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When I got my first computer before going to college, it amazed me with its massive 366MB of memory. How would I ever use all of it? That computer cost nearly $2000.

Since then, hard drives have gotten a lot bigger and a lot cheaper. Want proof? OpenDrive Beta will give you a gigabyte of storage for free.

OpenDrive is like an online hard disk for backing up data or sharing files with others. Collaborate in real time using OpenDrive’s Collaboration Pro feature. You can also sync with uploaded files, so if you update your novel-in-progress, OpenDrive will save your changes both on your computer and in the copy you’ve squirreled away online.

Years from now we’ll laugh at the idea of a paltry gigabyte of storage. Until then, feel free to marvel at OpenDrive’s massive amount of memory. And you can’t beat the price. -BILL FERRIS

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The first time I heard someone talk about Seesmic, I thought to myself: “This person has to be saying it wrong. ‘Seismic‘ is a word, and it’s not pronounced ’seesmic’!” Well, although it is very rare for me to be wrong about something (really, very rare), I was in this case. And not only was I wrong, but I was also totally in the dark about a new, conversational video-sharing site that is changing the way people are able to communicate with each other!

Seesmic is an innovative new site that lets users communicate and connect online through video conversation, and has become known as the “Twitter of video” because of its micro-blogging appeal. Unlike most video hosting sites, though, it’s intended for posting instant videos of what you are doing or thinking about and having others respond to the conversation over time. It’s kind of like a message board, minus the anonymity.

What’s also pretty neat about Seesmic is that you can record your videos directly onto the website (which is handy if you want to post a quick update, or don’t have a lot of editing to do). But you also have the option to use your own camera or mobile phone, upload an existing video straight from your computer, or link to a video posted on a social network.

Seesmic could be a great tool to host an online debate on something you’re discussing in class and share with your students the perspectives of other people from around the world. You can start a thread by posting a video about a specific topic and other users can respond, starting a whole video conversation about your topic. And because conversations on Seesmic don’t happen in real time, you will have control over what you share with your students (as not everyone in the world is a friendly debater!).

While the community is still growing, people on Seesmic are already using the site to have conversations about all kinds of topics, from debates about “hummus vs. haggis,” to discussions about quality and quantity in terms of statistics, to just about anything. So go on, ask an open-ended question or state your opinion on something, and see what kind of conversation you can start! -LAUREN FROHNE

Seesmic

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The New Frontier of Video Sharing: Viddler

Social Networking and Social Studies Collide with iCue

Obviously, our civilization has now evolved well beyond the days of fruitlessly attempting to summarize our reactions to the many moments of a video with only a single comment and tagging our multifaceted videos with general terms that don’t capture the specific content that lies within.

Viddler is the new frontier of video sharing. For one, you don’t just tag your video, you tag specific moments in your video. This kind of tagging allows viewers to search for specific content within videos, not just for the overall topic. Also, you and your viewers can post comments on the video in the same way. The tags and comments appear right in the time line of your video - describing people, places, and things - and let viewers discuss specific moments, not just the video as a whole

Add super-fast upload and download times, and you can share your videos with your students, friends, family, and the world quickly and easily - all while having full control over your privacy settings. Also, if you don’t have a video camera, Viddler also has a neat little tool that let’s you record right from your webcam.

So go, watch the Internet’s evolution right before your eyes - check out the next generation of video sharing at Viddler! -LAUREN FROHNE

Viddler

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Lights, camera, video…in the classroom? You betcha! If you think kids like watching videos, wait until they start making them. Creating stuff is at a higher level of Bloom’s Taxonomy than bubbling in a test sheet. But where to begin?

This handy and easy-to-understand guide from Education.com on producing an educational video is a great place to start. It breaks the process down into pre-production, production, and post production, step-by-step. You don’t need a lot of fancy equipment, as most digital cameras today have a video mode on them (my experience with Flip has been fantastic). I would add only one point to this otherwise superb article - for editing there is a free resource for Windows users in Movie Maker. It is not the most stable program (in the interest of disclosure, I have had Adobe Premiere Elements lock on me too, just not as often), but I’ll share a resource that should help you with these problems, PapaJohn - Movie Maker 2 - Issues-1.

A few other resources to help you out are Mathew Needleman’s excellent Video in the Classroom.com site. If you think your kids are too young, wait till you see what he’s done with 2nd graders. If there is an NYU Film school for videos in education it’s the AFI (American Film Institute) which does a lot of workshops teaching educators how to effectively help students make interesting, high-quality videos. -ALICE MERCER

Producting an Educational Video via Education.com
PapaJohn - Movie Maker 2 - Issues-1
AFI ScreenNation
Video in the Classroom.com — Integrating Video Production in the Elementary Classroom and Beyond

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Photo Credit: Stacy Lynn Baum on flickr

Here at Instructify, we know that about half of you tune out when you see an article about Wikipedia; the site has become a lightning rod for discussion about everything that’s good about Web 2.0 and everything that’s wrong with it. But as Wikipedia pages come up first in more and more Google searches, its inevitability as a source of student information grows. So, when we discovered Wikipedia user Jbmurray’s essay “Was Introducing Wikipedia to the Classroom an Act of Madness Leading Only to Mayhem if not Murder?“, we knew we had to share. The essay details the process through which a professor at the University of British Columbia integrated Wikipedia in his classroom, revealing both its strengths and its warts to his students, by setting the goal of creating featured articles, which meet Wikipedia’s highest standards.

According to Jbmurray:

The premise of the project was that students had been using wikipedia as a source without properly considering its drawbacks. So it should have come as no surprise then that when seeking sources for the articles they were writing, again all too often they should make the same mistakes. They would add information that was unsourced, poorly referenced (and too frequently even plagiarized), or cited from what were often enough merely other webpages and online encyclopedias.

Yet here lay also one of the great benefits of the assignment. Precisely because of wikipedia’s injunction … that every item in their article had to be referenced, students were forced to reveal their sources. These poor sources came to light in a way that they might well not have were they writing a term paper. Moreover, precisely because writing on wikipedia is a process of continual revision, they could be asked to go back and re-evaluate their sources, find better ones, and try again. Even with plagiarism, there was no longer the need to make a song and dance about it, because at no time were they handing in what purported to be a final product.

As a result of the project, Jbmurray has been made an administrator on Wikipedia, and has contributed a second essay entitled “Advice on Using Wikipedia in Colleges and Universities.” While your K-12 classroom might not yet be ready to create featured articles, you may be able to apply some of the lessons learned about research and sources. You may find that asking students to engage in the Wikipedia community actually discourages them from using Wikipedia as a source in the future. Wouldn’t that make reports and research papers more pleasant? -ROSS WHITE

Wikipedia: “Was Introducing Wikipedia to the Classroom an Act of Madness Leading Only to Mayhem if not Murder?”
Wikipedia: “Advice on Using Wikipedia in Colleges and Universities“

I’m terrible at Risk, which probably has something to do with the fact that I’m terrible at geography. My main problem, though, is that I end up with terrible territories:

Opponent: “I’m sending an army into Irkutsk.”

Me: “Meh. You can have it, Nanook.”

Perhaps I’d do better if I got to defend a place I actually cared about, or could at least locate on a map. The New York Times reports a few Ivy Leaguers apparently felt the same way when they created GoCrossCampus.

Like Risk, the goal in GCC is to recruit and position your armies to take over your opponents’ territory. Unlike Risk, the territory consists of college campuses, or U.S. cities and states, and your armies consist of you and your friends. Working as a team with people within your social network, dormitory, whatever, you coordinate your movements to defeat your rival, as well as develop teamwork, collaboration and leadership skills. You can also nominate commanders, and remove nefarious spies from your ranks.

The game’s creators - a small group of Yale students - designed the game to be compatible with existing social networks, both online and face-to-face. They also play up the game’s small time-commitment - only a few minutes every day.

GoCrossCampus isn’t available to the general public just yet, but the founders plan to expand into high schools, as well as corporate team-building exercises. If you can’t wait that long and you’d like to participate at your school ASAP, you can contact them via the GoCrossCampus website. It’s a good way to bolster school spirit, as well as inject a little energy into your next geography lesson. -BILL FERRIS

Storming the Campuses via the New York Times
GoCrossCampus

In high school, I swore off backpacks. Therefore, my goal was to carry as few things as humanly possible. So I would get one of those huge 5-subject notebooks which worked great for that purpose; that is, until the end of the semester approached, and it would be practically exploding with a disorganized mess of notes and papers. What I would have given for a laptop and Springnote.

In essence, Springnote is a wiki, but really it’s like a virtual three-ring binder that you can share online. It works similarly to Google Docs, but it’s hyper-organized and super easy to use. All of your documents are organized into a drop-down tree menu with categories and tags, so you can see and access all of your content quickly. And with two gigs of space and the ability to add attachments and embedded links and images, what more could you ask for?

Well, the text editor is simple and intuitive, you can set your documents as private or public, and you can invite collaborators to edit documents, too. Springnote is a great tool for sharing class notes with your students, having your students work on group projects together, or even for collaborating with colleagues on event planning with to-do lists and details and everything you need all in one shareable place.

It’s probably too early to rid the world of backpacks entirely, but it’s a start. - LAUREN FROHNE

Springnote

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Oooooosaaaahhhhh! I just keep saying this site’s name over and over again. Ooooosaaahhhhhh!Okay, okay, I’ll stop. Anyway, Oosah is a neat Web-based application that lets you upload photos, music and videos — or use the media you already have uploaded to your Flickr, Facebook and YouTube accounts — to make multimedia slideshows, which they call “oosahs.”

But Oosah is more than just a place to make slideshows, it’s also an entire Web-based file management system. And, you have 2 gigs of space to play with for free! You can upload your photos directly to the site and easily manage them, or use it to safely store your videos and music files — whatever you want!

Oosah is emphatically not a file sharing site, like Mediafire or YouSendIt, though; it’s a user-generated content hosting, management, and sharing site. The content you or your students put on Oosah is only available for others to see if you make it public. And even the content you make public can only be viewed by others on Oosah, not downloaded or accessed in any other way. It’s open to anyone who is at least 13 years old and it has an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, so it’s the perfect place for your students to manage their media and get creative with slideshows and multimedia.

Keep in mind, though, that Oosah is still in beta, so expect some kinks here and there. I had a little trouble using photos from my Flickr and Facebook accounts to make a slideshow, but uploading files directly to the site worked super smoothly.

Oooooosaaaahhhhh! That was the last one, I promise. -LAUREN FROHNE

Oosah

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You’ve heard a lot about this “social networking” stuff kids are talking about. Whether you’re a complete networking newbie or you’ve got a MySpace, Facebook and Twitter account, make sure to check out iCue, a site from NBC News that combines peer connection with learning and multimedia.

iCue is an online learning environment that will let your students collaborate online while learning. While it does have fun stuff like games, iCue’s coolest features are the Cue Cards, which play video clips, as well as view images, documents, and video transcripts, related to the subject you’re looking up. Like an online baseball card, “flip” the Cue Card over to read useful info about the person speaking, his or her political views, the source of the video clip, earned run average, and lots more. Each card is tagged with notes and keywords, and if NBC’s notes don’t cut it, you can write in your own. Also like baseball cards, you can save and share them, so you can finally get hold of the Barack Obama rookie card.

Once they’re in iCue, students can build their friends network, interact with peers through discussion forums, and comment on others’ Cue Cards or ideas. iCue forums also have a “Thought Starter” which you can use to spark student discussion about an event in the news.

For its debut, iCue features content focused on politics, since there’s apparently a presidential election coming up. Over the summer they’ll add resources for courses including US History and English language and composition. Who knows? Once your students get started on iCue, discussing political candidates and collaborating on history research may just take precedence over updating their MySpace pages. -BILL FERRIS

iCue

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You may have heard your students talking about questing or getting their epic mounts or selling bars of gold on the auction house. If you have, you’re probably dealing with a World of Warcraft player.

As a long-standing gamer and a doctoral student interested in virtual worlds and games and their potential use for teaching, I was thrilled to learn that a recent issue of Science magazine called for participation in a unique conference – one that would take place within the massively multiplayer online game, World of Warcraft (WoW). For three days in May, participants in the Convergence of the Real and the Virtual conference created characters and joined players from around the world to participate in scholarly discussions about the game while hanging out in a virtual world.

The conference was comprised of three sessions: one about the possibilities for research within the game, one about the relationship between the game and the “real world,” and one about the future of such virtual worlds.

I was particularly drawn to the second session because it featured both Constance Steinkuehler who researches the potential for learning and literacy in games, and Julian Dibbell, who researches cultural and sociological aspects of games. These scholars are two of my most favorite within this community. This particular session shed some light on the learning potential in games.

Steinkuehler believes there’s serious learning and knowledge creation that occurs as a result of playing WoW. For instance one conference participant related a story about how his son wanted to find a specific pet within the game (yes, players can have virtual pets in the game) and spent several hours researching how to find and obtain such a pet. This example uniquely illustrates the development of critical thinking, research skills, and strategic planning - indispensable skills in high school, college and beyond. Other threads of discussion in this session included the notions of:

1. How real is a friend in WoW?
2. Are the relationships that are formed in-game meaningful?
3. Is the social space of the game completely different from real life, or does it simply mimic real life?
4. Can leadership be learned in WoW?
5. Can skills developed within the game world transfer to the real world?

If you are interested in learning more about the potential for learning in games, I recommend you start with Steinkuehler’s work. After all, 10 million people play WoW; and some of them might be your students! -LAURA CHRISTOPHERSON

Welcome to the Carnival of Education Career Fair! We’ve retracted the bleachers and set up the booths on the gymnasium floor so these brave teachers can see what they might be doing if they weren’t teaching (perish the thought).

Motivational Speaker
Mr. D at I Want to Teach Forever agreed to sport a freaking mohawk as long as his students worked hard, which was about three weeks. Sadly, his motivational experiment has concluded. Long live the mohawk.

Camp Counselor
As a kid, my wife got to go to Space Camp and Marine Science Camp. Had Tisha Kulak and American Consumer News been around back then to point out how to save money on tuition to summer research camps, I might’ve been able to go, too.

Productivity Consultant
Instructify-favorite studenthacks.org has some great tips for students who want to learn how to write a research paper.

Pro Athletes
The Jose Vilson uses Derek Jeter as an example of how nurturing students’ talent and leadership ability early on can reap great results.

And over at Jay P. Greene’s Blog, the author talks about the importance of identifying students’ talents, whether they’re a left tackle or potential honor student.

Economist
ESL teacher Larry Ferlazzo knows that money is the international language.

Translator
Melissa B. at The Scholastic Scribe provides a handy-dandy English-to-Eduspeak dictionary.

Director
Mathew Needleman at Creating Lifelong Learners takes a proactive approach to managing disruptive students during a class movie project.

Advice Columnist
Let’s Play Math! has some advice on teaching math to a struggling student.

Detective
OverwhelmedMom gets to the bottom of problems that gifted students face.

Investigative Reporters
The proprietor of a voice from the middle knows the means to discovery is asking the right questions.

In addition, eduwonkette responds to a Wall Street Journal article about the criteria used to evaluate teachers.

Game Developer
Alvaro at SharpBrains shares a few games to stimulate your temporal lobe.

Diplomat
Coach Brown tries to reach an understanding with hostile parents.

Nutritionists
At Homework. Dinner. Life. Angela points out that good nutrition habits ought to be maintained year-round, not just a few days before the test.

Meanwhile, Chanman at Buckhorn Road says all that caffeine students drink can’t be good for them.

Cartographer
Dan Callahan, a.k.a. geek.teacher, harnesses Google Maps for a lesson in community mapping.

Librarian
@EDU takes the work out of student research by pointing them toward Google Alerts.

Politician
Jane Artabasy at Golden Apple Teaching Excellence Network unloads the loaded word of the day, “elitism,” showing it’s nothing to be frightened of - especially in schools.

The folks at Golden Apple also mull over the differences in races and learning styles.

Astronaut
HowDoWhy asks, what is a solar system, anyway? Furthermore, just how big is ours?

Human Resources Specialist
Over at Right on the Left Coast, Darren discusses the sticky situation of a teacher dating an 18-year-old student at a different school.

Mentors
Allison Jones at Entry Level Living wants to revamp the way young people think about leadership.

The folks at the Efficient Leadership Files have some ideas on that as well.

Statistician
Lead from the Start crunches the numbers about the disconnect between teachers and EdSector.

Strategist
Seth Pearce at NYC Students Blog has an intriguing idea on how to overcome schools’ non-stop test preparation.

Lobbyist
PZ Meyers at Pharyngula has some news about a disturbing bill in the Oklahoma legislature regarding religion in schools.

Road Grader
As the great homework debate rages on, Shabam School makes a good case for grading homework.

Kindergarten Teacher (sorry, I couldn’t come up with anything else)
Kiri at Elbows, Knees, Dreams shares her thoughts (and asks for others’ opinions) about early entrance to Kindergarten.

Photo credit: ou_ags on flickr

Open Education, a blog from the folks at GoCollege.com, has some great content to share with educators like yourself. The work is licensed under Creative Commons, so the information you find is meant to be shared further. Open Source is all about collaboration and sharing, so your comments can only add to the topics presented. The entry topics range from advances in education to interviews with notable educators and innovators. In a recent post, OE spoke with David Sherman - principal of South Park Elementary (no, not that South Park) in Deerfield, Illinois - about technology use in the classroom from a school leader’s perspective. Sherman explains here some of the things his school is doing to take advantage of technology on the web:

“We are very fortunate to work in a school district which places a high value on the use of educational technologies, so many valuable sites are not blocked including YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, del.icio.us, and other social networking sites.”

Sherman’s own blogs, The Principal and Interest and The Principal’s Page are both valuable resources in themselves. Check out what he has to say about a teacher’s responsibility and expectation:

“Teaching children how to organize their materials is our responsibility. Teaching children to tell the truth is our responsibility, and teaching them to use their words and not their fists when dealing with conflict is our responsibility as well.”

Take advantage of the conversations these blogs are starting and add your own thoughts in their comments. After all, as educators, we should know by now that education all begins with sharing. –JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Open Education
The Principal and Interest
The Principal’s Page

The last movie I watched about British schoolchildren was over 2 hours long and didn’t make a lot of sense to me. My main trouble was trying to figure out why an organization such as the Department of Mysteries would store rather valuable information in crystal ball format, which were then stacked precariously on high shelves where they could easily fall and shatter. If you ask me that’s just inviting disaster.

Plot holes aside, terrific strides are being made by other British schoolchildren when it comes to film-making. Check out the Me and My Movie feature on Children’s BBC. This interactive site offers the amateur filmmaker in your classroom all kinds of videos and written instructions—plotting advice, camera techniques, lighting, etc. Trying all these short tutorials together is the Movie-Making Guide, which helps the student to plan out the entire process. -NICK YINGLING

Me and My Movie

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Do you struggle to explain Web 2.0 to interested but clueless administrators? Social networking, blogging and podcasting can be tough to describe to the uninitiated. If you need succinct explanations of social media to convince your principal to open the school’s firewall for you, show him or her a video by Common Craft.

Common Craft videos are free mini-tutorials on everything from wikis to RSS, and even what to do in case of a Zombie attack (that was a Halloween video, but zombies probably don’t know what day it is, so it’s good advice to heed year-round). Each video discusses a topic in plain English using a white board and simple paper drawings for visual aids. The simplicity of the production is Common Craft’s greatest asset - nebulous concepts like social bookmarking don’t look so daunting in a paper doll context.

Watching Common Craft videos may give you a few ideas for some class projects. Your class can make this type of video without much more than a white board and a Web cam. Making your videos as engaging and pithy as Common Craft, however, may take some practice. -BILL FERRIS

Common Craft

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April 25 marks the 55th anniversary of Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA. That’s why the National Human Genome Research Institute is celebrating National DNA Day. Your class can get in on the fun by participating in a live online chat from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. on April 25. Students will have the chance to converse with top genetic researchers about how their work will impact everything from medicine to cloning dinosaurs for a theme park on a remote Caribbean island.

The DNA Day website also features webcasts and slide shows that will help explain DNA to students, whether they’re new to genetics or they’re considering a career as a mad scientist. However you want to present the material, DNA Day is a way to genetically engineer your next science lesson to be a success. -BILL FERRIS

National DNA Day

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