Playing Catch Up

Wow, I got further behind that I thought I did. I have been doing the exercises, just not blogging about them. So here goes.

Online productivity tools:
I love Google Docs. What a great way to collaborate with people during the draft phase of documents! Julia and I use it to work with EDC on the online course. I used it last week to store documents I needed to work on at home one night. It's such a better way to "send" myself something other than using my email. However, it's definitely not a replacement for Shared Docs. And I don't think we should ever put a document there that has sensitive information in it (i.e. passport numbers). But, I do think it's a great tool that we could encourage study tour participants to use when they are collaborating on teaching plans before leaving for China (or elsewhere).

Social Networks:
I have had a Facebook page for almost a year now. There the personal and the professional occasionally overlap. I'm a fan of Barefoot Books and am a member of several library groups in Facebook. In November, I advertised our holiday bazaar on my page. For this exercise I joined the TeachingLibrarian Ning Network. It's a nice network of librarians all over the world.

Videos:
I really like iCue. The fact that it is affiliated with NBC News is nice, and gives it some deeper credibility than things you find on YouTube. For video clips, I also love the History Channel's website and EaseHistory as well as PBS and the special sites PBS creates for each of its series. There is so much out there on YouTube and TeacherTube that I like to direct teachers to smaller sites with more focus when answering reference questions. In fact, if I can send them directly to a link with a clip, all the better.

From a webmaster point of view, YouTube and Vimeo offer great ways for us to store and share video that we create.

Personally, I use .Mac's (MobileMe) web gallery to upload both pictures and videos. Check out my site!

Podcasts and iTunesU:
Unfortunately, I had to miss the Apple training in early December. When I think about podcasts though, I think that we need to be careful that we understand that podcasts are a series of audio (or video) files with an organizing theme or purpose. Otherwise, it's just an audio clip. I think teachers should be aware of podcasts and how they could be used to bring content into the classroom. I don't know that we need to be creating podcasts, however. Who? What? When? Oy!

iTunesU is a pretty cool site where more and more organizations are adding content in addition to their current websites. There are a couple of grand visions I have for Primary Source and iTunesU. One, we could partner with WNET/Wide Angle (or PBS, etc.) to create companion activities or viewing guides for their films on iTunesU. They probably have in-house people to do this. The second grand vision is that someday we are creating content and adding lesson plans like PBS and Wide Angle have done with their films. They are grand visions. Very grand. In the meantime, I think we can let teachers know that their students can watch PBS clips and view content from the Smithsonian on their iPods by downloading free content from iTunesU.