creative commons and free

For a media class that I teach occasionally we are often looking for media that students can use to create videos and such. To model digital citizenship, we endeavour to use media that is at least free (gratis), but preferably public domain or creative commons. There are, of course, some creative commons licences that allow sharing but don't allow derivatives, which means that they are not useful for us.

There are a few caveats about using creative commons or public domain works, though. Since students don't tend to be as familiar with the works/artists it often takes them longer to complete their projects than if you just let them bring in their own (usually quasi-legal) media. As well, the onus is usually on you to point the students in the right direction.

To help with this, a few sources of media that I've come across are:

Video:
Archive.org (also has other types of files)
CreativeCommons.org/video

Audio:
Jamendo
SoundSnap

Photo:
Morguefile
Stock Exchange
100 (Legal) Sources for Free Stock Images
and, of course, Flickr

Vector Graphics:
Free Vector Graphics
Vecteezy
Quality Vector Graphics

crowdsourcing

I've noticed a recent trend of crowdsourcing amoung regular people (by which I mean non-geeks) on sites like Facebook as well as on blogs.  My wife's friends will post something like, "what's a good movie for us to watch tonight" or "I have to make supper with ground beef, what to you recommend" and they'll get a douzen responses pretty quickly.

I've been thinking about how to incorporate this into a classroom context.  Of course during regular classroom lectures I'll solicit responses from the students, but we're talking about more asynchronous interactions.  I've experimented with vocabulary wikis and forums, but students don't seem to be motivated unless there are marks associated with it.  As I see it, the motivations for responding to crowdsourcing requests are likely the desire to help, and to have your voice/opinions heard, so the challenge for us is to tap into that to get students engaged in the content.

Testing iPod Touch Posting

I'm just testing to see how well it works to post from my iPod using LifeCast.

Posted with LifeCast

a new presentation tool

I was recently introduced to an online presentation tool called Prezi. Since I spend a fair amount of time lecturing with PowerPoint (and Keynote occasionally), I'm always interested in cool ways of presenting things. Even though it's a beta product, I've starting using it for some of my lectures.

Writing about it doesn't do it justice, though, check it out at http://prezi.com/prezi/27/try/.

filtered Internet access with OpenDNS

Whatever your views on censorship of the Internet, I think it can be argued that preventing phishing at least is a good reason for some filters. Our school district uses FortiGuard which is administered at the Central Office, but for the network in my classroom as well as at home, I use OpenDNS.

OpenDNS can be set up on each computer, or in the router that they all use to connect to the Internet. You can choose categories of sites to block, or even blacklist or whitelist individual sites. It's quick and easy to set up and make changes, and it's free.

email reminders with Google calendar

Whether you have recurring events, or just events that you don't want to miss, it's possible to set up reminders for yourself using your Google calendar. These reminders can email, pop-ups on your computer (if you have your calendar open), or even text messages (SMS) to your mobile phone.

If you have your calendar open, perhaps from calendar.google.com, click Settings at the top right, then the Calendars tab near the top middle. You'll see a link for Notifications for each of your calendars. This allows you to change the default notifications, I'd recommend setting it to Email 3 hours before each event, but you can also change the notification types for individual events.

You'll also see options for setting up your mobile phone, calendar sharing/publishing, and many other things. Have fun.

buying cables online

I've mentioned monoprice.com before as an online supplier of cheap cables (for classroom projector/computer as well as home theater), but since they are based in the US there is the exchange rate and longer shipping times to deal with.

I've recently had two similar Canadian online suppliers recommended to me. While I haven't yet bought cables from either of them, apparently they are both very good: InfiniteCables.com and CableSalesCanada.com, both of which are based in Toronto.

Let me know in the comments if you've bought from either one and your experiences with it.