Round Rock Tech Guy

Weekly Tech Tip

I’m going to stray today and do a back post.

** A few weeks back I did a post about VoiceThread and how it can be used in the classroom. This morning early when I was reading a blog from one of my feeds I found another post about VoiceThread. This post showed a perfect example of how it can be used in the classroom. I had to watch and read the whole VoiceThread!!! It was that good!!! (not normal for me, I get bored easy!) Please, do yourself a favor and look at the VoiceThread - http://ed.voicethread.com/#q.b62276.i322457 You will find students engaged, empowered, problem solving and passionate while learning at the same time. Thanks for the example, Cool Cat Teacher Blog! http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/ She even has a follow up post about what her students are doing to extend their learning experiences. Awesome Stuff!!!!

(Note:) I’m only giving an example of how it can be used. I’m not promoting any views in the VoiceThread.

** World Wide Telescope coming soon! This sure sounds exciting for the Education and Science worlds. Here is a description from their web page. “The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a rich visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground and space telescopes in the world for a seamless, guided exploration of the universe. WorldWide Telescope, created with Microsoft’s high-performance Visual Experience Engine™, enables seamless panning and zooming across the night sky blending terabytes of images, data, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a media-rich, immersive experience.” You can check it out further at http://worldwidetelescope.org/ I hope to be bringing you more info on this when it’s released this spring”

** What an exciting time to be a part of education in such an “information available” age! When I first started teaching we only dreamed of having this kind of information available to us. Now we can not only have it available we can have our students producing it, collaborating on it, and making it available for the rest of the world to see. There are over 100,000 new blogs created daily with a majority of them being student aged creators. There are about 300,000 new MySpace / FaceBook users every day. This is growing by leaps and bounds.

This is where our students are at: Capturing their interests + Capturing their hearts = Capturing their minds!

 Happy Educating with Technology!