Monday, August 25, 2008

Make A Digital Wish

I spoke with Heather Chirtea, Lead Staff Development Trainer from Tool Factory earlier today and she told me about a very exciting website all teachers should know about. I called Heather to tell her about involving Tool Factory in the Storychasers project. Storychasers is a multi-state educational collaborative founded by Wesley Fryer and Kevin Honeycutt that has been created to empower students and teachers to responsibly record and share stories of local, regional and global interest as citizen journalists.
I asked Heather about linking Tool Factory’s Flip Video Mobile Lab and Mobile Podcasting Lab to the Storychasers website. The Flip Video and Podcasting Mobile Labs have everything in one case for podcasting and video production for classrooms. Teachers interested in Storychasers should definitely check them out.

Our conversation turned to funding sources for technology in schools and Heather told me about Digital Wish. Digital Wish is an online community of educators sharing resources and digital lesson plans. I addition to teacher-created digital lessons, there are also fundraising for creating a technology fundraising campaign and grants resources to help teachers and schools obtain technology tools for their classrooms.

Digital Wish encourages teachers to create a profile and a wish list of needed technology products for their classrooms. Donors can then access the site looking for schools needing technology and either buying items from teacher wish lists or by donating money directly to a school. Contributing vendors include both hardware and software companies alike. So, if you are a teacher who is struggling with a dried up technology go make a digital wish. It just might come true.

Friday, August 15, 2008

Podcast08 - Screencasting for Learning

Welcome to episode eight of the Technology Shopping Cart podcast where educational innovation thrives on the food of creative ideas! This episode was recorded on August 8, 2008, and shared live over the web using Ustream.tv and Skype. Karen Montgomery and Wesley Fryer discuss reasons to use as well as create screencasts, places to find educationally related screencasts, and tools to use on both Windows and Macintosh platforms for screencapture and screen recording. Near the end of the webcast we were joined by Tony Vincent, an amazing educator from Omaha, Nebraska, and author of learninginhand.com. Tony shared some of his favorite screencast tools and also joined us for our closing “geek of the week” exchange. Refer to our podcast shownotes for links to the resources and websites we discuss in this show, including the Ustream chat transcript of our live webshow and Ustream archive.

mp3 podcast

Show Notes:

  1. Referenced links from this episode on our wiki

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