inspiration software (http://inspiration.com) to create concept/semantic maps to further explore and relate ideas and concepts. I really like a free software called CMaps: http://cmap.ihmc.us/download/
Free video uploading services:
Google is CONSTANTLY coming out with new software and other web tools. My son recently told me about a free video upload service (you need to install google’s software to do this, it’s beta version right now), but it’s WAY COOL: https://upload.video.google.com/ (Google converts your mp4 video into their video format, which reduces the quality somewhat.)
Internet Archive: (http://www.archive.org/index.php) The Internet Archive is a public nonprofit that was founded to build an "Internet library," with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format.
Our Media.org: (http://www.ourmedia.org/) A branch of the Internet Archive. Provides free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software.
Blip tv: (http://blip.tv/) If you are having trouble with our media (they are in alpha stage right now) try Blip.tv as a reliable alternative. They're free and they'll even post to your blog for you.
Community Calendar: Use many of the free services available to post a community calendar that parents/students can access. Yahoo has one, as well as google and many others. Investigate which one would work best for you.
Movie/podcasting production: If you have access to an Apple computer, iMovie makes movie editing and production very easy. Also, GarageBand3 in Apple makes podcasting very easy too. You can use Apple’s iWeb program (you’ll need an account) to easily publish podcasts online.
Free QuickTime Player for Windows: You can download this free player to view movie files: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/win.html
Video editing/compression software:
QuickTime Pro (about $30) offers video compression to QuickTime movie format (viewable on all platforms) and mpg4, as well as iPod format (m4v).
Avid Free DV: (http://avid.com/freedv/index.asp) Free video editing/compression software. I’ve not tried this yet, so I can’t recommend it, but wanted to let you know about it.
iMovie: Included in Apple applications. Very easy to use and powerful. Can compress movie files and edit videos.
Windows Movie Maker: Another free movie editing software included on Windows Operating System. Very good too, but limited when you publish to the web, since files are only viewable on PCs, not Apples.
Sorenson Squeeze: This costs money, but they do have education prices. It’s very easy to use and can compress video files into many formats that can be used by Breeze Presenter, such as flv and swf. http://www.sorensonmedia.com/
Online Surveys: Zoomerang http://zoomerang.com is a great service that allows you to create instant surveys, questionnaires. The basic service is free, with paid services offering downloads of data to text delimited files for easy data analysis.
Additional ideas on using technology in the classroom:
Kids LOVE to use technology in creative, unusual ways and are keen to try. For instance, have students create a podcast as a book review. If you don’t know how to do this, have them figure it out and show the rest of the class. It’s okay not to be an expert at everything. Besides, that’s impossible anyway!
Create a Yahoo! Group for your classes, with your students and parents easily able to stay in touch. You could use only first names and not post pictures or any info about the students. Also, I’m pretty sure you can set up a group as non-public, so that the search engines can’t find it.
Instead of paper-based journals, have your students create a blog on edublogs. In this way, they won’t “lose” their papers and can create and edit content easily from any location with Internet access. They can take their best writing and create another blog, for a final project/evaluation.
Have students collaboratively construct and participate in a wiki, addressing a problem or question and finding/discussing ways of solving it.
The list is really endless. It just requires that you go beyond your comfort level in technology and take chances.
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