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Here’s a link to some AMAZING tools from PBS Vote 2008: http://www.pbs.org/teachers/vote2008/tools.html
Access, Analyze, Act: A Blueprint for 21st Century Civic Engagement has some great interactive sites you can use for teaching purposes or have students use. There are curriculum materials as well. What I like are the sites that promote “critical thinking”…check out YouDecide which plays devils advocate on many controversial issues today and is a good initiator of class debates and discussions. There are also lots of sites where students can see how the candidates match up to their own views.
Ever have to write an important message to yourself on the back of a receipt, scrap paper, or even a napkin? Jott.com is set up to resolve this issue for you. Once you sign up, you will be able to send messages from your cell phone to your email. So if you are on the run and someone tells you an address or important message that you need to remember, just call the Jott number with your cell phone and speak out the information once it starts recording. The result? You can check your email when you get to a computer and find your “spoken” message sent to you as an email from Jott. I was a bit skeptical about it thinking “how can it understand what I’m saying?” The first time I tested it, Jott could not understand my message. Some of my colleagues concluded it was because of the signal of my cell phone. I tried it again and it worked perfectly. Most importantly, it annotated my voice message perfectly well. I think this is great for those of us who don’t have the luxury of a blackberry, iPhone, or other pda device that allows you to access internet or document applications. I have a basic cell phone and have started to use this for those important messages that I don’t want written on my hand! Best of all…it is FREE!
If you haven’t heard of it, you can try 12seconds.tv. It is in private alpha and you have to request an invite to use it. Mashable has a great article on it. It allows you to record 12 second videos directly from your computer and keep a library of them on your own little mini “channel”. What a way to take your microblogging to the next level! Or as someone else put it…something else we need when our attention spans are already disappearing! 12 seconds is not a long time. It’s kind of funny watching some of the videos because people are trying to rush with what they want to say…anxiety causing? But this is a great way to chronicle what’s going on in your life, a specific event, a specific project, provide updates on something for work (especially when you are out traveling for work!) or just be crazy. You can take the video from a webcam or even your cell phone. It is totally FREE. I’ll try it out and see how it works. To be continued.
From Instructional Technology Coordinator Janene Gorham:
This coming Friday (August 22nd) the.News at www.pbs.org/newshour/thenews unveils its new, video-centric website for high school and middle school teachers and students.
The site includes a number of videos on different topics including social studies, language arts, financial literacy and economics, science and health that will be updated throughout the school year with new information and new videos.
Just in time for the start of the school year and the elections, the.News will inaugurate a new feature called the.Vote. Right now on the website the.Vote includes a detailed background report on political conventions that not only presents the challenges facing the Obama and McCain campaigns but looks back at past conventions. Like all the video content on the.News, the the.Vote videos will have companion lesson plans for social studies and language arts, including written transcripts, and will be open captioned.
A second segment timed for mid-September called “He’s our President too: Youth on the campaign trail” will look at student activities in campaigns focusing on grassroots politics, including voter registration and fund raising. This video report will show students how politics works on a citizen-to-citizen level. New the.Vote videos and lesson plans will be updated every other week throughout the election.
Also kicking off this fall will be a student-generated video competition called YOU.report. We are wrapping up the final details for this video production activity that will be related to a social studies prompt (and is being shaped with the help of the NCSS). Final details will be posted on the website in mid-September.
Here’s an amazing keynote speech given by a student to teachers for Dallas Independent School District. It’s a bit long, but very motivational in starting the year off with the right perspective.
