So remember I mentioned that my students and I came up with a great idea to help Jeff Corwin learn Spanish? Well, it’s come to fruition.

Don’t walk, run over to TeachJeffSpanish.com and check out the first episode!

We’re going to offer a few different things that I think will be fun for a lot of folks to be able to learn Spanish along with us! We’ll offer a word of the day post directed to Jeff as well as a weekly episode of Scavenger Hunt for Spanish. This idea was totally done by my students, with only minimal coaching on some of the more technical details. I handed three students (actually, three girls) my MacBook Pro (yup, my personal computer), a Panasonic GS-300 3CCD camera and a tripod and they went to town. The young lady that did the editing had not really ever more than played with iMovie and I think she did a jam up job.

I’ve got the iTunes link working, so feel free to subscribe to the episodes! Also feel free to leave a comment on the episode 1 post (comments are seriously moderated, as you might imagine) to tell my students how you like it!

I actually really could use the comments, because without an act of Congress, I’ll lose these students in January and have to either ditch the project or start over with new students. Then, I’d get new students at the beginning of April. I need these same ones for consistency, but let’s see how you like the project.

So if you like it, blog it, would you? This is all student-made work here, and these are sixth graders. Help me show my school these kids are as great as I keep saying! If you do blog it, please use blog tag teachjeffspanish.

So since I made a Voicethread with my little girl today I wanted to embed it. That turned out to be hard to do. Here is how I got it to work…

1. I searched Google.

2. I found the WordPress plugin on this forum page and installed it.

3. Now I have this neat little tab below my post editing.

And all I have to do is paste in the code it gives and presto!

Darn that was easy. Nice plugin, Voicethread!

You have to sign in to Voicethread before you see the screen above, which means you can only embed the voicethreads you create, or does it?

Using the syntax it offers, you can embed any voicethread, just by using the number of the thread itself. For example, the wordpress plugin tutorial address bar looks like this…

So if I use the syntax it offers (which looks like voicethread b=xxxx) surrounded by brackets, I can embed any voicethread.

Here is the voicethread wordpress plugin tutorial…

All I’ll do is replace xxxx with 4643.

[voicethread b=4643]

Voila! An embedded voicethread that I didn’t create.

My daughter brought home her class teddy bear this weekend. Sunny spent the entire weekend with us and we took some time today to create a voicethread about it. I hope this works, so sorry if it comes through a few different times in your aggregator.

[voicethread b=20446]

We also made an Animoto about the weekend…

It’s interesting to see how the network sort of travels from one new service to another. I was looking through my edu feeds today and came across upcoming, which was supposedly the latest and greatest centralized notification service for upcoming edblogger events.

Since its inception, I haven’t seen much from it, have you?

Just curious what’s become of upcoming.

I don’t know about you, but when I’m uploading video to one of those other video hosting services (to remain nameless) it’s frustrating to see just an “encoding” label slapped on a video. I end up hitting refresh to see if it’s done!

Today I am experimenting with Vimeo, after seeing Shareski use it. He’s my inspiration for a lot lately.

I came across this screen, which moves when it’s not a screenshot, and was so pleasantly refreshed.

Now if only it will accept this darn .wmv file that Fliqz has rejected time after time.