May 2008 Unmeeting

R2D2 Projector
Really just for fun, but still pretty cool.

New York Public Library Digital Archives
A great collection of images, text, and audio from the New York Public Library.

Calisphere
A collection of primary resources related to California history.

Acrylic Times
Collects RSS feeds and allows you to read the news in a virtual newspaper format.

Dipity
Timeline generator can add YouTube videos and RSS Feeds. Create your own timelines or use ones that are there.

Revolution
Use to create your own customized web browsers like John Patten did and showcased on Edutonica.

Google Survey
Use Google Docs to create a spreadsheet, click share, and then others can respond.

Ask 500 People
Ask a question and people respond.



April 2008 Unmeeting

Yesterday on TappedIn...

I did not actually participate in the TappedIn session, but yesterday Bernie Dodge was conducting a little session over there on his latest thoughts on WebQuests and Constructivist thinking..."Rethinking the WebQuest Taskonomy: A New Taxonomy of Authentic Constructivist Tasks."

The chat transcript is available here: www.webquest.org/act/tappedin.htm

What was significant is he is trying to break it down (simplify it) into five verbs: design, decide, analyze, and predict. Within each of these verbs, he further breaks them down to address the types of project based learning activities (webquests) occur within each.

It seems this conversation yesterday at TappedIn was just part of the process he's going through to refine his ideas. Should be interesting to follow the progression.

I too think we could do more of this type of instruction in class. He also provides some interesting tidbits as a result of questions from the participants, such as, how many of these types of activities should a teacher be doing?

He references some additional resources that provide some of his early thinking on creating a "Taxonomy of WebQuest" and I've add the links here if you just want to quickly click through them.

http://webquest.sdsu.edu/taskonomy.html (1998)

http://webquest.sdsu.edu/designpatterns/all.htm (2001 ?)

Whether you call them WebQuests, or project based learning activities, or collaborative assignments, or whatever, the info he's currently kicking around in his head may be helpful in formulating your ideas too.



ClickTale

As a blogger, I know one of the most challenging things can be figuring out whether anyone is actually reading your page. Lots of people read, but few leave comments. To fix this problem I have employed the use of vistor tracking services such as Google Analytics and Statcounter. While both of these provide some good basic data, ClickTale goes beyond these by actually recording a short flash video anytime someone views your site. You can watch the video and see what parts of your page people are actually reading and where they are clicking. Woopra, another analytics program, also allows you to chat with current site visitors. In the future I'd like to see more students blogging. One of these vistor tracking services would be a handy way to show students that they are actually writing for a real audience.

Stumble!

It very well could be that anyone reading this is already a Stumbler, but as far as web resources go its kind of handy and I always find useful things.

HippoCampus
A collection of multimedia tutorials that are correlated to curricular areas and

PicLens
A neat way to view images search results from a variety of sources.

UStream.tv
Stream out a presentation for others to watch. While its streaming they can chat back to you and the session is recorded for later. Broadcasts can be set up.
Check out Brian's Wiki

CamTwist
Use to add special effects for videos and UStream.

CTAP4 CyberSafety Training Resources
Website
Workshop Information
Administrator Resources
Steps to Removing Information

Search Me
A pretty way to search.

Evernote
See something really cool online and you don't want to forget it? Take screen shots and add them to your Evernote notebook. Has a desktop client that syncs with a web client. Has optical character recognition so you can search for words in a screen shot. You can publish and of your "folders" inside of your Evernote notebook. It creates a URL you may share with anyone.

Picknik
Online photo editor. Works well with Flickr.