I have created this lesson series using Jing and have stored them on http://www.screencast.com/users/LBurleigh/folders/MBC%20Flash%20CS3%20Lessons. I also submitted them to the Education Podcast Network at http://epnweb.org/.
This is an introductory lesson series and students can watch it over and over again at their computer stations. With Windows 7, students can dock the video on one side of the screen and dock their flash file they are working on, on the other side of the screen. Students can pause the lesson, back it up, and rewatch it until they learn the techniques.
This is a link to a completed student sample on the pbworks class wiki I created:
Hannah's Header for her Dreamweaver Site
Podcasts are great to use when you have a substitute teacher. Students can each work at their own pace without requiring any assistance from the sub. They can also work at their own pace without feeling behind anyone else.
The best learning for students comes when the students create thier own how-to Podcasts and publish them to My Big Campus, http://www.mybigcampus.com/, (MBC). My Big Campus is a secure online learning community that is a division of Lightspeed security systems. We use Lightspeed to protect our students while they explore the Internet.
This online learning community is used by students to watch educational videos, email each other, create Blog posts, start discussions, and post their own multimedia projects to their public libraries. As an administrator, I can run a report every evening and make sure the students are staying on task and not submitting anything inappropriate. I take about two hours each week and visit their Blogs and comment on some of them. I can create assignments for them and even upload my podcasts to the MBC Public Library so the students can watch them from home.
If I had a magic wand I would make the World Wide Web a safer place for our children so that they could take virtual field trips from the classroom to exotic places like Jamaica or Australia. I would introduce them to a classroom in Alaska or Hawaii and collaborate with the teacher so our classes could do a cross-cultural group project. I would help my fellow teachers incorporate technology in all their classes so that students in social studies could create maps using Google Earth or students in English could collaborate with others around the world to write and publish an adventure e-book. I would even have my Accounting students research web stock traders such as Ameritrade or Sharebuilder and encourage them to create an online stock portfolio.
Why would I do these things?
Because I believe that the workplace today uses employees from all over the world who can effectively collaborate and communicate using any media that is available to them. It is so important for students to learn basic social skills and how to work with others from different cultures. If students were really able to expand their learning as much as they are capable of, without us holding them back, I believe we would see that students today are more capable of critical thinking than we ever were. I suspect the reasons for this are that they are bombarded constantly with stimuli coming from many different directions. They see in 3-D and they communicate using shortcuts and hotkeys. Their social communication skills are more efficient because of the different media they are exposed to. With the right training, I believe that the students of the United States could be the leader once again in Global Awareness.
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