I had some opportunity to play around with file conversions. In particular kickyoutube.com. For me, file conversions would be extremely handy. Living in a rural spot in Montana, our high speed internet access can be somewhat sketchy. In fact, if another classroom is streaming audio or video, most other classrooms have difficulty just accessing basic sites on the internet. It is not at all uncommon for many sites to "time out". So if there is a video that I know I want to share, I now have a means to save it for later.
I must admit that I really can't get into screencasting, voicethreading and the like. For one, I don't have a microphone that would allow me to add audio descriptions, which limits my use of the applications. More importantly, I'm still wondering how I could use these effectively in my classroom. Classes that I envision using such a technology are generally small enough (2 to 6 students) that classroom discussion of material be appropriate. I'm going to have to give this one some more thought.
Tough place to be. I too am in a relatively small school with an absurdly small amount of bandwidth. Our problem is too many computers sharing the equivalent of a single home-user's internet. We time out a lot too, except from 6-7 am, which is when I try to load all of my videos on my computer and keep them up until class starts. It's a huge challenge. I too am struggling with finding where and when to use screencasting and the sort. I am figuring it could be good for absent students to highlight a few key points. I'm trying to figure out if I could really work it into their homework as a way to introduce new concepts prior to them coming to class, or to reinforce some of the trickier sections of the text book. It will be a challenge, but with the ease of use, I feel that I really should use it (Jiing-at least).
ReplyDeleteI know that I have created some screencasts for my students to watch outside of class -- a good alternative to having all text based!
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