Web Tools for Educators

If there's one bothersome side effect of getting a long Web video sent to you, it's getting to the good parts. In some cases, the part your friend wanted you to see could be a few minutes in, and you might not have the time (or patience) to sit through the rest. A service called Splicd fixes this, by letting anyone drop in a YouTube video URL, then pick the start and end point. It's not a very pretty implementation, but it works. You've got to manually plug in the start and end times, which requires skipping around to the part you want in YouTube, then heading back to Splicd. Once it's worked it through, you get a permalinked page that you can share with friends. What's nice about this system is that it doesn't require extra time to re-encode the video; when you've put in those changes it's instantaneous. The downside to that is that the finished product cannot be shared outside of Splicd's site.

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The differences between digital native learners and digital immigrant teachers. Digital Native Learners Digital Immigrant Teachers Prefer receiving information quickly from multiple multimedia sources. Prefer slow and controlled release of information from limited sources. Prefer parallel processing and multitasking. Prefer singular processing and single or limited tasking. Prefer processing pictures, sounds and video before text. Prefer to provide text before pictures, sounds and video. Prefer random access to hyperlinked multimedia information. Prefer to provide information linearly, logically and sequentially. Prefer to interact/network simultaneously with many others. Prefer students to work independently rather than network and interact. Prefer to learn “just-in-time.” Prefer to teach “just-in-case” (it’s on the exam). Prefer instant gratification and instant rewards. Prefer deferred gratification and deferred rewards. Prefer learning that is relevant, instantly useful and fun. Prefer to teach to the curriculum guide and standardized tests.*Ian Jukes and Anita Dosaj, The InfoSavvy Group, February 2003