We are asking you to do a little exploration into emerging technologies as teams. One of the better resources on the web for educators to tap into is Educause. They produce an excellent series called, “7 Things You Should Know About …” It is essentially a series of short white papers that answer seven simple questions about a given technology. On lots of levels it the first place we stop when researching a new technology in a teaching or learning context. Find the seven things series by visiting the Educause site (http://www.educause.edu/7Things).
With that in mind, we’d like you to look at a few of the ones they have there that perk your interests as a team. Once you’ve organized your thoughts a bit about it we’d like you to create and share a short YouTube video that lets us know the following:
- What technologies did you review?
- Why?
- Are there novel ways you could see those technologies being put to use in education?
- Are there technologies you couldn’t find at the Educause site that you’d like to learn more about?
If you don’t have a YouTube account, just create one and record your video. If you don’t have a webcam, all the machines in our classroom have one … otherwise, most of the campus labs have webcams available. Once your video is recorded on YouTube, you’ll use the Embed Code to create a new entry at the course site with your video in it. To embed a video follow these directions:
- Log into http://blogs.psu.edu and create a New Entry at the course blog.
- Switch from “Rich Text” to “Convert Line Breaks” in the Format drop down menu
- Write and format the text for the body of your entry. (Note: The easiest approach is to describe the video first, then insert it.)
- Look for the Embed code on the YouTube page and cut and paste it into the text body of the new entry. (The embed code begins as “<object width =…")
- Save and publish the entry. The video stream will be displayed in your blog.
Your entry format field should look like this before adding your embed code: