05 February 2012

Weekend Update

First, the Technology Integration Teams would like to thank everyone who has viewed and commented on the blog posts so far.  Here are some interesting statistics that we wanted to share with you:
Number of posts: 3
Number of page views in January: 435
Number of page views in February: 1296
Number of comments: 81
Number of countries with at least 1 viewer:  11 (including Romania, Canada, France & Colombia)
That's right, we are international!!  It has been wonderful talking with colleagues about the different web tools and how they are using them in the classroom.  Keep up the great conversations!

We wanted to take a minute and bring to your attention one of our sponsors, TechSmith.
TechSmith is a great company filled with people who are passionate about helping teachers bring more technology into the classroom.  Some of their products that you may have heard of are Jing, Snagit, Camtasia Studio, and ScreenChomp.  All of these programs allow both teachers and students to create screencasts of their work to share on the Internet.  Jing and ScreenChomp are both free programs and we encourage you to try them out with your classes.  They are extremely easy to use and are designed for both the novice and advanced users.  Just a note, ScreenChomp is available only on the iPad.

In a later post, we will be introducing podcasts and screencasts and the TechSmith products will be highlighted for both their ease of use and their functionality.

Thank you to all of the people at TechSmith for their continued support for education and more importantly for helping us with giveaways for participants of this Web Challenge.
  

9 comments:

  1. TechSmith is wonderful. It provides Jing. My kids use Jing to record themselves explaining difficult concepts they are learning about in school. We take these Jings and post them on Screencast.com. we are building a wonderful archive of instruction for kids. It is like Kahn's site but in children's voices. Research has shown that kids learn better when they hear instruction from their peers. Great stuff.

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  2. Personally, I use Camtasia Studio for all of my podcasts, but it is definitely for the more advanced user. My students were playing with ScreenChomp and used it to create a podcast of an example I was doing in class. They turned on the mic to record my instructions and then copied how to solve the problem in the whiteboard area. It was great because they got my voice explained the problem in their handwriting.

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  3. I use Jing and Screencast to recreate classroom minilessons that are then posted to my website. It's great for students who need to revisit a strategy or skill, and it affords parents an opportunity to work with their children at home.

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  4. I have used Jing with students to create video tutorials-I have also used Audacity with the students to create Podcasts. I used Audacity and pulled in a science lesson about soundwaves and discussed white noise. They really loved it.

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  6. like Jing. I just need to practice using it more so I'm proficient at it. It's a great tool.

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  7. I have seen Jing at work and it is a fantastic program. I look forward to actually creating my own in the future.

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  8. This wasn't 100% clear to me prior to our Professional Day, but Randy Thomas gave a great class on Jing and thus showed us TechSmith. I set up an account.

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