QlipBoard & Next Vista for Learning
I never thought I’d say this but I’m getting tired of the sound of my own voice. Because if the nature of individualized instruction, I find myself explaining the same key concepts and skills over and over -- probably 15 or 20 times a semester. Given that cloning myself so I can sit beside each student is not yet possible, I need to collect some of my explanations on video and make them available to the students to view and review. I’d much rather they view first and then get feedback about their level of understanding with a quick task they have to do get after they’ve seen the clip.
I want my students’ independent learning to be more successful – and so do they. In our school, streaming videos or podcasts slows down the all computers to a crawl. I just found out today that we have one of 2 ancient ADSL modems left in the entire province. It's advantage is that it can transfer a signal over long distances, but if it detects even the smallest bit of noise on the line, it begins to strangle the stream -- AND IT DOES NOT RESET ITSELF!!!! The worse the noise on the line is, the less bandwidth we get, and that becomes progressively less and less until someone from IMS comes out to reset it. Because our school server is full, we can't store any resources there.
Conclusion -- I’ll need to put all mhy new resources onto individual thumbdrives -- 1 per student -- so I’m off to my local cut rate computer store this weekend to buy 10 thumbdrives and load them with Science 10 resource files students can sign out and play as they need to.
With this free program (downloadable and online versions; PC only), little instructional movies are madie with any content you can screen capture. “QlipBoard lets you add your voice to anything you see on your computer and make videos without a video camera.” You put pictures into a sceneline below the screen and then use the record button to create the video. These can be shared via email, posted on their website, embedded, or saved as .wmv files that can be opened and fully edited again if you wish. You can also post them on YouTube or Photobucket.
Here’s a link to very nice Qlippit about how rainbows refract light from an educational resources site called Next Vista for Learning: http://www.nextvista.org/rainbows/.
The people at Next Vista are compiling an online library of free videos to help students "learn just about anything, meet people who make a difference in their communities, and even discover new parts of the world." They are soliciting submissions, but everything that goes into this library is fully shareable and downloadable so they only want original content with no copyright infringements.
