Course participants offer their ideas about ways to use these fun free tools in instructional situations and other academic applications.

One of the most meaningful and informative types of communication that happens through education technology blogs like this one is when teachers share their experiences and ideas about how to use technology in the educational setting.

Last summer, EmergingEdTech ran an online workshop in which participants learned about a variety of free digital presentation tools. With each tool, we got hands-on and created brief presentations, and then discussed our experiences and shared ideas on how we might use these tools in our professional roles. The participants shared a lot good ideas, and I’ve been meaning to share some of them here.

Following are some of the tools we used, and some of the ideas offered for how to put them to use in education. For brevity, I limited the comments to a few per app, but some of the comments offered had quite a few different ideas packed into them. Hopefully some of these suggestions spark some creative thinking for our readers, and inspire them to try some of these fun presentation appls themselves!

Glogster
Glogster is a tool for creating unique, interactive digital “posters”, to share ideas, pictures, videos, and more. Learn more about Glogster here (on their “What Is Glogster?” page).

“I have been eager to create a wiki-based Glogster gallery that would showcase student work on a project, i.e., assemble thumbnails of student Glogs for an assignment on Battles of World War II, for example, so that everyone in the class — and beyond — can review and learn from the work.”

“We are starting a new early college high school program. The consensus was it was a great way to publicize our new endeavor. I think this is a great way to publicize new programs. It was easy to use.”

“… classroom ideas for Glogster use:

* advertise a word or concept
* illustrate an oral presentation
* create a Glogster for an historic or current day pivotal/key person related to a time period, movement, development, etc.
* back to school ‘introduce yourself’ project”

Vuvox
Vuvox allows users to mix text, pictures, sound, and video, to create a couple of different presentation formats – a scrolling ‘collage’ presentation, or their ‘express’ format. Learn more about Vuvox here (on their ‘About’ page).

“This could be used for digital storytelling, much like a storyboard. Any activity with a sequence or timeline could be built for history lessons (i.e. battles of the civil war, or science – phases of moon, rock cycle, water cycle). Really anything goes! It can almost work as a graphic organizer, it is so visually rich.”

“I can recommend Vuvox to the classroom teachers with whom I partner on instruction for a variety of projects, including portfolios of students work, timelines, country brochures, properties of chemical elements, biographies, and reader response to literature. In the library, Vuvox could be a fun way to provide book recommendations by featuring books related to a theme (similar to what I’ve done with my summer reading collage) or new additions to the collection.”

OneTrueMedia
“Make amazing videos by mixing your photos and video with our effects, text and music” with OneTrueMedia. Learn more here (on their ‘FAQ’ page).

“With the ‘old time’ video effects, students could use this tool to create ‘You Are There’ style news reports about historical topics, using primary source images that they research and scripts that they write, record, and upload. Although the 30-second limit may seem like a drawback, it could actually force students to synthesize and condense information, thereby enhancing learning.”

“This tool can be used to convert short writing assignments or projects into videos. For example, a science project on the layers of soil could include images of the three layers and a paragraph about each layer.”

“I would like to use a program like this for an online yearbook. It may be a more affordable way to offer pictures from the year. Acceptable use would be an issue, but definitely something to think about. I might also use the program to have the students share information about themselves to help me get to know them better at the beginning of each new class.”

Voki
With Voki, you can create a speaking animated avatar! Learn more here (on their ‘About’ page.)

“I use Voki to personalize some of the web sites I create. For example, I have a Voki on my blog to send a greeting to students, and I have one on my resume/portfolio wiki to explain the site to potential employers/ collaborators. I have also used Voki as part of a sub plan; if I’m going to be out for the day, I use my avatar to send a message to students with goals for the day’s class. [Could also] be used for reading instruction (record students reading aloud) and world language pronunciation exercises.”

Prezi
Prezi is an app where you can create those cool visuals with images and text that zoom in to specific content elements and then  back out again to see the bigger picture, and then zoom in again, etc. These have become popular in television commercials lately. Learn more here (by watching the video on their home page).

“…  four other faculty members and myself were to present information to the faculty that we learned at a workshop. Everyone e-mailed me the outline of what they were talking about and I was able to create one seamless Prezi for us all to refer to. This was much better, in my opinion, than five different people hooking up to the projector and using different tools for visuals.”

“Prezi could be used as a getting to know you tool. Students could write their first name and tell us about themselves and their family. There are numerous charts (timelines, flow charts, etc.) that could be utilized in the content areas as well.”

Thanks to all course participants who offered these ideas (everyone had given permission to share their feedback, but I did not provide names here, as I had not specifically requested permission to do so).

Do you have some ways in which you’ve used these or similar tools in the classroom? We’d love to hear about them!

Keep an eye out for EmergingEdTech’s next 4 week workshop (we will be charging a small fee for this one), which will focus on using Facebook in instruction. This four week course will debut in the next month or two.

And a special “Thanks!” to Lakeland Community College in Kirtland, Ohio, for having me out this week to participate in their Professional Development Reading days!

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A wealth of free resources that can help you jazz up those tired old (or new) lesson slides and presentations.

Thanks to a preponderance of boring content, PowerPoint has earned an undeserved bad name. It has become an all-too-easy target for bashing in today’s web media. At a recent education conference, someone used the phrase “Power Corrupts, but PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely” and they got a lot of laughs.

At the same time, we’ve all seen PowerPoint presentations that made us stop and think, “wow – that’s pretty cool, how’d they do that?” Or even better, we got so caught up in the presentation that we completely forgot about the medium of the slide deck.

Following are a number of ideas and free resources that can help you add fun and pizzazz to your PowerPoint slide presentations by incorporating engaging visual and audio elements. The extent to which you evolve your slides is limited only by the time you wish to devote to it, and how imaginative you are. Of course, it’s also important not get carried away (which is easy to do with some of these tools), so remember that the addition of a couple simple visual or audio elements is usually more than enough to add new life to an old slide deck, or make a new one fun for both you and your students.

Add Animations
PowerPoint includes easy tools that make it a snap to add exciting visual elements to your slides using automated animations.

• Slide Transitions: This tutorial from Online Tech Tips explains how to create slide transition automations using easy pre-configured tools in PowerPoint.
• Custom Animations: You can really kick it up a notch by creating your own custom animations, which is easier than you might think. This tutorial from Utah State University explains some of the different animation effects and how to use them (this was written for PowerPoint 2003, but the same effects are available in the 2007 version, and are found on a standalone Animations menu rather than under the Slide Show menu). This tutorial from About.com discusses the use of Animations in PowerPoint 2010.

Here is an example custom animation that I created:

Note that I went beyond what is shown in the tutorial, and clicked on “More Effects” menu options, as well as clicking on the drop box options that appear to the right of each animation listing after it’s created, to access “Effects Options” and “Timing” choices, etc. 

Add cool free picture and text effects and backgrounds using dozens of templates for PowerPoint from Microsoft
There are so many of these cool free templates available on the Internet today. Click here to access a preconfigured search of Microsoft’s Office Site, set up to return dozens of articles with hundreds of free templates for PowerPoint.  To use the templates, you just download them and the follow the instructions provided in the articles.

These template sets range from simple, ready-to-use slides, to much more sophisticated templates that require significant effort to update with your own images, but can produce spectacular results. Below are two examples of the kinds of template sets available here, a simple one and a more advanced set:

• This is a set of a dozen backgrounds that can be used as is by just inserting text boxes, etc., or if you wish, you can follow the included instructions to learn how to create similarly themed backgrounds using your own images. Here’s one of the backgrounds in the set:

• This advanced set of templates contains two dozen striking animations and step-by-step instructions on how to recreate each of them with your own pictures and text (it will take some time and effort to work through the process). Below is a screen shot of one such image in mid-transition. This animation features three circular images, each with its own associated text, and a transitioning effect in which each of the images and its text phases in:

Add audio to your presentations
Adding audio elements to your presentation is a wonderful way to modernize them and make them more appealing to viewers. Here’s a couple resources that offer two different approaches to doing this.

• Add Audio or Music to Your PowerPoint Presentations
  This article from the online magazine Presentation Magazine (more on that below) explains how to add audio files to your presentations so they can play in the background.
• Slideshare Presentations Plus Audio
  SlideShare is a popular free tool that lets you upload your PowerPoint decks and run them across the web. This SlideShare presentation explains how you can add audio to a SlideShare deck using the free application Audacity.

Check out Presentation Magazine for tons of tips, tricks, and templates: http://www.presentationmagazine.com/
This online magazine has lots of great resources focused on improving your PowerPoint presentations, such as:

• A whole section of articles devoted to enhancing your PowerPoint presentations
• Tips to give your PowerPoint presentation the ‘wow factor’
• Plenty of articles focused specifically on PowerPoint 2010
• Hundreds of free PowerPoint templates

“Bonus Option” – Consider synchronizing video to your slides with Zentation.com: www.zentation.com
Zentation comes in various pricing levels, and the free option claims to allow users to upload a video to YouTube and then “create a new presentation in Zentation to synchronize your YouTube video with your PowerPoint slides”. We have not tried this yet here at EmergingEdTech, but it sounded so interesting, we figured we’d throw it out there for your consideration!

Advanced PowerPoint Tutorials
If you wish to learn more on your own, there are plenty of resources available to you on the web. Here are a couple listings to get you started.

• The Advanced PowerPoint Tutorial Series from About.com
• Advanced Power Point Tutorial Video search results from Bing

So there you have a variety of resources that provide fun tips, techniques, and tools to help bring new life to your old PowerPoint presentations, and create new ones that go well beyond the static slides of yesterday.

As always, we love to hear your feedback and learn about your experiences with this topic, so please comment and weigh in with your favorite tools or ideas for spicing up old slides or creating new presentations that capture the interest of today’s tech-savvy students.

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A mix of web apps that can help you make presentations that are fun, eye catching, and engaging (great for students too)!

In this month’s free online workshop, we’re learning about the wonderful variety of free digital presentation tools available on the Internet today, and ways we might use them in our classroom. For the last assignment, I want to let participants select from a list of applications we haven’t tried yet. I’ve been searching out new ones, as well as revisiting tools I’ve used before or known about, and I’ve listed a handful here.

This interactive image is an example of a Glogster ”poster” I tossed together in about 25 minutes, without any previous knowledge of using the tool. Note the different functionality for video and images - click an image to see it zoom and straighten for a better view, and the videos clips actually play!

I have no doubt that many educators might enjoy some of these tools, so I am sharing them here, and asking for readers feedback on these and other apps. Not only can tools like these offer a fun approach to presenting educational content, they can also be used by students for assignments and creating their own digital content.  

• SlideShare: A very popular tool for sharing Powerpoint presentations and more, online, or embed them in your blog or website.
• ZohoShow: Kind of similar to Powerpoint, but free, and online.
• Glogster: This link will take you right to Glogster’s Basic (free) plan for Educators. 
• Fotobabble: Create talking photos with Fotobabble! I haven’t tried this yet, but I here’s an example of a Fotobabble talking photo by”Becky4477″  – looks like a simple tool for adding as voice-over to pictures (they have a free iPhone app too).
• Prezi: With Prezi, you create graphical presentations that you can easily zoom in and out of, to “get the big picture”, or “drill into the details”.
• Voki: The idea behind Voki is to use a talking avatar to make your presentation. Click here to read a post about Voki that includes a video demonstration of the creation of a Voki avatar.
• Vuvox: I had a lot of fun creating this music video with the help of Vuvox last year, and selected it as the first app we covered in the workshop. You can add text, pics, and embedded “hot links”, over a bed of music, to make your scrolling presentation.
• OneTrueMedia: We took this one for a try this week – definitely easier to use than Vuvox (but I was also a little dissapointed by some of the limitations in the free version).  

If there are other free digital presentation tools that you like to use, please comment and let us know about them!

 
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Course will be limited to the first 25 participants who enroll (so sign up today if you wish to participate).

I had an overwhelming response to last week’s survey, asking if readers would want to take a free online 4 week course. Based on this feedback I am offering the workshop, “Fun Free Digital Presentation Tools for the Classroom (Vuvox, OneTrueMedia, Jing, and more)”, starting on Tuesday, July 5.

(In addition to almost 100 teachers, there were nearly 100 responses from education professionals in other roles, including administrators, technologists, librarians, instructional designers, and more. Fifty percent of the respondents worked in Higher Education, and the rest were pretty evenly split among Elementary, Middle School/Junior High, and High School.)

How The Course Will Work
Each week we will get hands-on, learning about and using a free online application to create digital presentation materials. Participants will be expected to participate in our online forums, discussing their experiences with the tools, and offering their ideas for how each tool might be used in their professional role. Please note that you will need a webcam for this course (a couple sections will require use of a webcam to capture brief videos).

Assignments will be rolled out one week at a time. The syllabus consists of following a similar assignment format each week to get introduced to using the following tools: Vuvox (Week 1), Jing & Eyejot (Week 2), OneTrueMedia (Week 3), and finally, week 4 will introduce a variety of presentation tools and allow you to select which one to try out and discuss.

I will review the created materials (which I encourage everyone to share with the group when they post their discussion forum comments), and I will review everyone’s comments and respond to many. I will also encourage all participants to read others’ postings and strike up a dialogue.

To sign up for the workshop … please submit your name and email address using the form below (your email address will be treated with complete confidentiality and will not be shared by me with anyone).

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Voki makes it easy for educators to incorporate technology into lesson plans and assignments (and it’s advertisement free!).

A couple weeks ago in the post “3 Quick Lesson Plan Ideas That Utilize Technology”, we explored some ways in which animation web sites could be used in the classroom. These types of tools were new to me and struck me, and readers who commented, as a great way to engage students in preparing assignments, reports, or projects.

I had a lot of fun getting hands-on and trying out GoAnimate (as illustrated in this video blog post), and I’ve been looking forward to exploring Voki, the other site suggested by guest writer Rebecca Garland in that post.

This weekend I spent some time with Voki, and had fun learning about Voki’s resources for educators, and creating and using my own Avatar. In the video below, I show how easy it was to create a customized speaking avatar using Voki. In the rest of the post, I discuss some of Voki’s resources for educators.

The folks at Voki are clearly focused on education, and have created a special “Voki for Education” web site section. Two of the main resources provided for educators are a Lesson Plans database and a Teacher’s Corner forum.

Voki’s Lesson Plans Database
Voki’s database of lesson plans is searchable by grade level and subject area. Objectives, Materials, and Activities for each lesson are clearly laid out, and the lesson plans can all be rated. Following are a few examples of some of their top rated Lesson Plans:

• Community History (Grade Level: 7th Grade):  In this lesson, students analyze the development of a community, use interactive media, and learn interview skills.
• Delivery (Grade Level: Higher Ed):  Students learn about how to identify and read nonverbal communication, and how body language can be perceived by an audience.
• Hygiene (Grade Level: 1st Grade): Using Smartboard and Voki, students learn about good oral hygiene, why brushing your teeth is important, and which foods are bad for the teeth, while developing better reading comprehension.

The Teacher’s Corner
The forum provides 5 discussion areas: Q&A, Ideas & Feature Requests, a “Newbie’s Corner”, Voki in the Classroom, and a section for Voki Partner Sites. The forum includes quick links to access “Recent Topics”, “Hottest Topics”, and a Search function. Some of the Hot Topics that looked particularly interesting to me were threads focused on embedding your Voki creations in other apps, like PowerPoint 2010, Blackboard, and Blogger.

Wrap Up
I think Voki is pretty cool, and I bet you probably will too. I can’t believe I haven’t come across more information and discussion about using animation tools in course work before. Voki and GoAnimator are just two of many of these types of tools available online, for free. While Voki is geared towards the creation of simple speaking avatars, GoAnimator lets you create little animated movies. Another example is MakeBeliefsComix, which bills itself as an “Online Educational Comix Generator for Kids of All Ages” (thank you to Ryan Moulden for mentioning this in a comment on the “3 Quick Lesson Plan Ideas …” post).

The one primary shortcoming of Voki that occurs to me is the 1 minute limit to what can be recorded for a given avatar. Multiple avatars can be created, but I saw no obvious way to simply copy an avatar so you could then record more speech to create a new “scene” for it. Additionally, there did not seem to be any apparent help utility (beyond an FAQ section). If I just missed this, and someone knows how to find help or request help in Voki, kindly comment and point it out.

I’d love to hear more about these kinds of apps and how readers are using them in the classroom. If you’ve used these or other animations applications, or if you have some questions, please don’t hesitate to comment below and share your observations or thoughts.

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3 Quick Lesson Plan Ideas That Utilize Technology

Letting students use technology to create presentations, reports, journals, etc., can be an easy way to introduce technology in a lesson plan or project.

Guest Post by Rebecca Garland

If you’ve been teaching longer than a few years, you already know that it can be tricky to be a “perfect” teacher all the time. While we might play the part of perfect when it comes times for evaluations and such, most of the time we tend to fall back on what we know – which usually isn’t the latest and greatest technology.

Unfortunately the lack of planning time and huge amounts of expectations in the classroom create a challenge when it comes time to work in some technology-based lessons. In many cases, there just isn’t time to learn about the sites or figure out how to use them – no matter how great they looked in the thirty minute meeting you had with the technology specialist last week.

Rather than just blowing off improving technology in the classroom, you should look for ways to use it more simply. The key to this is to let the students create with technology – it’s far less time-consuming for the teacher than having to create a lot of content yourself. Here are a few quick lessons that have a great technology tie-in that shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes to plan or organize.

GoAnimate.com – It’s an animation website (wait, don’t panic!) that your students can use to create their own short movies. All you have to do is send students to the website on the library or computer lab computers. Have them set up their own free accounts and explain that there are very limited choices for free accounts when it comes to customization of characters, but they are creative enough to work around that.

Once they are signed in, they should create an animation in one of the available “worlds” to perhaps summarize a book or short story, deliver a speech they have written, teach a lesson on a particular topic or introduce themselves or their ideas to the class. It’s a great way to present student work without having to force students to the front of the room.

Voki.com – Another great, simple website that students can jump right into. Voki creates talking, somewhat animated avatars. Have students write poetry or speeches and then create a Voki to actually read the message aloud. Or make a final deliverable for a formal paper a bit more interesting by having a Voki that the student has created read it aloud to you.

Both Voki and GoAnimate are “cutesy”, but often letting students play with a website gets them much more engaged in what you’re asking them to do. Rather than just the typical ‘write a summary of the article’, tell students to create a Voki to describe it instead. It uses the same principle of summarizing and picking out main points, but it also lets students dabble in the sorts of things that make learning ‘fun’ to the digital mind.

Blogger.com – If your students have access to Blogger, have them use the blogs instead of a journal to outline ideas or create products for your assignments. Since the blogs are visible to the world, you might assign pen names (that you would know, of course) if your students are underage – and be sure to get permission ahead of time. Stress to students that having published work means it must be mindful of the audience and cautious at the same time.

Let the students write journal entries, address prompts you’ve set up, or summarize chapters of the text or novel you’re working on in class. One idea that is a bit more involved and “out of the box” is to have students set up the blog as if they are the main character in a novel or perhaps even a scientific element or historical figure. They must stay “in character” throughout the blog posts and post a minimum number of times exploring concepts, ideas and plot points through their posts. You would need only to go to their posts to view the blogs when the assignment is finished to create a grade. You could even have fun leaving comments for your students to have them respond with deeper thoughts on the posts – much like a more traditional reading response journal.

[Click here to open a brief video tutorial showing how easy it is to get started blogging with Blogger.]

 
Have you used these, or similar tools, to create lesson plans that incorporate technology? Do you have any experiences to share that can help others? Please comment and share your insights, ideas, or questions! Thanks - KW

Rebecca Garland is a freelance education writer specializing in creating materials to inform, educate and entertain readers. She represents a Minneapolis technical school online as well as creating materials other secondary teachers might be able to use in the classroom to improve student engagement and foster deeper learning.

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These two widely used presentation applications are accessible from any web browser.

Guest post by Mark Davies.

If you want to present a lecture without too many words, then your best bet is to prepare a presentation and let your slides talk for themselves. This makes presentations a convenient tool for teaching online courses. There are quite a few Web 2.0 presentation creation tools available, but the best free options to consider are Prezi and SlideShare, both of which are briefly reviewed below.

Prezi

• It’s an unconventional presentation design application because you don’t have to create individual slides
• You have a workspace where you can create non-linear presentations which you can navigate with the help of pointers – a map shows you how to move around the presentation.
• The user interface is intuitive and easier to understand the more you use it.
• It’s great for creating unconventional, interesting and visually appealing presentations.
• It’s designed in Flash, which explains the visual brilliance.
• It comes in both free and paid versions – if you don’t want to shell out money, the free package comes with 100 MB of storage space and a player that allows you to view your presentations offline. However, you cannot create presentations offline, and all your presentations are stamped with the Prezi logo and published publicly in the showcase. There are other plans that have more features and which you have to buy, so if you’re a serious user, you can try the Enjoy plan or the Pro package.
• It’s initially a little difficult to use, but there are many video demos that help you find your way, and once you get the hang of it, Prezi is a great tool for designing presentations online.

SlideShare

• It’s more of a presentation sharing tool than one that helps in creating them.
• It allows you to upload and host your presentations in common formats like Microsoft PowerPoint or OpenOffice on an online community.
• The user interface is simply designed and easy to use.
• It converts all presentations to the Flash format. However, this is a time consuming process, so with a slow connection, you could end up spending quite a few hours waiting for your presentations to upload.
• A big advantage of SlideShare is that you don’t need to have PowerPoint or any other software installed to view the presentations online (because they’re converted into the Flash format).
• The Flash format also allows you to embed these presentations in your blog or on your website.
• You can restrict viewing privileges and control who sees your online presentations.
• SlideShare allows you to view your presentations in the full-screen mode.
• It’s completely free to use.

As you can see from the above points, Prezi is good for professional users while SlideShare works well for those who’re just experimenting with online presentation design tools and looking for ways to share them online.

This guest post is contributed by Mark Davies, he writes on the topic of Online Masters Degree . He welcomes your comments at his email id: markdavies247@gmail.com.

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Join me on a little diversion from Ed Tech, to explore some fun Web 2.0 tools that I use to create music videos.

I occasionally get asked what it takes to create videos like the one I made to accompany this year’s “musical Christmas card”, my version of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer (or last year’s rendition of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”). A fundamental concept behind what is now commonly referred to as “Web 2.0” was the transition from Internet surfers mostly just pulling content from the Internet to the wide adoption of tools to create and ‘push’ content out to the Internet. Many of the tools I used to create this video are the kinds of tools that have helped enable this transition.

Naturally, it starts with the music, but that’s really a separate discussion. Suffice it to say that I used my Korg D3200 Digital Studio (a powerful yet affordable ‘studio-in-a-box’ from Korg) to record and engineer the music. What I’m going to focus on in this post is the making of the video.

Gathering and Creating the Content
First I needed the visual content – the collection of photos, pictures, and video clips that would be used to compile the music video. Some of these I took or made myself, like the pictures of the stuffed Rudolph toys or the elves with the guitar (I made this using Microsoft Paint, which as you are all probably aware, comes free with the Windows Operating System). Others I searched out and found on the Internet. After having learned about Creative Commons a few months ago, I made a point of seeking out images that were free to use and manipulate. My primary source of these images was Flickr (I included references and links to all such images in the comments section of the video itself).

Some of the images required some editing in order to make them appear as I wanted. For example, you will notice various historical pictures (like Reagan at the Berlin Wall, or Lincoln’s Inauguration) which feature Rudolph flying along in the sky. My older son has become rather adept at using Adobe’s Photoshop, and was kind enough to “‘shop” these pictures for me, inserting Rudolph and manipulating the image’s colors and positioning to make it work better within the context of the picture. He also used Photoshop to wrap Santa’s arm and hands to appear to hold and play the bass guitar (I then used Paint to create different versions of his original edited picture). Friend and artist Glen Cotler also used Photoshop, to create those great pictures of Rudolph playing guitar. (Thanks to Glen and my son Ian for their great work!).

I also used a couple other programs to create content. I used Vuvox to create the scrolling visual with Santa holding a bag of toy’s and the scrolling text quotes (“Rudolph with your nose so bright …”), as well as the clip at the very end of the video (for more about Vuvox, check out this post). One other tool I used is a demo version of Sony Vegas Pro. I used Vegas Pro to create this video of me playing guitar and singing a song a few months ago and I borrowed some small sections of it to include in the Rudolph video.

Compiling and Publishing the Video
The program I used to compile and produce the video is Camtasia Studio 7 from TechSmith. I became a huge fan of Camtasia this year and have used it to create many music videos, and all of the video blog postings I’ve done out on the EmergingEdTech YouTube Channel. I wrote this post about “5 Reasons Why I Think Camtasia Rocks” earlier this year.

Last, but certainly not least, I should mention YouTube! Neither of the aforementioned channels would exist without YouTube, and I probably wouldn’t be doing any of these music videos if YouTube didn’t happen along years ago. This widely used free video broadcasting service is undeniably one of the key players in the evolution of Web 2.0, and I am very grateful for it.

Well, that’s the story of the many different tools that were used to create the music video you see above. It was a lot of work, but it was also a lot of fun, and now it can enjoy a long life out there on the ‘Tube! I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday season!

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This free, easy app for creating scrolling timeline-style content is a fun way for students or teachers to create presentations.

With Vuvox you can easily create scrolling presentations that include pictures, text, video, and music. I’d come across it some time ago, and thought it would be a lot of fun for students or teachers to use to create reports or presentation materials.

I decided I’d take it for a spin by using it to create a video for a song I recorded with some help from my family (a version of the old folk/country classic, “The Streets of Laredo”). I was able to do so, with one limitation I had to overcome. Overall I enjoyed the process, and think Vuvox is a wonderful tool. The final product is presented below.

NOTE: The issue I had was overcome by capturing the playback with Camtasia and editing it to create a final product that consistently synched the music and the visuals. This was necessary because I was trying to accomplish something that was really beyond the intended capabilities of Vuvox. The tool is excellent for creating scrolling visual presentations and generally works well with background music, it’s just not intended to be used for tightly synchronized playback of music and video at the same time.

Here is the original Vuvox presentation, which is the same basic thing (but the song easily ends up being out of synch with the visuals if you mouse over it or drag the scroll control around – maybe there’s a way to lock the song to the playback, but if there was, it wasn’t evident to me). As you can see, Vuvox presentations can be embedded in a web page, but they can also be delivered via a URL.

I’m a big fan of Vuvox, and I think it is a great example of the way Web 2.0 tools can be engaging and fun and can enable students to have a blast while learning and creating. To create presentations, you simply upload files and drag and drop them in to the presentation area. Images are easy to move around, resize, rotate, etc. Text is added or edited using a simple tool. 

Click here to explore various Vuvox presentations that are currently being featured on the site. I encourage you to stop by and check Vuvox out today!  

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We’re finding the popular, free voice and video conferencing solution to be very useful in the classroom. How about you?

This year, there have a been a growing number of cases where we are being asked to set up Skype in our classrooms and provide webcams to facilitate video calls.  This free application makes it easy to connect for free over the Internet, and coupled with a webcam, the free video conferencing capability can really extend student’s and teacher’s reach – the potential applications are limited only by your imagination!

So far, we’ve used Skype to enable home-bound students to offer presentations and to bring guest speakers into the classroom, and we’re considering using it to let people on campus connect when they can’t abandon their posts.

I’m sure we’re not the only educational institution putting Skype to use. How about you? Does anyone have a Skyping-in-School story to share? We’d love to hear it!

[Ed Note: Just came across this article, thought I should add it to this post - Skype is building a Directory of Classrooms, http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2010/11/skype-education-directory-of-classrooms.html  - KW 11/15/10]

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