Searching for Video

Jeff Thomas raises a good point - there is so much video online, but it's not always easy to find the video you want. Just searching on YouTube or Vimeo might not be the most effective strategy. He recommends 10 video search engines, and an iPad app for watching video on the iPad. Video search engines include the usual suspects - Google Video, Yahoo Video, Bing Video, but also some I haven't heard of, like Fooooo, Blinkx, and VideoSurf.

Oh, and if you're looking for those specialized videos about technology in adult education, try OTAN's Video Gallery, which now includes the Captured Wisdom videos about adult education technology-based projects, or the Media Library of Teaching Skills (MLoTS).

Student Videos to Promote Voting

Susan Gaer's ESL class at Santa Ana College Continuing Education made this video encouraging people to vote! It's part of a contest on the Easy Voter Guide site. There are quite a few other student videos from other community colleges in California. Check them out and get your students to vote for the one they like best!

Guernica in 3D

An example of what can be done with media - wow!

Online Video Resources

This is a session that I didn't get to attend, but they created a wonderful wiki page with descriptions of a variety of video sites, whether you can upload to them, and what their special features are. Take a look!

How to Show YouTube Videos at School

I just read an article on Larry Ferlazzo's blog about how to get around your district's blocking of YouTube. This is a problem for many teachers. There are good reasons to keep YouTube blocked, but at the same time there is so much good content there. This was obvious during the election when Obama was posting videos on YouTube, and his transition team continues to do so.

Larry's article led me to a blog post by Joyce Valenza on the School Library Journal blog called When YouTube is Blocked (eight ways around). Larry suggests bookmarking this article, and I agree. There will be that time when the perfect video that you or one of your students needs for a presentation, and this article will help you download it and convert it to a format you can play from your laptop or from within a PowerPoint.

Joyce also suggests trying other video sites that may not be blocked. TeacherTube is one that many teachers know about, but Larry suggests EduBlogs TV, which is still in beta, but is hosting educational videos, and Larry says he has used it quite a bit in teaching American History. The list of videos on the home page looks intriguing, however, I can't get any of them to play from work. Maybe they are embedded videos from YouTube? In which case. this doesn't not solve the problem.

Other suggestions?

People of the Screen

Hey, can you tell I'm on vacation? I actually have time to read this article by Kevin Kelly in the NY Times about the ubiquity of video in our culture, and to think about it, and respond to it! (OK, I know, something's wrong with this picture when I only have time to think on vacation!)

The article compares how the printing press made us eventually "people of the book," and how digital media have become so accessible and manipulable that we will soon have a visual language to match our verbal language, and be able to create, manipulate, annotate, and recreate visual images, video, the way we now do words.

There are many ways to do this now. For example, here is an article, with classroom suggestions, about how to add thought bubbles, captions and hyperlinks to video using Bubbleply.

CCAE South

The workshop went well. I spent half the time talking about resources on the OTAN Web site, and there are always plenty of people who haven't explored yet. The other half was about video in the classroom. Useful for the teachers, but I had a mixed audience with a lot of support staff, not sure what they thought of it all. But really, you gotta admit it's amazing how easy it is to show video from anywhere. It took me all of 15 seconds to embed those videos in my blog. How many in my audience had a blog? None.

However, a teacher from Downey Adult School, John Oppenheim, did a workshop on Web 2.0 for the Classroom, and talked about blogs, wikis, and social bookmarking. This is encouraging - it's not just us OTANians talked about Web 2.0 any more! He also posted his slides.

Video as a Writing Prompt

There are lots of funny animal videos online. Here is one with a bunch of cat clips. Any one of these could be a writing prompt for a descriptive paragraph.

Using Video to Teach Math

I'm putting together some examples for a workshop on using video in the classroom. Here is a classic Abbott and Costello using math. Maybe not great for instruction, but will certainly lighten the mood once students have a good understanding of multiplication and division.

Web 2.0 for Administrators

My workshop for administrators was interesting. It reminded me that most people don't have time to surf around and look for cool new things. That's part of OTAN's role (my favorite part!), to review the possibilities and present a few that might be helpful for busy teachers and administrators. Links are all on my wiki.

So here's what they wanted to hear about:
1. Google Calendar, and how to share a calendar online
2. Wikis - what's a wiki and what to you use it for?
3. RSS Feeds - but I had to talk about blogging first, and the OTAN News, so they would have a concept of what feeds they might want to get.
4. Social bookmarking - I didn't have time to go into detail on this, but I think this might be one of the most useful things for them

Things we didn't get to:
1. Google Docs
2. Video sharing
3. Unitedstreaming
4. Moodle
5. Open source software

This could really be a 3 hr workshop instead of just a show and tell. Maybe I should propose this for COABE.

Social Bookmarking in Plain English

Just came across this video by Lee Lefever explaining social bookmarking in simple terms. It could be a great aid to explaining Delicious and other sites (he mentions Magnolia and furl) to teachers, students and even your relatives who haven't experienced this approach yet.

I'm interested because we are currently working on converting the OTAN My Resources area from the old files and folders model to the new tags and tag clouds model, and should have this up soon. We have about 1,000 people who have saved links in their Resources area, and I anticipate that all will not be thrilled with the change, as all never are. Maybe we can send out a link to this video to help explain what social bookmarking is. What do you think?



He has posted some other videos too, like RSS in Plain English and Social Networking in Plain English. Check him out on YouTube or at the Common Craft Show.

Did you know...

This is an interesting video I got from David Warlick's blog, 2 cents worth. It has a lot of data about how the world is changing, and how fast. For example, if MySpace was a country, it would be the 8th largest country in the world. Could your students relate to this message?

TeacherTube and MLoTS

Viral video is taking over the world, even the world of teaching! It seems like a few months ago we were talking about Barry Burkett's video of his ESL class posted on YouTube, and now suddenly there is such a proliferation of teacher-made videos! The adult education version, being developed by David Rosen and Friends, Media Library of Teaching Skills, is in its beginning stages, with two videos posted currently of an ABE vocabulary lesson. But there are plans to train teachers all over the country to videotape each other, and to enlist states to link their state adult ed standards to video examples.

Another example I found today is TeacherTube, a YouTube for teachers. It contains only teacher- and student-made videos illustrating the teaching and learning of many concepts in many different content areas. There is no reason that adult education videos couldn't be uploaded here. I had a technical problem that I have to figure out, my uploading video got timed out, but I'll try it again from home. It's amazing to see the energy and creativity that is going into this work!

Instant Video

My colleague Branka was at TESOL in Seattle, where she recorded a short video of the a presentation in the Electronic Village, and posted it on Google video. It makes me realize how we are more and more able to see what others are doing almost instantly from anywhere in the world.

What can adult learners do with Google video or YouTube? Already teachers are videoing each other and posting videos, for the MLoTS project (Media Library of Teaching Skills). The idea of this project is to train teachers to video each other, create short clips (10 min. max) of specific teaching techniques tied to standards or best practices, and make these available in a searchable database.