e-wot?

Just transfered my content over from my now de-funkt blog at http://zoiks.wordpress.com/

Plan is to do more instructional videos using a combination of Jing http://www.jingproject.com/ and ScreenFlow (Mac only) http://www.varasoftware.com/products/screenflow/

The Video link above doesn’t work properly at the moment. I’m experimenting until I find something that works.

Screencast who hosts files for the currently free Jing (made by the expensive Camtasia) seems pretty good for video at the moment. Jing is very new and looks very cool (link above).

Connexions is a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. Anyone may view or contribute:

• authors create and collaborate
• instructors rapidly build and share custom collections
• learners find and explore content

Well, that’s what the blurb says on their site. The material in their database appears to be mostly tertiary level.

[edit - Cheryl Lemke mentioned this in her keynote at ICTLT]

Low-income students are in many ways just as technologically savvy as their counterparts
In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers at the University of Minnesota have discovered the educational benefits of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. click for article

“What we found was that students using social networking sites are actually practising the kinds of 21st century skills we want them to develop to be successful today,” said Christine Greenhow, a learning technologies researcher in the university’s College of Education and Human Development and principal investigator of the study. Read More…

Voicethread is a neat online tool that allows you to set up or join group discussions around photos, presentations, documents or videos. Here’s their own description:

A VoiceThread is an online media album that can hold essentially any type of media (images, documents and videos) and allows people to make comments in 5 different ways - using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam) - and share them with anyone they wish. About Voicethread

Here’s a good starter tutorial:

Here’s an example of how a voicethread works:

Here’s how to embed a voicethread into a blog:

Here’s a voicethread wiki.

Here’s the voicethread Ning community

And then Language learning: Using Voicethread for practising speaking skills which is probably the most comprehensive step-by-step guide out there, by Ann - here’s Ann’s blog.