A SmartBoard mini-movie is a simple (most involve only a click of the mouse), interactive animation that teachers can download and add to their galleries. From there, the movies can be inserted into their SMART Notebook presentations. Each mini-movie is a dynamic Flash file, similar to the same files that are already included in SMART Notebook's resources.
My friend and colleague, Tech Director Jen Hegna over in the Byron (MN) schools developed this set of guidelines for the staff in her district. (She was motivated, she said, partially by posts here and here on the Blue Skunk. Cool!) Anyway she's given permission for me to share her work here and says readers are welcome to use and adopt as well:
Guidelines for Educators Using Social Networking Sites August 2009 (DRAFT, DRAFT, DRAFT)
Create screencasts and screen recordings with this free online service. It is very simple.
A great way to develop video tutorials for your students and colleagues.
Today, we've gone from scarcity of knowledge to unimaginable abundance. It's only natural that these new, rapidly evolving information technologies would convene new communities of scholars, both inside and outside existing institutions
"We said, 'Let's create a university that actually measures learning,' " Mendenhall says. "We do not have credit hours, we do not have grades. We simply have a series of assessments that measure competencies, and on that basis, award the degree."
Hulu.com, launched just 18 months ago, is widely considered to be the first Web site to prove that mass broadcast-television viewing as we know it can and will shift online. Hulu did that by being attractive, well-designed, and easy to use, and by having a viable business model with actual paying advertisers -- and soon, subscribers.
He has also offered five of his courses to anyone on the Web for free; he donates his own time to review nonenrolled students' work, awarding a signed certificate in lieu of course credit. Wiley's most recent open course was formatted as an online role-playing game, with students divided into "guilds" completing "quests" -- a learning community inspired by the world of online gamers. "If you didn't need human interaction and someone to answer your questions, then the library would never have evolved into the university," Wiley says. "We all realize that content is just the first step."
If you want to perform a proper string quartet, they noted, you can't cut out the cellist nor can you squeeze in more performances by playing the music faster. But that was then -- before MP3s and iPods proved just how freely music could flow. Before Google scanned and digitized 7 million books and Wikipedia users created the world's largest encyclopedia. Before YouTube Edu and iTunes U made video and audio lectures by the best professors in the country available for free, and before college students built Facebook into the world's largest social network, changing the way we all share information. Suddenly, it is possible to imagine a new model of education using online resources to serve more students, more cheaply than ever before.
Includes a link to a gradebook plugin for Wordpress. If the costs associated with Moodle (server space and time to manage) are too much, this is another cost-effective way of having a LMS without paying for Blackboard/WebCT/Vista.