Audacity Tutorial

http://mikeygolden.wordpress.com/

has a downloadable Audacity tutorial in a .doc format.

The RED PANDA! (Or how Canada's greatest superhero taught my class how to make podcasts!)

I've always wanted to get my students to make enteratining podcasts, but I didn't know where to get inspiration and modeling for them. Recently, on iTunes, I've listened to "Old Tyme Radio Network" podcasts, and by chance I stumbled onto Podiobooks.com . The Red Panda season one is Decoder Ring Theatre (from Canada)'s tribute to old radio programs. I've played both the old radio and Red Panda for my class. They definately prefer the Red Panda because it has better sound quality, and moves at a quicker, more modern pace. (As well, can you imagine the Red Panda's sidekick, his driver, Kit Baxter, as the Flying Squirrel?)

Today, some students started experimenting with recording podcasts. One group used my laptop MacBook, and the other group and I experimented with Audacity. GarageBand is AWESOME as we all know, but we were all surprised at how well Audacity worked. We still need to do a lot more work, but today was one of those great days in education.

PS....any tips on using Audacity and/or GarageBand gratefully received!

Google Alerts and De.licio.us

Being once again (yegadz I am SO old) in the position to have to prepare lessons for yet another set of applications (am I whining?) , I have been using "Google Alerts" to locate online teaching resources, tutorials, and hints, and then saving the links to de.licio.us in order to keep them until I need them.

For example , to day there is :
An intro tutorial to Microsoft Word http://www.baycongroup.com/wlesson0.htm

How to make a realistic pupil in Fireworks (and lots of other cool stuff)
http://www.tutorialsphere.com/tutorial/fireworks/special-effects/2262/how-to-make-a-realistic-pupil-in-fireworks

Gimpusers Flickr Blog http://www.flickr.com/groups/gimpusers/

Building a better podcast http://www.thejournal.com/articles/21814

Ipod Dancer Tutorial http://sglider12.blogspot.com/2007/12/ipod-dancer-tutorial.html

I can screen the possible tutorials, and add the one's I think have instructional possiblitities to my de.licio.us account http://del.icio.us/patriciacone

It comes in handy. I especially love having these laptops; it makes sitting crosslegged on the couch more productive!

Hi Donna...and yes, I'm learning to love my Google Reader.

Out of sheer desperation...every other day trying to log into the "Learning Technology Blogs" one by one...and out of the cyber blue I figured out how to use Google Reader! It was like the heavens parted - briefly!

Then I began to add a few blogs that seem to have some useful information (see my previous posts).

As Lao Tsu says, "The journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step."

LANGWITCHES' Blog

This is another highly informative blog to which I have subscribed:

http://www.langwitches.org/blog/

As she describes herself:

"LANGWITCHES' Blog contains thoughts, ideas and projects on my journey as a Technology Integration Facillitator.

My name is Silvia Tolisano. I was born in Germany, raised in Argentina and am living in the United States. I hold a Bachelor's Degree in Spanish with a Minor in International Studies and a Masters in Education with an emphasis in Instructional Technology.

My areas of interest include technology in the classroom and multicultural and global education."

Save Our Prairie

This is a blog site about globalwarming with a local concern.

Deidre Bonnycastle is an educational technologist (UofS grad) and an instructional designer for the College of Medicine at the UofS (aka a teacher teaching doctors - novel idea eh???) She has let me know about a blog http://prairiesaver.blogspot.com/

Esnips.com

Esnips.com is an online storage and sharing site. Everyone can sign up for a free account and get 5 gigs of online storage space. (Google gives you 1 gig?) The idea of this site is that you will share things like video and images; however you can set the preferences so that nothing is shared. I've been using this recently to upload my school files for backup. So far, so good. I know I could save things to my flash drive, but dang it, then I would have to know where it is at all times.

Holiday Surfing Finds

I've found a few cool things as I've surfed over the holidays.


Paint. Net I tried downloading this onto my laptop. It seems to be more like GIMP than MS Paint is. http://www.getpaint.net/

Pete's Online Typing Lessons These seem to work well (depending on your connection speed).
http://www.typing-lessons.org/


Well, back to coffee - part two - and more surfing.

TeacherTechBlog

I've subscribed to TeacherTechBlog http://teachertechblog.com/ It seems (so far) to be a very practical blog for teachers in the K-12 community.

A good blog entry to start on is "The Best of 2007" http://teachertechblog.com/the-best-of-2007/130/

I'm going through it right now and have found some useful tidbits.