Cool Tools & Ed Tech

Kids' Vid is an instructional web site that gives teachers and students the tools necessary to implement video production in the classroom. Video production can be intimidating to the novice. Not to worry. It is nothing more than a method for recording research and expressing creative ideas. Video production, if properly implemented, is more than a new toy for students. It provides the tools and the means for students to create and display serious work in a new, exciting and engaging way that is appropriate for all age groups and abilities. This is a place for serious fun.

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How about a simple photo-editor that’s quick, easy, and doesn’t cost a thousand dollars. Fortunately, there’re tons of web-based photos editors popping up. Most are crap, but some are promising. Check out these free web-based Photoshop alternatives

Enhanced podcasts are AAC encoded audio files (m4a or m4b, m4p) with new data inside them that can be time based, like an image or a URL to appear at a certain time.

In this article, I'm going to do a little condensation of the content in the book and give you ten ways to improve your podcasts. There is no priority to their listing, though the first five tips cover some of the basics: getting a good microphone, proper microphone technique, show preparation, reducing noise, and formats; the latter five are more concerned with the content of your show. All are practical methods for improving both the sound and the content of your show. Feel free to take from them what you will and leave whatever you don't agree with on the floor.

Podcasters, who are as varied as bloggers, create their broadcasts from interviews, personal observations, phone calls, music snippets, or random nonsense. The most popular seem to be discussions and strange programming -- news read in rhyme while tap dancing, for instance -- that's totally unavailable in familiar forms. The secret sauce is RSS: podcasts are syndicated, meaning listeners just have to find them once, and receive them every time a broadcast is issued.

A wiki is a website where users can add, remove, and edit every page using a web browser. It's so terrifically easy for people to jump in and revise pages that wikis are becoming known as the tool of choice for large, multiple-participant projects. In this Article: Wikis Work for Big Projects Choosing a Wiki Advantages to Using a Wiki Disadvantages to Using a Wiki Using a Wiki Somewhere, in a dimly lit classroom, a library bench, or in a home study, some lucky so-and-so is writing an essay from beginning to end with no notes. This splendid individual is able to craft entire sections without forgetting by the end what the section was intended to include at the beginning, and can weave a carefully paced argument with thoughts and references collected over a period of months, all perfectly recollected. Neither of your authors is this person. Instead, we need help, and that help comes in the shape of a wiki. A wiki is a website where every page can be edited in a web browser, by whomever happens to be reading it. It's so terrifically easy for people to jump in and revise pages that wikis are becoming known as the tool of choice for large, multiple-participant projects. This tutorial is about how to effectively use a wiki to keep notes and share ideas amongst a group of people, and how to organize that wiki to avoid lost thoughts and encourage serendipity.

Welcome to TiddlyWiki, a popular free MicroContent WikiWikiWeb created by JeremyRuston and a busy Community of independent developers. It's written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript to run on any modern browser without needing any ServerSide logic. It allows anyone to create personal SelfContained hypertext documents that can be posted to a WebServer, sent by email or kept on a USB thumb drive to make a WikiOnAStick. Because it doesn't need to be installed and configured it makes a great GuerillaWiki. This is revision 2.4.0 of TiddlyWiki (see recent changes), and is published under an OpenSourceLicense.