How-To Videos

In reading my rss feeds at Bloglines, I found a delightful site VideoDo in a posting by Alan Levine on his CogDogBlog. This site shows short videos on how-to-do things and allows users to contribute videos to the site. I could immediately see the applicability of this in the classroom as students could make videos when learning process writing in Language Arts or in a second language classroom. Although I don't have a video camera yet, I may try out this tool with my webcam to see what happens. Maybe I could demonstrate how to play a simple rhythm on a dejembe!

Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts...

I am in the middle of reading Will Richardson's new book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. This book is the perfect text for courses I teach for pre-service teachers on educational uses of the Internet. I had previously used a compiliation of recent articles available on the web as the readings and how-to material for the courses, but Will has made my life so much easier. I'll have to tell him so.Each chapter or two in the book covers a web tool. Besides the ones mentioned in the title, he covers RSS and Flickr as well. Will has presented the material in a pedagogically pleasing way and covers the "why" as comprehensively as the "how-to." I really highly recommend that educators who are interested in these topics or teach about these topics check out Will's book.

As I finish reading each chapter, I'm going to try to post additional relevant links about each of the topics because, although Will's book was published in 2006, there are already updates on topics such as podcasting.