Dr. Z Reflects: atomic learning

Showing posts with label atomic learning. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

How to Use Iowa AEA Online - Kay Rewerts

Iowa AEA Online is a significant set of clip art, photographs, streaming video, graphics, online tutorials, reference resources that are available for teachers and students to use. Beginning in the late 90s, the forward-thinking sages at the Iowa Area Education Agencies began to purchase statewide licenses to support learning resources. These licenses provide access for all public and private K-12 schools across the state of Iowa. The Iowa AEA Online resources include:

The licenses for using the graphic resources vary somewhat, but most of them allow students to use them on projects and web sites. Atomic Learning provides hundreds of tutorials for learning software and have recently begun to describe teaching strategies for educators. Discovery provides a plethora of videos (many editable) for instruction and to be used in video creation. Ebsco, SIRS, AccuWeather and World Book Web provide a wealth of research information.

The only problem with having access to all of these resources is learning how to use them.

TA-DA!!!! Enter Kay Rewerts!!!!!

Kay Rewerts is an educational consultant who have helped educators in 30 states. Fortunately, she lives here in Iowa and has worked as a never-tiring source of information and innovation for our educators. A few weeks ago, we were fortunate enough to have Kay in our class where she took us on a 45-minute tour of the obvious and not-so-obvious opportunities with Iowa AEA Online.

Mrs. Rewerts has given me permission to include her demonstration through my blog. It is something that will be well worth your time watching. Even if you don't live in Iowa, these resources are available globally and there are sections that will be useful for all educators.

If you are interested in contacting Kay Rewerts, please send her an email at krewerts@mchsi.com

Here is a link to the 45-minute Iowa AEA Online workshop that Kay provided.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Tools for Video Authoring

Ever create a video and upload it to YouTube? Everybody's doing it. Although the statistics haven't been openly available since Google acquired YouTube for $1.650,000,000 (in Google stock), Comscore estimated that in January 2008 alone, nearly 79 million users had made over 3 billion video views.

Here is a video by Jon4Lakers about how to make a video using Macintosh iMovie HD and up load it to YouTube

. It is not too complicated. You will note that he did this video while on a studybreak from "writing essays for business school" (note that it has been viewed almost 11,000 times - not bad for a studybreak.)

Jon4Lakers was also courteous enough to provide some instruction on how to use Photobooth on his Macintosh to create YouTube videos.

Wondering how to do this with Windows Movie Maker? It is a little more complicated, but JohnGregory08 from Australia provides a 10-minute video about using MovieMaker to create a video.

Want to know how to do specific things in Movie Maker?
Atomic Learning has a set of 63 free videos for Windows Movie Maker 2.

Screencasting
Wondering how to share what's happening on your screen? This is called a screencast. There are a number of programs that you might want to use: Snapz Pro X (Mac) or Camtasia (Windows)

Another option for screencasting is Jing. This is a free, on-line version of Camtasia by the same company, TechSmith. Dr. Z has already posted on Jing in an earlier blog posting. It is a powerful tool that will allow you to create an online video up to 5-minutes in length. Read his posting to learn more about it.

Here is a video that demonstrates and explains Jing.

The world is full of examples of educators using videos to involve k-18 learners in expressing and exploring new ideas. Here are a few examples. Those of you in the EIT class should have received invitations for becoming authors in this blog so add your own examples (followed by your name). If you aren't from this class but have ideas, add your suggestions as comments: