Showcasing Student Teachers: Fall 2010

Last Friday, I helped to organize Millersville University’s second Student Teacher Instructional Technology Showcase.  For this event, we selected ten student teachers that were using technology in innovative ways in their classroom.  Our goal was to highlight the outstanding work being done by our student teachers and to showcase their use of instructional technology to support and assess student learning.

This was the second semester we’ve held the Showcase and I believe it was a real success.  We set up the event like a poster session at a conference with each student teacher being able to demonstrate and explain their lesson in an informal manner.  Overall, we had almost 200 students, supervising teachers, and faculty members attend.  I’m including the handouts that the student teachers distributed at the event for those of you who might want to take a look.

Cheryl Bowman: Assessing Students with Smartboard Personal Response Systems

Shaun Boyer: Presenting with Powerpoint

Rachael Callahan: Sharing Poetry with Wikis

Lena Cordero: Sharing Student Work

Mike Gau: Engaging Students with Blogs

Jim Moran: Assessing with Review Games

Kasey Mulberry: Collaborating with Google Docs

Mary Nolt: Using Glogster with Geography Students

Rebecca Nissley: Collaborative Writing with Wikis

William Wolfgang: Making Music Videos

Converting files easily with Zamzar

Recently, I had a group of students show up at my office doorstep pleading for help with a digital story project they were creating.  Their video camera had recorded a certain type of file that was not recognized by the video editor they were using and they were panicking.  How could they get their video editor to open the files?

My first thought was to direct these students to check out my post on Zamzar on my blog.  A quick search of my blog, however, showed that I have never featured Zamzar on this site.  Never.  I’ve been using Zamzar for years but I’ve never featured it?  Shocking.

Zamzar is a multi-purpose site which allows users to convert from one file type to another.  Remember when Microsoft Office switched from DOC files to DOCX files?  Loads of people were struggling with trying to open newer Word documents through their older version of Word.  With Zamzar, those files can be converted.  Zamzar can also convert between different audio, video and image files.  Want to save something as a PDF for Adobe Acrobat?  Zamzar can handle that, too.  Want to download a YouTube video?  Zamzar has that covered as well.  It’s a one-stop file conversion and download multiplex.  And it’s FREE and pretty easy to use.  Upload the file, select the type of file you want to convert into and then enter your email address.  In a few minutes, you get an email with a link to download your converted file.  It’s that easy.

Although it’s free and tremendously useful, Zamzar receives financial support through advertisements.  Most of the ads are for benign products and services (insurance companies, magazines, and such) but the pop-up nature of some of the ads can be really annoying.

Although Zamzar is not really an instructional tool, it can certainly be helpful as students develop multimedia projects or when they encounter some awkward file type.  Often instructional technologists discuss the need for developing digital literacy in students.  The idea is that students need to be literate in locating, understanding and analyzing information online.  In addition to developing these skills, I think students should develop proficiency with a toolbox of applications that can help them tackle the host of technical challenges that can emerge in working a digital world.  I believe that Zamzar is one of those tools.  For some help using Zamzar, be sure to check out the short tutorial below.

Visualizing statistics with Gapminder World

You may have seen the TED videos where Hans Rosling shows some amazing statistics then shows how the statistics change over time.  I know the first time I saw his presentation showing how life expectancy and family size has changed over the last 45 years I was not only amazed at the data but how he displayed the data as well.  Much like Hans Rosling himself, the graphs were dynamic and colorful.  To get a sense of what I’m talking about, check out this TED video on Hans Rosling showing “the best statistics you’ve ever seen.”

One of my first thoughts when seeing the TED presentation was “How can I get my hands on that software?”  Well, now all of us can.  The software, called Gapminder World, is available online as a web-based application and as a free download for off-line use.  It would be a great addition to a presentation that discusses world-wide data or a lesson focuses on changes that have happened historically. Want to see how international math scores relate to income?  You can check it out here.  Want to see how life expectancy has changed over the last 200 years around the world?  You can see that here.  The site offers a menu of topics that can be visualized but also allows users to customize graphs by selecting from different data sets to show.  My only reservation about the application is the data sets available.  While there are pages and pages of data sets available to visualize, the information isn’t always consistent.   Some of the data sets are really expansive, drawing from hundreds of countries over decades of time.  Other data sets have less information from international sources or only has data from a few years.  I’m sure this is to be expected considering the variety of collection methods that different countries use. The site is very easy to use and a video tutorial and a users manual are available for first time users.  The site also offers great teaching resources for how educators can use Gapminder World in their classrooms.  I’ve included links for all of these resources below.

Gapminder World Tutorial

Gapminder World Users Manual

Gapminder World Teaching Resources

Nine copyright-friendly sites for student multimedia projects

As our students create more digital projects as assessments for our classes, we need to be conscious of copyright restrictions and direct our students to places to find copyright-friendly materials to use with their podcasts, digital stories or Glogsters.  This week, I thought I’d feature nine sites that students can use to find and download audio, video and images for their classroom projects.

Sites with copyright-friendly images

Flickr Commons: Flickr is an online photography community which now archives images from a variety of institutions including the Smithsonian Institution, NASA, and The Library of Congress.  All of the images are either in the public domain or available for use by others without restriction.  Keep in mind that students should still credit the photographer when using an image in a digital project.

Wikimedia Commons: I’ve featured this site before when I blogged about copyright.  Wikimedia Commons houses over 7 million media files which can be downloaded and incorporated in digital stories, presentations or other multimedia projects.  Be sure to have students check on any copyright restrictions on individual images before modifying them or including them in their projects.

World Images: Part of the California State University IMAGE Project, World Images contains approximately 80,000 images, is global in coverage and includes all areas of visual imagery. The site allows its images to be freely used for non-profit educational purposes.

MorgueFile: Developed by the sons of educators, morguefile contains photographs that have been freely contributed by artists for use in creative projects by visitors to the site. Morguefile asks that students credit the photographer to acknowledge the work of the artist whenever possible.

Sites with copyright-friendly audio files

Jamendo: Jamendo houses music published under Creative Commons licenses and claims it is the world’s #1 platform for free and legal music downloads. Available in seven languages, the site offers a place for artists to easily publish, share and promote their music.  For students, the site offers an enormous catalog of music for use in their multimedia projects.

Freeplaymusic: Although Freeplaymusic is a for-profit music site, it allows students to download its music for free as long as the files are used in a classroom assignment that is not shared in a public forum.  The music is professional quality and usually sounds eerily similar to popular music you may have heard.

SoundBible: SoundBible offers royalty-free sounds that have been produced under Creative Commons Licensing. The sounds can be used educationally or commercially in things like digital stories, podcasts or other multimedia projects but students may not redistribute them for a profit.

RoyaltyFreeMusic: This is another for-profit site that provides free downloads for educators and students to use in classroom projects.  The site offers music, ringtones and sound effects and educators can sign up for the Free Music Program for free access to the site’s library.

Sites with copyright-friendly video files

Moving Images Archive: The Moving Images Archive is part of the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization formed to build an Internet library for use by researchers, educators and historians.  The site features movies from a variety of sources including governmental organizations and educational institutions.   By offering almost-unrestricted access to these films, the site hopes it will encourage widespread use of moving images in new contexts by people who might not have used them before.