audiobooks and podcasts

Our school library is starting an audiobook collection, as the start of a digital collection, and we were thinking to start with some creative commons and public domain titles.

I've mentioned before about some sources we use for free content, but I wanted to be a little more specific about some of the resources we're looking at for starting the digital collection.

Librivox - volunteer-read public domain works
Spoken Alexandria Project - creating audio books of creative commons works
Podiobooks - free serialized audio books
Lit2Go - a free online collection of audio stories and poems
Project Gutenberg - human read public domain audio books
X Minus One - a series of science fiction radio plays, not technically audio books
Cory Doctorow - an author who creative commons licenses his works, a number of them have been recorded as audio books by him or by fans

everyone's a geek

I've been thinking again lately that the bar for being a geek is continually being raised. It used to be that having an email address was enough to qualify you as a geek, back when we spelled it e-mail. But now everyone has an email address (although it seems that some are using IM, txt, Facebook, Twitter, et al more than email). We've seen a transition from encyclopedias on paper to CDs, then to the Internet. Almost everybody gets information, news, and videos from the Internet. Libraries have audio books, ebooks, and such in their digital collections. Regular people carry around digital music players, digital cameras, smart phones, and laptops.

So what does it take to be a geek these days?

SMART table

I recently heard about a new SMART product called the SMART Table. It's basically a multi-touch screen mounted horizontally at a height suitable for Division 1 (up to grade 3) students. It is, of course, similar to the Microsoft Surface or a DIY Interactive Multitouch Display.

Being a High School teacher, I see it more as an opportunity to use as a video game device; it reminds me somewhat of those old arcade Pacman tables. If I had one of these SMART Tables, I'd probably use it for playing chess or perhaps board games like Settlers of Catan. I'd be interested to see, however, how it would be used in an Elementary classroom.

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/.