May 2009 Archives

I was on Twitter today and one of the people I follow, Cyprien Lomas, had put up a video "tweet", which intrigued me so I had to figure out how you do it. Here, below, is a link to an article about video tweets which will point you to a couple of sites that allow you to use your Twitter account to log on and create/upload a video tweet. You can also record a video on your computer using something like MS Movie Maker and upload the video file.

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/05/29/easier-than-ever-to-video-tweet

Today's tip is another Common Craft video, about 3 1/2 minutes, that explains Social Bookmarking. It uses del.ic.ious as the example bookmarking site but that site has now changed its name to just plain delicious at delicious.com. Hope you enjoy the video:

http://www.commoncraft.com/bookmarking-plain-english 

I found a nice website this week that I think would be useful to many of the faculty using Powerpoint presentations with voice-over audio recording. This site, Authorstream, takes your Powerpoint presentations and convert them to Flash video so that they can be viewed over the Internet from both Macs and PCs. Here is a presentation on International Food Issues and Fair Trade. You can put up to 1 gigabyte of files online for free on this site. Hope you find it useful.

As more and more web sites go up on the Internet the Googles and Yahoo searches continue to return more and more sites when you do a search. There are just too many results and some that are returned are inappropriate or contain harmful links or malware. To mitigate this you can create your own Search Engine that only contain sites that you want search. Here is a relatively short 6 minute YouTube video on how to set up a Custom Search Engine using Google.

There are other sites that allow you to create your own search engines such as Rollyo and Topicle .

Lastly there are prebuilt search engines like Scirus for scientific information, USA.Gov for the U.S. government, and Education World.

Have fun!!!!

As our institution moves closer towards using Gmail (Google mail) as the replacement for webmail, I thought this might be a good time to look at some of the other services available from Google, specifically Google Docs. Here is a 4 minute YouTube video where some teachers and principals talk about the use of Google Docs by their students:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYPjJK6LZdM 

If that piqued your interest, here is another YouTube video on how it works:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRqUE6IHTEA