Wired Educator

http://www.youtube.com/edu

Exciting news from YouTube with the launch of YouTube EDU.  YouTube EDU is described as “a better way to collect and highlight all the great educational content being uploaded to YouTube by colleges and universities” according to those in the know over at YouTube. 

I have been a fan of iTunes University and even TeacherTube for finding educational content to share in the classroom, spark my own creative projects, or to help me become a better content.  I have been using TubeSock to rip the videos onto my laptop to share. YouTube EDU could be a very promising alternative.  At first glance, the content already looks better than TeacherTube (TeacherTube is so slow!), and I am certain the content with be more numerous than iTunes U, (Individual users like myself cannot upload, and I really want to see what other teachers are doing.).

The obvious drawback for me is that the new YouTube EDU is only for colleges and universities.  I hope that will change, and soon.  (I’m fairly confident it will.  If you hear something, please send us a tweet at www.twitter.com/wirededucator). K-12 is in desperate need of educational video content.

I love the idea of YouTube EDU, and I really like the look.  Now I am waiting for some K-12 content.  Way to go YouTube. (Now keep going.)

WiredEducator is now on Twitter.  That’s right! The blog you love and trust to bring you the latest & the greatest in educational technology integration can now be followed on Twitter.  Follow us, and we will alert you when we post a new article on our blog.  You can also suggest ideas to us via Twitter, and ask us questions.

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Appleinsider reports that Apple will continue to offer a 17-inch iMac aimed for education starting at $899. A March Apple eNews mailing (pictured right) mailed  to education users included an advertisement for the 17-inch iMac along with the 20″ and 24″ models. Apparently the 17-inch is limited to education sales and is not being advertised publicly.  

As our economy works to stabilize and gain strength, and our schools continue to face funding obstacles and setbacks, this $899 iMac may bring some relief.

many flip options

OK, as a teacher I have a secret crush to admit.  I love the Flip.  I have been a flip owner for about a year and a half now and I am absolutely in love with it.  Whenever I am out and about I have the ability to take a short movie of something I want to show my class.  I have taken video of trolling, NASA facilities, NYC buildings, and even video of my class completing labs.  It is an absolute necessity for teachers.

I personally have the Flip Mino HD.  What an awesome piece of technology.  It easily rests in a coat pocket or pants pocket and has the ability to take a full 720p video to edit later on.  The included software allows you to use one click to upload to youtube or use their included editing software.  I personally like using iMovie 09 to edit my movies so I am unfamiliar with the software.

My wife has my old flip.  The Flip Ultra.  This takes DVD quality video.  The video is very nice and the great thing about this camcorder is the fact that it is powered by two AA batteries.

Now to the news.  Cisco purchased the company for 590 million.  I hope they don’t screw it up.  Cisco seems to be trying to diversify their business with this move and it might be nice to include some of their technologies into the device.  Specifically, I would love to see a small optical zoom device.  If I could zoom in a little bit without destroying the quality I could get rid of my other camcorder.  I would also love to see a SD port to allow for more expansion and allow to slide in a new card when the internal memory gets full.

What cisco does with device is up to them but for me, I hope to see more innovations from a device that I love.

Kindle 2 is a Keeper by Ty Roth

Not long ago, my parents informed me that they planned to move out of my childhood home into a condominium more suited to their needs and diminishing locomotive abilities. At the time, I couldn’t imagine mom and dad in any other place. Despite my nostalgic grousing, the relocation took place. Now, after a short “getting-to-know-you” phase, I have adjusted to the condo-reality. I’ve learned that my old house, in the end, was just a house – brick and mortar, and in my folks’ new home the same memories live on but with more conveniences and vastly improved appliances. I had loved the memories that house contained so much that I mistakenly fused the two.

In recent weeks, I relived that experience when I purchased a Kindle 2 from Amazon. Since their introduction, I had managed to resist the siren call of the e-book by lashing myself to a lifelong love of “real” books and the magic those black symbols on white leaves conjured. Like my parents, I couldn’t imagine them in any other place; however, after less than ten minutes of “page-turning” inside my Kindle 2, I lost the meta-consciousness of myself as a “man reading,” and I became, simply, a reader. I realized that, like my erstwhile home, it hadn’t been the books that I loved so dearly after all; I had confused my love of language and story with a delivery system, one that hadn’t seen a significant improvement in, at least, hundreds ,if not thousands, of years. For what other technology so central to the quality of human existence would we tolerate such a glacial evolutionary pace?

The advantages of the Kindle 2 are many, beginning with an ultra-long battery life and the ease and speed of downloading text. Since its original charge and after hours of usage, my battery indicator still shows a full charge. The Kindle’s Whispernet technology means the device is almost always connected to an ever-growing selection of over 240,000 thousand books, newspapers, magazines and blogs. I am no technophile; however, the preloaded Owner’s Manual quickly allayed all of my concerns with easy-to-follow instructions and explanations of the Kindle’s capabilities. The device’s 5-way controller allows the reader to move quickly from the Kindle Store to purchased texts to the Menu page from where individualized settings can be customized and where admittedly experimental functions of The Kindle (including basic web browsing, mp3 files, and a text-to-speech mode) can be accessed. Within the first ten minutes of removing mine from its box and in less than fifteen seconds of download time, I had a free sample chapter of John Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven and the most recent edition of The New Yorker ready for a two-week trial. I later purchased both at greatly reduced prices and discovered a treasure trove of classics at bargain bin prices. My proudest purchase thus far: Crime and Punishment at ninety-nine cents. I’m having to fight the gluttonous impulse to stuff the over two thousand book capacity of the Kindle with similar classics.

After the briefest of adjustment periods, I found the ergonomics of “curling up” with my Kindle conducive to the full enjoyment of the reading experience. Its cutting edge electronic ink is easy on the eyes and the font size adjusts to suit one’s preference or visual acuity. After many critical responses to the prototype’s rather large and often accidentally pressed page-turning buttons, the 2.0’s have been greatly reduced in size and made more manageable. Upon ending the reading session, the Kindle automatically bookmarks the last page read and opens to it upon returning to the text; however, when necessary, movement within the text is accomplished without difficulty by accessing the menu. My only difficulty came in deciding how to hold the Kindle. Possessing smallish hands, it was too large for one hand, yet it felt clumsy in two; I continue to experiment.

My criticisms are few, relatively minor, and largely targeted at secondary features outside of the basic reading experience. As other reviewers have noted, it lacks a much-needed system of backlighting which would enable its usage in the dark. Also, its internet functionality is limited to text-heavy web pages, the mp3 player allows for only marginal control of music files, and the text-to-speech voices are tinny and robotic. The diminutive size and feather weight of the Kindle also raises the concern of misplacement or of accidental discarding, and at $359 it’s far from the equivalent of leaving a book on the seat of a bus or subway car. The cost also renders me hesitant to venture with it into any but the most sterile of environments: the beach is definitely out. Unlike the original version, a protective carrying case is not provided with the Kindle 2, but one can be purchased from Amazon.

As a classroom teacher, largely due to the prohibitive expense, I can imagine little immediate application of the Kindle to daily instruction. The text-to-speech capability, the pace of which is adjustable, may be of use to a struggling reader (the device includes a headphone jack), and the futuristic “sexiness” of E-reading may seduce technologically curious students, who, otherwise, find traditional books “so yesterday” and boring. In my wilder dreams, I can imagine a day when students walk nimbly through less-crowded hallways unencumbered by the weight of overburdened backpacks because all of their textbooks have been preloaded on their school-issued Kindles, but I don’t believe it will be any day soon. I’m sure, however, that minds more creative than my own will soon envision and implement numerous uses for a classroom Kindle.

As for now, my Kindle, it calls. I think I’ll go and check out my library’s new digs, and, just think, for the price of an Apple I-Tunes song, I may just download a Dickens or another Dostoyevsky.