Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Links for Week of October 9, 2007

OLPC


David Pogue writes about technology for the New York Times. He recently wrote an article about the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) initiative to bring technology to 3rd world schools. Be sure to check out his video too. The laptop was originally planned to be $100, but things happen and the price of the laptop is now a “whopping” $188. As a fundraiser, OLPC is offering people living in the United States the chance to buy one of the laptops. For $400 you are actually buying two laptops….one for yourself and then the second one is donated. The laptop is small (it is for children after all) but it is packed with innovative features. The machine is rugged and suffers no ill effects with brief drops. It is also self contained….so nothing can get into the laptop….even spilled liquid does nothing because even the keyboard is sealed. The organization has even engineered a new battery chemistry which is much cheaper than regular laptop batteries and lasts much longer.

Don't Let that Block stop you from playing YouTube

Have you ever had a video that you really wanted to use with your students? Me too. When you are working on your lesson plans you come across just the right video (yes, YouTube has all types of videos, not just people lip synching popular songs) to get the extra umph to that lesson. You come to school, start working thru the lesson and now to really get the students’ attention you try to pull up the YouTube video. Ugh…that’s right, YouTube is blocked here at school. Well, with a little upfront work you can overcome come that. All you need to do is download YouTube from home and then play it at school. Videos are big so using a flash drive or even emailing yourself the video will work. Heck, if you have your tablet, you can attach to YouTube from and download the video to your machine and then play it from the saved location the next day. Here are some tools that will help you with the process.
http://www.edsupport.cc/mguhlin/share/index.php?n=Work.VideoGrab

Basically you download the video as a flv type file. That is a flash video file. By default your machine probably doesn’t even know how to play that. Don’t give up yet….you just have to help your machine. You can download a piece of software (such as VLC media player) that will open those flc files. You can also use other tools that will try to convert the flc to a more common format like avi or mov. YouTube Catcher is a piece of software that I came upon last week. It is housed at sourceforge. Sourceforge provides server space for groups of people developing open source software. I tried out YouTube Catcher and it downloaded and converted my YouTube video to avi all in one action. Once in avi I can play it for the class, edit it in Movie Maker, or even include it in a Powerpoint presentation. Hah….no YouTube blocks for me (or you).


Looking for Intervention Ideas?

If that is the case then you might be well served to check Intervention central. This is a great place for teachers to share with teachers about what is working in their classroom. This site not only has teaching ideas…they also have assessment ideas. Check out the Curriculum Based Measures (CBM) link to find ideas of measuring student growth. They even include some Excel templates that you can plug in your own numbers and get different graphs with show growth over time.

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