Directly from Free Technology for Teachers blog by Richard Byrne is an idea for locating music for student videos. Check out his blog for some fabulous tech for the classroom ideas.
“I always encourage people to use their own music creations in the videos they produce, but I recognize that that is not always possible or practical. My next recommendation then is to use Creative Commons licensed music (here are seven good sources). This morning through Pitchanan Gaysornmas I learned about another good place to search for and find Creative Commons music, the Vimeo Music Store.
“The Vimeo Music Store offers more than 45,000 music tracks. Not all of the tracks are free or Creative Commons licensed, but roughly one-third or more of them are. In the Vimeo Music Store you can search for music by genre, license type, price, and length.
“Applications for Education
The next time your students are developing multimedia projects for your class, have them take a look through the Vimeo Music Store to see if they can find a tune to enhance the message of their productions.”
Another wonderful idea from one of my faves, MakeUseOf: six free online programs to create your own personal chat room. These are options for those of us who want to chat with a group but everyone in the group doesn’t use the same chat program and doesn’t want to sign up for several. Here are several very brief previews to show you what is out there to explore:
TinyChat supports voice, webcam, whiteboard, and desktop sharing.
Chatterous is password protected and you can even chat via SMS on your cell phone, too.
Anologue is a simple, clean chat program without lots of bells and whistles.
BabelWithMe allows you to chat with others who don’t speak your language; chats are converted to your language of choice.
BoostCam is a simple one-on-one video chat room with no sign up requirement.
And, finally, ChatRide is similar to BoostCam with the added feature of chat.
Here’s a great source for you: 25 online locations where you can read books for free. Here’s the URL to the website–the list is lengthy because it describes what each source offers. What a great way to spend your lunch hour at your desk!
http://educhoices.org/articles/Online_Libraries_-_25_Places_to_Read_Free_Books_Online.html
Here’s one for your students! Do you see your students creating and using paper note cards to study for examinations and tests?
Typhoeus Revision is an application created so that you can create note cards containing text and an image using your computer. This is useful as you can edit them and view them whenever you need without having to worry about losing paper. First you create a User Account so more than one person in your household can use it, secondly you create a subject to organise your cards.
http://ht.ly/1T2Zr
Teach Paperless: How to create paperless classrooms
What a fabulous blog–check out June 2 post. Blog author posts what students have told him about how they learn best–what strategies have worked for them. Even though we may have been teaching for a long time, there are still infinite possibilities for our making our teaching more learning centered–just listen to these students.
http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2010/03/free-33-page-guide-google-for-teachers.html
An author at Freetech4teachers put together this guide (see link above) to using Google search, docs, books, news, and maps in the classroom. The guide consists of 33 pages containing 21 ideas and how to instructions for creating Google Maps placemarks, directions creating and publishing a quiz with Google Docs forms, directions for embedding books into your blog, and visual aids for accessing other Google tools.
