Category: Language

The Cutting Edge Classroom is a small blog by an educator with many ideas about using technology in the classroom. Here he talks about how to use PageFlakes and NetVibes, two of our recent tools.

Netvibes is another site where you can put together content from many other web pages without knowing how to make a web page. It is really easy, and, like PageFlakes, has a web community that discusses what is available and what works.

This is one of the most transparent web services I know. It was hard to find their logo, and when you set up a page for yourself, their content is only at the bottom of the page.

Have you ever wanted to put together lots of material from different web sites, and put it all on one page, so that students can access it easily? PageFlakes allows you to put together text, media and web pages all in one place. It is like your own content aggregator. (A content aggregator uses information from other web pages, and are more popular than the web pages themselves.) It also has a built-in community of other people making aggregated content. They often help each other out.

Digital StoryTelling is a great site created for a high school class in the US. The videos these students have made for class projects are really exceptional. This proves that the technology is cheap enough and good enough that now the only limitation is the imagination. This site helps with that, by outlining the roles of the students in the group.

These 4 roles exactly parallel the groups I developed for my Radio Production and Podcasting Courses, and then for my Video Production Course. They make sense and allow students to concentrate on different parts of the production process. I usually try to do more than one project in a semester, so as to allow the students to try different roles. It works well.

TED is an annual conference of the best thinkers of our time. It has been going for 18 years and getting more and more popular. It has a famous deadline: no speech can be over 20 minutes. Here is what they say about TED at the website:

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

People like Al Gore, Jane Goodall, Bill Gates, Tim Burners-Lee have all talked at TED. (a few did get more than 20 minutes). Recently, videos of these presentations have all been put on line.

So you have a wonderful resource of the smartes people on the planet putting as much information as they can into a 20-minute presentation, and making it understandable to a world-wide audience. How do you teach with this?

Some teachers have pooled their ideas into a wiki (see Tool #58) to use this wonderful resource in class most effectively. Mostly to create discussion topics that are very relevant to our students today, TeachingWithTed can give you materials as well as ideas for particular presentations made at TED.