Thursday, October 27, 2011

New Tools

It has been quite a while since I've last posted. The beginning of the school year is always a hectic time but this year seems to be busier than ever.  I decided that I am going to set aside 15 minutes each week just to update my blog.  Hopefully I'll stick to it!

Yesterday I attended a fabulous technology workshop at my county's central office.  Anthony Dove from NC State's Friday Institute worked with members of our District Technology Team on screencasting and Google Docs.  I was so excited about the screencasting because just the day before I was worried about my fourth graders missing a lesson on composing emails because I was going to be out.  That will never happen again because from now on I will record my lessons using Screencast-O-Matic and have my video tutorials available for my classes.  Screencast-O-Matic is a free, web-based screencasting tool.  I'm hoping to post some of my examples to the blog soon.

We also had a refresher course on Google Docs.  I played around with Google Forms and we came up with loads of ways we could use them, from video request forms to discipline referrals.  I can't wait to do a tutorial using Screencast-O-Matic on how to use Google Forms and share it with the teachers at our school.  I also learned that you could upload videos to Google Docs and embed them in blogs and websites.  This was HUGE for me  because our school system's website is not compatible with the Flip Video format.  We were having to convert videos then upload them only to have School Fusion "optimize" them for streaming which degraded the quality of the video tremendously.  By uploading the videos to Google Docs, the quality was saved and they look fantastic on our website.

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