I had some fun this morning creating a Google Search Story.
The tag line (description) for this video is, “If you are just looking for activity worksheets, then you are missing the point!” I took advantage of my own high search-ability to do a little self-promotion in the search results, but the link that shows up is actually to my old blog site. Still, the whole thing took less than 20 minutes and the creation steps are really easy. I can see this activity being a lot of fun to do with students as an introduction to a topic in just about any subject. If you have students create some search stories, share them with me.
Enjoy the first day of school 2010!
Here is my YouTube channel if you are interested.
This is wonderful! I wish I could use it as an icebreaker, but YouTube is blocked : ( I do plan to make one for Intro to Rhetoric, though. Hope you have a great school year. I look forward to getting back into the good habits of reading and writing. It has really been a “summer of sloth” for me!
So cool! Thanks for that David! I’m never disappointed when I read your blog posts.
Thanks for your kind words Daryl, and thank you as always for your thoughtful contributions to my blog Yvonne. Living in China I have the same issue as you with YouTube being blocked. As a result, I’ll probably create one of these as an introduction to some of the 1-1 orientation meetings for students, but they won’t be able to do one themselves. You’ve heard me say this many times before, Filters Filter Learning!
Can you use animoto to make these quick shows. If it is under 30 seconds then it is free. Have fun in China Dave… will be in touch.
Thanks for the idea Dave, although I have tended to avoid suggesting high bandwidth tools like this in my school because 5 or 6 kids on this could slow our entire system down. We are supposed to be getting a fiber line this year, so that may change. I’m also trying to figure out ways to support my teachers so that they can access educational videos etc, since so many video sites are blocked here. I pay for a VPN, but yesterday I couldn’t get it to work at school on our new network. The biggest challenge is that this becomes one more layer of challenge which gets both teachers and students thinking more about the technology than about the learning.
Likewise, Animoto is a really neat tool, but it does a lot of the creative things for you/the student rather than having them be the creative contributor. We spend time helping them with the tool rather than on composition of the photos etc… but then, that’s a whole other post I’ve got brewing in my head:-)