CEDO 535 Week 4

This week in class we are looking at social bookmarking, podcasts & screencasts, social networks, & microblogging (Twitter). I've been using these tools for quite some time now. I look at social bookmarking & Twitter as going hand-in-hand. While I'm on Twitter, I'm not sure how I would keep track of or organize all of the resources I gather in just one hour on Twitter. I mainly used Delicious but recently have exported all of my bookmarks to Diigo after the talks of Delicous's possible demise and/or sale by Yahoo! I just wanted to be safe so I imported all of my Delicious bookmarks into my Diigo account. I've been using Diigo since mid-December & it works just as easy as Delicious.

I've also used Facebook (social network) in order to keep in touch with family and friends across the miles. Actually, the main reason I joined Facebook was to share pictures of my son when he was born (instead of emailing pictures, etc). My brother lives in Florida so it is a great way for him to see pictures of the kids since he only gets to see them a few times a year (and thank goodness for Skype as well!) :). There have been talks about teachers using Facebook for school purposes as long as the teacher has a separate school & personal Facebook account. I'm still on the fence with that issue. I totally see the value in teachers connect with students to share news, assignments, etc since they practically live on Facebook anyway but I want to see a policy in place to lay out the guidelines, etc before I'm jumping on board with that. I know our school has a general Facebook profile that is mainly used by alumni to stay in contact with fellow classmates & get any school updates that relate to them.

The last two applications, podcasts & screencasts, I have the least amount of experience. I've made a few "how to" videos for a teacher who was leading a committee and wanted to set up a wiki and an etherpad for group collaboration. I couldn't be at the meeting to explain the tools so I created a screencast for a few "how to's". I didn't use an official "screencast" application but simply used my Flip video camera to record myself going through the steps as I narrated as well. I also used the Windows 7 Problem Steps Recorder to show teachers how to create a Custom Google Search. It turned out really neat; it took a screenshot of each step I did in the process as well as the narration below each image. It was super easy to use! To find out more information about it, go here.

I'd love for my students in Web Tools to create podcasts & screencasts of various Web 2.0 applications that they explore so they can be shared with teachers as they have questions about that specific tool/application. It would be neat to have a wiki full of "how to" tutorials that are student created. I think I'm going to add that to my list of activities for that class...