Tech Smith Grant

As you may have read in the CC update newsletter e-mailed the other day, TechSmith, the creators of various screen capturing software, announced a grant that would award schools copies of their software for free. Both Catholic Central and West Catholic applied and were approved! Our grant includes 50 licenses each for both Camtasia Studio and Snagit as well as a 1 year subscription to Screencast.com Pro. The total for the grant is $11,000 per school. So what will this allow us to do that we can't do now?

Snagit allows the user to capture a copy of whatever is on your screen. You can capture a certain area, an entire window, or a scrolling window. Once captured, you can apply effects, arrows, text, etc. to further describe the item. You can then share this with other applications such as Office and it also auto-stores them for you. So, if you have a web page that you want to capture a certain screen of and include further explanation of you can, and then send that to Word to include with your assignment. Post the entire thing on Blackboard.

Camtasia Studio goes a few steps beyond Snagit and allows you to actually record exactly what is happening on your screen. You can create videos that demonstrate a process, an application, or an idea you want to share. You can edit your product and add text callouts, arrows, additional photos, music, etc. for a full featured video that can then be saved in several formats such as iPod, Media Player, Flash, etc. I'm sensing some training videos coming from my office!

Screencast.com allows you to upload and store your videos online. You can then invite people to view it, assign a URL, or embed it in your Blackboard course or your blog/wiki!

Would you use this in your lesson planning and creation? How would software that allows you to do these type of screen captures enhance your lessons?

Interested in Expanding Your Personal Learning Network?

Here are some great online resources for expanding your PLN with educators across the globe.

LearnCentral

Tapped In

Classroom 2.0

All offer discussions, online tutorials and webinars, mentors, etc. Social Networking with a purpose!

The Lost Generation

Are our students "The Lost Generation"? Watch this video:   Gotta love the reverse of perspective!

Rushton Hurley at MACUL

Rushton Hurley is my new favorite educator to follow for ed tech information. While at the MACUL conference this year I saw a large group of people standing outside one of the larger lecture rooms. It was jammed and people were still lining up to hear him. He's dynamic, fun and entertaining to listen to and has extremely good ideas and resources. He has taught at both the high school and college levels (foreign language - Japanese), been a high school principal, and has run an online school. His new project is Next Vista for Learning an online library of free videos for learners everywhere. There are videos here showcasing various careers and subject areas (Lightbulbs), tours of other countries (Global Views), and videos about volunteering (Seeing Service). The project is fairly new so the collection is growing daily. Here's an example of what one student created about the Boy Scouts of America an organization that the student was active in and felt strongly about. Remember this was created by a student of about 13. Wow! Rushton shares freely so if you're interested, sign up for his newsletter. Here is a link to one of the sessions that he held while at MACUL: Hordes of Free Tools from a Google Certified Teacher. Find anything you could use there? Any ideas of similar tools to share?

Student's Aren't the Only Ones With Their Heads in the Clouds

Cloudcomputing. What is it and why should we care? Cloudcomputing is a fairly new term on the technology horizon. The Wikipedia describes it as: "... Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software and information are provided to computers and other devices on-demand, like a public utility." Click here to read more from Wikipedia. Basically, it's a means to deliver the software and network access that you normally would have to be at school to use from any computer connected to the Internet. That means you can get access to your server space and other resources from home, a conference with available wireless, or while you enjoy a cup of coffee and a pastry at your local coffee shop using any wireless device. Doesn't matter if it's a laptop that's owned by the school, a Windows Vista or 7 Home Premium PC that you've recently purchased, or an iMac/MacBook Pro. Even your Internet-capable Smartphone can connect. Pretty cool!

Soon our secondary schools will be starting a demo of Stoneware, a cloudcomputing solution, that we are looking at implementing in the near future. Not quite sure why they picked a name like "Stone" to represent the Cloud but I'm not their marketing person so I digress! :-) Anyway, a few of your fellow teachers will be trying out this software and seeing how it works for them. Hopefully it will be a successful trial and we can begin adding additional users and a full implementation for staff for the upcoming school year.

Google Voice

Google Voice is a web 2.0 app that gives you a "virtual" phone number. You can hand out that number rather than your real number and then set the software to ring any or all your phones or go directly to voicemail. The product is currently in beta so you have to request to be included. Once you get the response you can apply for a number with a local area code and begin using the service. One nice feature of the product that I thought might be useful for a classroom teacher is that you can record a conversation. It does tell the caller that they are being recorded so they will know up front. You then have a record of exactly what was said by both parties. Might be nice for those phone conferences. Check it out and sign up for your Google Voice account at http://voice.google.com

Any ideas of how else you could use a tool like this in your classroom?

Macul 2010

Wow! What a whirlwind two days at the Macul 2010 conference in Grand Rapids. I learned so much but am now on technological overload! There are so many new tools but just not enough time to try them all out. So... I'm going to start listing them here and hopefully some of you will also give them a try and find a few new tools to use in the classroom! Please feel free to comment!

To get you started I thought I'd mention Evernote. This is a free app that works on all platforms of computer as well as mobile phones, and iPhone/iPod touch. What does it do? Evernote allows you to save things you see, save ideas you have, or save items you like and then find them again from any device you use. All for free. You can upgrade for a fee to get more storage space and additional features but the basics are all there for $0! Check it out here: https://www.evernote.com/about/learn_more/

How could you use this type of tool in your classroom? How could students use this type of tool?