Part+5+-+Future+Goals

**What's In Store?** = What Have I Learned? Future Goals and Plans = Having the opportunity to work in my own VHS class has really opened my eyes. While NIM was extremely helpful in preparing me to teach my online course, taking these BP courses and then participating in the capstone course has demonstrated how much more I can do. Some things that I hope to address include staying involved in content discussions and adding more podcasts and screencasts. I started using screencasts as tutorials because students were having many of the same problems when trying to edit a wiki or add a new page. Podcasts are invaluable resources for students but I have also found that adding a short voice announcement can help make a connection between students and myself. I would like to begin to make some of these changes in the second half of this semester but my goal is to have the course revamped by the time the fall semester begins.

= = = Some Challenges = Some challenges that I will face are personal - time, time, and time! While I have thoroughly enjoyed taking the Best Practices courses the are the culmination of a Masters plus sixty credits in the past five years. I feel that I have put off so many things - family time, gardening, and general housekeeping. And yes, you can actually miss cleaning house, especially when you end up climbing over a piles of "stuff" just to find that one thing you need :-) I also face a challenge with my A/B schedule at school. If I only have two scheduled blocks in a week and then an assembly or early dismissal cuts into one of the blocks I left with little released time to work on my course.

Other challenges I may face are with the technology available to my students. I was flabbergasted to find out that some VHS schools have rather pitiful internet connections. Students are unable to download some of the multimedia files at school, while others have fast connections at school but filtering keeps them from some of the sites used for sharing audio and video files. I also want to make written transcripts available for any audio or video files that I've used with the course.

= Resources =

Here are some of the resources I've gathered during my Best Practices and other professional development classes.
If you were in my Web 2.0 class in January many of these will be a rerun! = Collaboration Tools = These all open in new pages.

Links to School Bloggers – you’ll find hundreds of different types of blogs

Google Docs is my favorite collaboration tool. It’s free but you do need a gmail account.

Try Zoho if your school blocks Gmail (still can’t figure out why they’d do that)

Skrbl is a virtual whiteboard, great for conferencing. You can brainstorm, take notes, and use it as a bulletin board.

If you need a quick discussion board try QuickTopic

With all this collaboration you are going to need a place to store and share your files A free account at Box.net gives you 1 GB of storage and sharing capabilities. 4shared gives you up to 10 GB of free storage

Responsible Digital Media
In the early years many people just took want they wanted and then shared it with everyone. New peer sharing sites popped up on a daily basis. The same person that would never think of copying from a text and calling it there own was creating powerpoint presentations with sounds and sights taken without permission. So what can a teacher do?

Digital Images
Start with images that are copyright friendly. Here are some sites that allow you to search for images licensed under Creative Commons: Open Photo FlickrCC has the photo attributions in the right panel and you can edit photos through it’s own editor. For younger students you can set up your own tray of images on FlickStorm MorgueFile is a public image archive. While most of the images can be used by educators they are often terms, such as letting the photographer know where/how the image is being used. The Incredible Art Department has images, along with powerpoint templates and lesson plans for art teachers. Image After has an incredible number of absolutely gorgeous images and textures which you are free to download, alter, and use in you own work, whether it’s personal or commercial. LIFE Photo Archive, whether you remember LIFE magazine or not, there are millions of photos from the 1860s until today available for download If you’re like me you will click through a multitude of images and then when it’s time to use them you can’t remember where you downloaded them. Why not try ImageStamper to keep track of the attributions for images that you’ve downloaded.

= Using Video = media type="youtube" key="BWXuZltYeJk" height="344" width="425"

Having trouble seeing the media? Maybe YouTube is blocked at your school! See why you should [|Just Jing It] On your website, wikispaces, or in your classroom – there are so many ways that video can enhance your lessons. My school doesn’t have any video editing software, unless you are lucky enough to have one of the Classrooms For the Future. Does that mean you can’t edit video? Heck no!

Video Editing
JayCut MotionBox One True Media

Mashups
What’s a Mashup? According to wikipedia, a **mashup** is a web page or application that combines data or functionality from two or more external sources to create a new service. JibJab Animoto Vuvox

Screencasts
Screencasts are a good way to add instructions or other visuals to your webpage. Here’s one that I made for my wikispace. [|Jing] [|Copernicus] – captures images and video (no audio) for Macs [|Screencast-o-matic] [|FreeScreencast] [|ScreenToaster] – tutorial to view your ipod screen on any computer

Video Hosting
[|YouTube] [|Vimeo]

School Friendly Hosting Services
[|TeacherTube] [|SchoolTube] [|GoogleVideo] Video Conversion – when you can’t get that YouTube or Vimeo in school you can convert the video files ahead of time [|Zamzar] [|Media Converter] [|Jodix]