$30,000,000 Deal for Sharing Video!

Greetings,

I recently visited with a colleague of mine this past week, and it gave me an idea to blog about today’s topic. Most people have already heard about Youtube. You know where you can create a free account and post your own videos online. Here is a real life rags to riches story. Recently an unknown film producer produced a short four minute video costing around $300, in which robots where attacking a city and Hollywood found it. There soon was a bidding war for the video and finally Sam Raimi, the producer of "Spiderman" offered him a $30 million dollar deal. That’s right a 30 million dollar deal to collaborate with him to produce a new movie with robots of the future blowing up a city. If you the video above is not working, here is the link Panic Attack! or you can click on the picture above. So far this video has received over 5,500,000 hits. To learn more about the video, yahoo has posted a blog discussing more details of the future Hollywood blockbuster. Just visit http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/buzzlog-uruguay-to-hollywood.html So what kind of effect does this have on teachers?



If you have a video creation in which you are teaching a concept or idea you can post it on either http://www.youtube.com/ or http://www.teachertube.com/ Teachertube is a video sharing web site, in which teachers post their collection of videos. When you go to presentations for staff professional development, you know how the presenter usually has a funny video clip stressing an important point in his or her presentation. This is the site where most of those clips are coming from. So check out these new video sharing web sites and yes, you too can produce your own videos to share with the whole world.

Stay tune to next years blogs. I will be teaching you how to download videos from Youtube directly to your computer that you can use in presentations. I will also be reviewing the new flip camera by flip and sharing with you my exciting video about the Wintery Blizzard in West Central Texas I encountered, where I was stranded on the highway for 9 hours with thousands of other people. I will be showing you how to edit, crop pictures and take screen shots of your work in MS Word and soon I will be going step by step how to set up your own microphone in your classroom. I can't forget twitter, how to host your own web cast, and how to create your own podcast, as well as more picture sharing web sites. We have an exciting new year coming so stay tuned and we will see you next year. A lot of school districts have banned Youtube so I have posted the video here.

Tell the Whole World!

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then what is a talking picture worth? This week I am introducing a new web site that lets you turn any picture into a talking picture. That’s right, a regular picture into a talking picture. All you have to do is click on the picture to the left or click on the following link: http://www.blabberize.com/ Just like the picture says, it only takes 30 seconds. It's fast, easy and also fun to use. How would you like to use this tool to teach the students a concept or an idea from a talking picture?Your students or audience will love it. You can also put it in presentations or entertain your audience to make a point. Hope you have fun playing with it and we will see you next week.

Express Your Next List of Words With Creativity!

Greetings fellow Colleagues,

As you know, we all give our students list of words, ides or concepts to remember. How can we find a unique and fun way for students to remember them? Well here is a cool web site that can turn your list of words or ideas into a format that represent them in a unique way. It allows us to express creativity by putting words all together to make unique vertical and horizontal designs called word clouds. You can use different colored fonts, layouts and colors in your own word cloud. After you have finished creating your word cloud then you can save it or print it or share it with others in their gallery. You can also see other word cloud creations that other people have made and shared with the world. To try it out for free you can visit http://www.wordle.net/ Hope you enjoy this site and we will see you next week.

Valuable Writing and Brain Based Resources!

Hello,

Today I will be sharing valuable writing and brain based research resources. My first web site has numerous writing resources you can use with your elementary writing class. The web site is located at: http://tinyurl.com/Writing201 I attended three full days of training in which most of the ideas came from Colleagues/Teachers who attended the New Jersey Writing Project and shared their wonderful ideas with us. Here is a list of the recommended books that were given to us at the NJ Writing Workshop.





The next web site has many brain based research resources that Eric Jensen shared with us at a Workshop in San Diego, California. Eric Jensen is a major leader in the brain based research area and speaks at numerous engagements every year. Also there are resources and ideas from another work shop I recently attended in Dallas, Texas. Most of the ideas can be used as topics for discussion with teachers to facilitate collaborative discussions in Professional Development settings. The web site is located at: http://tinyurl.com/ErikJensen Hope you enjoy these two resources. Here are a few of the resources that were mentioned in his workshop and I have already added these resources to my library.