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Teacher Training Videos

Apr 27th, 2009
by pollyalida.
4 comments

I love it when I find a great new resource, only to realize that I bookmarked it in delicious account months ago! So much for my memory. In any case, here’s one of those resources that I re-learned about today. :-)

Teacher Training Videos “were created for teachers to help them to incorporate technology into their teaching.” These screencasts step you through how to use a wide range of desktop & web based tools and include ideas for using them in educational settings.

Tools covered include: delicious, Bubblr, YouTube, RSS, SecondLife, iTunes, Twitter, BlackBoard, Photoshop, PowerPoint and many many more. And there’s a special section of screencast for ELT/ESL. I could spend all day watching these and learning about new tools and new tips for ones I’m already familiar with.

flowgram – a different sort of screencast

Jul 3rd, 2008
by pollyalida.
1 comment

Have you ever picked up the phone, called a friend or colleague and said ‘go to xyz web site’ and then tried to say things like “click on that link at the top left”. “no not that one, the other big yellow button”, “see that thingie at the bottom” and so on. I have and it can be frustrating.

Flowgram is an interesting new service that I found out about today thanks to Greg Schwartz. It falls somewhere in the realm of screencasting services, though maybe we need a new term for this type of tool. (Maybe there already is a term?)

With Flowgram, you open up web pages, add highlighting to point out different parts of the page and add a narration to the pages. All this is done with live web pages.

When you share this with others, they see the live web pages with your highlighting in their browser window, with a small toolbar at the top of the window with  start and pause controls. What’s really intriguing, and a bit confusing at first, is the ability to stop the presentation, go off and explore the web pages that are on the screen and then return to the Flowgram to resume the presentation.

I haven’t created any Flowgrams myself. The service is still in an invite-only beta version.  I’ll be curious to see how this service develops. I can see it being very useful for quick instruction and sharing of content with others.

Greg’s Flowgram showing some tips on using FriendFeed.

And another Flowgram – this on one What is a Flowgram.