They are looking for an online service (so they can show to the public as well) that would allow multiple users to add announcements. These may be as simple as a social event coming up or a congratulations for a student. They would also like to have curricular review mixed in.

I can’t think of a good way that would allow multiple users to add to the system. Do you know of a way to accomplish this?

Thanks in advance…

I responded by trying to find the answer myself. Having recently returned from the Google Teacher Academy in Washington, D.C. I sort of fancied myself a Google whiz.

I was wrong.

I simply could not find a ranking based on just our state. When I searched for various combinations (i.e. “economic impact” +industries +”south carolina”) I got all sorts of results, but no real way to rank them.

I tweeted back that Mandie should consider contacting a reference librarian.

Backstory

Here in Irmo, SC we have a little branch of the Richland County Public Library called The Link. It’s tiny, about the size of a small store. It has some comfy chairs, a bunch of books, and a few computers for use.

They do not, however, regularly staff a reference librarian. To overcome this, they have a video conference system set up and mounted on the wall. It’s a bit like a video phone, where you pick up the receiver and it connects you with the reference desk at the main branch down town. A few months ago while I was in the Link I joked with the ladies who worked there that I didn’t need a reference librarian, I had Google. They tried to convince me I should try it out but I just couldn’t come up with a question that Google couldn’t handle.

Until today.

So, I decided to try out the reference librarian. I hit up the Ask a Librarian page and fired off an email asking the question. I would have tried the IM, but whatever service they use was blocked at school. I wondered whether it would result in anything, and went about my day. A few short hours later, to my pleasant surprise, I received an email with not only the information, detailed instructions as to how s/he found it. It turns out the librarian used the Bureau of Economic Analysis at the US Dept of Commerce. With no further effort on my part, I had the answer to the question, with an entire table copied to me.

I was floored.

It’s not that I don’t have faith in librarians. In fact, this is the second time that the RCPL reference desk librarians have come to the rescue.

The truth is, I’m surrounded by wonderful librarians who are a credit to the profession. And this goes to show me that libraries are still as crucial as ever.

So thank you, RCPL reference desk, for showing me that there is still a need for information experts.

Embedded here please find the keynote address, in its entirety. Please understand this is my first keynote address, so that might explain my nervousness!

I want to thank Jeff McCoy, Tim Van Heule, Tim Cushman, Cathy Arnold, Kevin Merritt, Donna Goldsmith, and everyone who attended for your support.

A special thanks to MaryAnn Sansonetti and Cathy Nelson for their unwavering support in helping me so much over the years.

You can see the video on Blip.tv if you like, or click through and see it here.

With no further adieu…

Click To Play

I’m planning to make a few to embed in my Moodle site for my kids to use. I wanted to try it out here first.

A few weeks ago, a couple of my students were joking that there was YouTube, and we needed our own video sharing site! We discussed it a bit and SpanTube was born.

Now, before you jump all over me for creating a new site when there are ample good video sharing sites out there, i.e. YouTube/Vimeo/TeacherTube/SchoolTube, etc, I do not claim to replace them nor compete with them. This is different.

The goal of this site is to invite Spanish teachers, Spanish speakers, and anyone else with an interest in teaching Spanish to register and upload videos.

I do not have any ads on the site, and I am paying for this myself. This is (as of right now) not a profitable site, nor is that really the intent. I just wanted to have a space to put all my students’ work in one spot where folks could come.

So please, stop by, register, and comment on some of my student videos. They’d love to hear from you!

And if you know  a Spanish teacher, maybe let them know? We welcome new videos.

Now, there might be an easier way, but all I did was hunt for his code, and then copied it and pasted it. I then viewed the source of one of my pencasts and changed the relevant data. Let’s see if it works…

Update: Didn’t work, threw an error of being unable to connect to the Livescribe server. I’ll have to wait for Dr. Wesch to respond.

Update 2: I found code here to use, let’s see if it works. Sigh, nope.

The purpose of Papershow is to allow presenters, teachers, marketers, etc. to give interactive presentations while also having the ability to annotate their presentations on the fly. While aspects of the Papershow pen are similar to the Pulse Smart Pen, Papershow as an entire product, which consists of three components, is very unique. The Papershow interactive paper, USB key and Bluetooth pen working together allow someone to give a presentation, conduct a brainstorm or teach a class all from a notepad, and that person can be 20 feet away from the computer. After annotating a presentation or conducting a whiteboard session, Papershow allows you to save all of the notes as a PDF, and then print or e-mail them to anyone you would like.

Papershow is a similar concept as the SMART Airliner wireless slate and eInstruction tablets, but it is much less expensive, it’s just $199 for the starter kit. Also, with Papershow, you are physically writing with ink on paper, rather than an electronic tablet, and this is then projected on the screen which creates more of a “magic” effect. Papershow is very portable too, and easy to carry around, as it’s just the pen, USB key and pad of paper or presentation binder.

You’ll note the comparison against SMART Airliners (which I don’t like much) and other tablets. This is because I mentioned that it seemed a likely market for Papershow.

I’ll test it out a bit this week with students to see how they like it compared to the Airliner.

@thekyleguy mentioned via Twitter that YouTube does not do well with HD footage, despite being newly HD and widescreen capable. He recommended blip.tv as a viable alternative.

I decided to compare them head to head, well, to head. I added Vimeo to the mix, as it is my sharing service of choice when publishing work for public display. My little less than one minute video was roughly 70 megs when copied right from the Flip.

Here are the three videos. Keep in mind I uploaded this without any changes at all. This is raw footage, compressed using the Flip’s internal H.264 compression and then the sites do with it what they please to display it. I also did not change the default embed code in any way, despite Vimeo’s delicious method to change the size, color, etc of embedded videos.
I had to change all the embed code to the same size. Since YouTube’s embed code used the size I liked the best (560×345) I stuck with that all around. This post looked awful with three videos of all different sizes. In hindsight this should have been three posts.

The first thing to notice is that the blip.tv player borks my theme because of the width. It plays HD video in the native resolution of 1280×750. I could change that in the code relatively easily, but in keeping with a direct head to head to head comparison, to heck with my theme.

YouTube

Vimeo

So the Vimeo embed wasn’t HD. You have to go to the Vimeo site to watch it in HD. Odd.

Blip.tv

So I tried Vocaroo. It didn’t work.

I emailed my principal and it was then forwarded to the district level for consideration. The district folks determined that when pressing Record, the request actually went to a different server. That server was blocked by our filters for being a known proxy hosting server. I accept the need to block that server, and wrote off Vocaroo.

However, I decided to email the Vocaroo folks and let them know. Originally they had me check to see if port 1935 was open in our district. It is. A few days later, I got an email from the Vocaroo folks saying..

Hi, just an update on this.

Vocaroo has now moved to a different server, so you should be able to
access it now (unless they deliberately block the vocaroo.com domain).

Wow! Vocaroo works like a charm now! Yay!

I asked whether this was directly related to my emails from earlier and they said:

Yes it was in response to your request – and thanks for reporting the
problem. The more people that can use it, the better

Wow again! I’m impressed. A very public thank you to Vocaroo for being willing to make this change so that my students and presumably many others can use the service.

This goes to show you, it pays to contact folks.

Here is the final slide deck.

What do you think of their design techniques?