Wondershare is a free video download tool that works with Safari. It is easy to download YouTube videos now with Wondershare.
1. Open a video in the Safari web browser. (Will not work with Firefox.)
2. In the top right corner of the video you should see a Download button.
3. Click the Download button and it will open your WonderShare application and show it downloading.
4. When done downloading, it will be in your Wondershare Library folder.
You can click on it from there to play it.
WonderShare is an application that is located in your Applications folder. Anytime you want to access your video downloads, just open WonderShare.
NOTES:
• Some videos may be protected and will not show the Download button. In this case, you cannot use WonderShare to download.
• Wondershare also works on some other video websites.
• If you are sharing videos with your students, you should not put the actual video on your website, but embed it which makes a direct link to it but still shows it on your site. Uploading the actual video to your site is a violation of copyright.
Need a way to have your students turn in digital files to you?
Here’s an easy way using DropBox and DropItToMe.
First, if you aren’t using DropBox yet, you will need to setup an account. You can do this right at the DropItToMe web site.
1. Click on the Register button.
2. Click on Get Dropbox if you don’t have an account. (If you do already, go to step 5)
Enter in your name, email address and a password you would like to use for Dropbox.
3. It will automatically download DropBox for you, but you should have it in your Applications folder already. If not, please contact Shari or David and they can install it.
4. Open DropBox from your Applications folder. It will ask you to login.
5. Go back to the DropItToMe website and click the register button this time. Then click the register button in the next screen.
6. Click the Allow button to allow DropItToMe to connect with your Dropbox. It will ask you to login to your DropBox account if you aren’t already.
7. Enter new information for your DropItToMe account
The upload password is the password you will give to students or other staff to allow them to upload a document into your Dropbox.
Click Register.
8. The next screen will show your URL to share with others to upload files to you. Click on it, then bookmark it so you have it. You can put this link on your web page if you like, then you can verbally tell students your password to upload files to it. Students will go to your URL and login with your upload password, then they will browse for the file they want to upload to you.
When someone sends you a file, your DropBox will notify you with a small pop-up message in the top right of your screen. But this message goes away, so you will need to check your Dropbox to see if you have any files.
If you forget your URL, it is always: www.dropitto.me/username with username being your own username.
To open your Dropbox and see your files, you can go to the Dropbox icon in your menu bar at the top right of your Mac screen. It looks like an open box and is blue. Choose open dropbox folder.
Here’s a video showing students how to upload a file to your Dropbox:
Skype is already installed on your teacher laptop. You’ll find it in the Applications folder.
Open Skype from Applications.
On the main login screen, click Don’t have a Skype Name? that is under the Skype Name box.
Type in a Skype Name, which is a username that people will see when they Skype you. No spaces are allowed and it must be at least 6 characters long.
Type in the password you want to use and then repeat it.
Type in your email address.
Check the box for the license agreement, and if you want it to remember your login on your laptop. (Don’t check this if on a public computer that many users use.)
If you want Skype to open automatically when you login, check that box.
Then you can uncheck the box for contacting you about new features if you like.
Click Create.
It should sign you in, but sometimes if a lot of people are creating accounts at the same time, you may have to retry a few times.
The first thing you will want to do is set your privacy settings so you don’t get unwanted Skypes.
Go to the Skype menu and choose Preferences.
Click on the Privacy icon at the top of that window.
Set all of the items to be from contacts only. That way only people you approve as contacts can Skype with you.
Now you are ready to find some contacts.
Go to the Contacts menu and choose Search for people on Skype.
You can enter their email address or their name and search.
If you know someone’s Skype username, you can just go to the Contacts menu and choose Add a Contact.
With your privacy settings set to only contacts, you will get a message from anyone who tries to add you as a contact and you have to approve them. Once approved, they will go into your contacts list which shows in the main Skype window.
To Skype a contact, you can click on the triangle to the right of their name and choose which kind of Skype you want to do with them.
Start chat will start a text only chat. Start call will initiate an audio call, then you can click video to add video conferencing to that call.
You can set your default settings in the Skype menu – Preferences and the General icon so that if you double-click on a contact, it will initiate the kind of chat you typically would use for all contacts. I have mine changed to chat, as I usually just text chat with people. If you normally call people, you can leave it on that setting.
I recommend you look through all of the preferences and set things that way you want.
The best way to get familiar with Skype is to find a partner and start skyping with them.
We have been seeing an increase in MacBook power adapter cords getting frayed and damaged. To avoid this, please be sure to wrap your power cord properly, using the flip out tabs on the side of the adapter.
Yes, I’m sure you do. You may not call it that, but it is all the people you interact with on a regular basis to exchange information.
Now a bigger question… have you expanded your PLN online?
There are so many opportunities online to exchange ideas with other professionals in your field that it can be overwhelming at times. But it is also very rewarding once you learn where to find the people you can share with and learn from. Twitter is a great tool to expand your PLN. At first Twitter is hard to grasp, but once you dive in and start experiencing the information that is being shared, it is awesome.
Twitter is a microblog. A microblog only allows 140 characters in your statement. I compare it to your status on Facebook. It’s meant to be short bursts of information. Twitter is used by many people in many different ways. Some just post what they are doing. I’m sure you’ve seen the TV commercial where the Dad is typing in on his phone, I’m sitting on the patio and the son says noone cares Dad. But there are a lot of professionals using Twitter to share information about the good things they are doing. For teachers, they are sharing what lessons they are doing, and how they are integrating technology. They share their student blog links and links to other good resources that they have found. They also share things that don’t work right and ask for help. This kind of sharing lets you gain access to resources you normally would not find, except maybe at a conference.
To see the basics of what Twitter is all about, view this video: Twitter in Plain English (you will need YouTube access to view.)
Setting up a Twitter account is easy. Just click Sign Up Now and fill in the information.
Once you are setup, the hardest part can be finding who you want to follow. This takes some time to build and will grow as you go. To get you started, here is a list of people to follow. You can then see who is following these people, or who they retweet and follow others that way. You can also use Twitter search tools such as http://wefollow.com/ to search for teachers for example. FreeTech4Teachers also gives ways to find teachers on Twitter.
http://twitter.com/barnhartshari
http://twitter.com/jamiefath – Jamie from CASTLE
http://twitter.com/mcleod – Scott McLeod from CASTLE
http://twitter.com/AngelaMaiers
http://twitter.com/PBS/teachers
http://twitter.com/web20classroom – Lots of resources pushed out daily.
And finally some Twitter etiquette:
1. No spam – it is not allowed and you will be blocked.
2. Retweet – give people credit, leave their @name in the retweet.
3. Use Direct Messages for more personal one-to-one conversations.
4. Use shortened URL’s to make tweeting and retweeting easier to share resources. Here is one URL shortener you can use: http://bit.ly
You might find it helpful to use a Twitter application, such as TweetDeck. I find this much easier to follow and see who is retweeting my tweets and direct messaging me. It also can automatically shorten your URLs. If you’d like to have an application installed, please let me know.
As teachers are encouraged to have their own “websites”, it brings up some questions that need to be thought about to make the site useful.
Why should teachers have a website?
• Because our world is going more digital everyday with everyone being “connected” 24/7.
• To communicate with parents, students, teachers and community.
• To provide resources for students and parents.
• To share student work, what you are doing in class and your ideas.
What should be on my website?
• Contact information, with email address so your audience can contact you.
• Current assignments and due dates.
• Links to websites you want to use with your students at school or home. This will alleviate them typing in a long URL that you write on the board and then take 15 minutes to troubleshoot everyone getting to it.
• Links to videos and other resources online that will give students another learning opportunity. Maybe they didn’t understand what you went over in class, but they could watch a video online and have a better understanding.
• Classroom news to keep parents up to date.
• Classroom wish lists for supplies.
• Student work. Pick a few to put online and share with other students, teachers, parents and the world. Studies show that student writing done online is improved because they have an audience of more than one.
• Your website should not be something you do once and let it be. It should be updated frequently with current resources and information for your students and parents. It should be an extension of your classroom.
View your website as a student, as a parent, as a community member. Do you find what you want? Is it easy to navigate? Think of how you use websites and what you expect to see.
Formats: You can use a standard web page, or you can use a blog or wiki. Determine what the purpose of your site is and then determine the best tool to accomplish that. You do not have to use iWeb or the school’s web server. We can link to any other source you decide to use. You might use a combination of several formats.
Design: Look at your page as a viewer, not a creator. Is it easy to read and find what you need? Is the background color too overpowering? Are there too many images that distract from your content? Remember that your web page doesn’t have to be flashy. It’s the content that is important.
Here are some more ideas for teachers on how to use their website and what to include on it:
It’s time again for a reminder to staff to clean out your email attachments folder as most of us don’t have it set to automatically delete them when the email message is deleted. Every time you get an attachment in your email, it is stored in a folder. It stays there until you delete it.
You can download instructions on how to delete your attachments – How to delete Email attachments and I created two videos on how to delete your attachments to help with this process. Choose the one for your email application.
David Warlick presented this session.
Second Life is being used across the world and heavily in business for meetings and professional development. Discovery has a space to show videos and have meetings. ISTE has an island as well.
Second Life takes some time to learn how to navigate. You can set landmarks like you would bookmarks. Speakers can upload PowerPoints to work on screens in the meeting rooms. In ISTE island, they showed each seat had a screen in front of them.
There were 57,169 people in Second Life during his presentation.
It’s OK not to understand it, but we need to respect it.
Collaboration is great with this tool.
You can build your environment, but the more things you make, the slower your navigation in that room will be. You can add content in drawers, like file cabinets.
Teen Grid is like Second Life, but for teens only. Adults have to be approved to get in with background checks, etc.
There are lots of schools on virtual worlds with teachers. One example had the home economics class making clothes in Second Life that the students could wear.
Overall, you need to create an account and start playing.
The topic of David’s keynote was Literacy & Learning in the 21st Century. Rebooting the Basics.
You can view the backchannel comments on Scott McLeod’s CoverItLive feed and I will post a link to the video of his keynote when it is available. Scroll to the bottom of this post to view the keynote video.
David says: I am a learner. A 21st century educator must be a learner, a master learner. If we are preparing children to be life long learners, we must be too.
He says we are still preparing a workforce that is the factory model: can work in straight rows, perform repetitive tasks under close supervision. He showed a home office where many people work now. We are giving up the wired telelphones and connect to family in new says. We want our communication technology to go with us now. We are wasting time with our students trying to use paper. Teach them how to work the digital content. More and more of our professional communication is going to be virtual.
David gave examples of what technology might look like in 2039. Computers might be built into our clothing with a control panel on the sleeve. Our phones may be a microphone on our pinky and a speaker on our thumb and we use the international gesture for talking on the phone. We might have GPS toe rings that vibrate which way we are supposed to turn.
We are not preparing kids for our future and what we want. We are teaching them for their future. They are technology users. We know almost nothing about the future our students will have. How do we prepare them for an unpredictable future?
We need to stop integrating technology and integrate literacy.
Teach students how to teach themselves.
Our students aren’t reading magazines. They read online.
Being literate – willing, able and encouraged to ask questions about the answers that you find.
He gave a demonstration of website evaluation. Is it good information, what does the owner of the web site know? Find the webmaster’s email on the site and google it. He showed an example of a Martin Luther King website. The author/webmaster of the site was Vincent Breeding. Through Google, we found out that he also authors a site on white pride.
We were all taught to read what people gave us and trust it. Today, we are reading in a global electronic library that anyone can publish to. This is good! But, we have to expand our notions of what it means to be literate.
Wikipedia – may not all be accurate, but there are warnings about it on the page. Makes you want to go back to a good old textbook because those are always correct, right? (The audience laughs…) No, they aren’t always correct, and there aren’t any warnings to state that.
Our students need to be good producers of content. Everyone has a story to tell. They need to learn to tell it in an effective way. He showed a video example from a California student who was failing. Her older brother was protesting the Global Economy. She didn’t know why. She asked a teacher and was told to look it up, do some research. So she did and instead of writing an essay, she created a video. If she had written an essay instead, how many would have read it? (One – her teacher). Her video has been seen in at least 23 countries and by every CEO of the companies mentioned in her video. Many companies have contacted her to explain what and why they do what they do. The music in the video was powerful and it communicates.
Any school that does not teach art, music and drama is not a school… it’s a factory.
David talked about the 3 E’s of Contemporary Literacy:
• Exposing what’s true
• Employing the information
• Expressing ideas compellingly
And the 4th “E” being Ethics.
Our nation spends more on fighting spam, than it would cost to find the cure for HIV/AIDS.
We must redefine literacy so that it reflects today’s information environment, and integrate that.
It starts with us and it’s scary. We can’t teach like we were taught. That was Ok in the industrial age.
“The World is our curriculum, and it’s changing everyday.”
When in history have people like you and I been able to speak a message to the world? Werenotafraid.com is a blog that was created after the London bombings. Anyone could post on this blog and they wanted specifically pictures that showed that they were not afraid.
I was not able to personally be at ITEC on Monday to hear Daniel Pink, but I followed the backchannel from Scott McLeod’s Cover It Live. You can view a similar keynote here, and I will keep watching for the video of the ITEC keynote to be posted and link it here.
