Saturday, August 2, 2008

Thing #20... YouTube, TeacherTube and Zamzar

What a learning adventure I have had this early morning! Although I've known about YouTube and TeacherTube, I surely didn't know that Google and Yahoo also offered their own video hosting sites. But who cares, now that I am aware that Blinkx is the video search engine par excellence!

I thoroughly enjoyed viewing the 3 video samples. Jackie Halaw's Three Steps about Competing, Cooperating & Collaborating as literate skills for the 21st century learner was very upbeat and inspirational. It made me want to try epals again --I had tried pen pals with my french classes and it didn't work out so well. I absolutely loved the concept of global collaboration and would never have thought about it, even after learning about wikis yesterday. What a great video to inspire me for the upcoming school year; COMPETE, COOPERATE, COLLABORATE might be my motto for 2008-2009!
I also enjoyed the video snipped advertising The Portal to Texas History and was surprised to find Elvis' army picture! I found out that he was stationed at Fort Hood for a while!

My best discovery today is without a doubt the URL converter Zamzar -- surely wish I had known about it when I was trying to show that Cinderella tease by the Houston Ballet! It does indeed sound less complicated than the other way to play videos that might blocked & it doesn't require sign-up for the basic free service! I have however uploaded the Powerpoint YouTube Instructions to my Google Docs, so as to always have it available as a back-up plan! Gee, I am frightening myself with all this technology usage!

I used the "Advanced Search" box in YouTube to find this cute little video on French prepositions. It was really easy to narrow down my video search by language and also by playing length (less than 4 mn long!)



In TeacherTube, I looked up "English as a Second Language" and found a short video about the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) which could be a quick way to remind teachers across all content areas to take advantage of the wonderful professional development opportunities offered in SBISD as to how to make input comprehensible for our English Language Learners.

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