Video Conferencing with ooVoo

In 1920 the French illustrator, Léon Saussine, sketched a series of pictures where he imagined life in the year 2000 (Online collection). Of interest is; "Correspondance Cinéma - Phono - Télégraphique". The drawing depicts a gentleman comfortably sitting down in an armchair and holding a “microphone”. He is having a conversation with a young woman whose image is projected on screen.

Visionary or dreamer?
Well he wasn’t that far off! Two-way video conference is available and has been for some time. With the advent of the Internet you can now have a face to face discussion with others. There are several free applications that you can use, Skype, Windows Live Messenger, ooVoo and many others.
It’s easy as plugging and all you need is some basic equipment:

• A computer
• A digital video camera (if not built-in)
• An Internet connection (high speed)
• Microphone and speaker (if not built-in)

Lately I’ve been playing with ooVoo as it offers the chance to communicate with multiple users (up to six people can talk face-to-face). Its easy to use, has a slick interface, the quality is great and like so many others, it’s free!

View Your Pics using FastStone Image Viewer

Here is another great little application that will allow you to view and modify your pictures. FastStone Image Viewer, is a freeware program similar to IrfanView. It has a slicker interface and will allow you to do most of what IrfanView does (resize/resample, rotate, etc…). Some features worth noting are; the Draw Board which allows you to add, text, lines (arrows), shapes (rectangles, ellipses, full or empty), highlight areas and watermarks to the image.

One of the neat features is the portable version. “… Major advantage is that you can carry it around on a memory stick / USB flash drive, or copy / migrate from PC to PC via simple copying of files. No installation is necessary.”

So click away and have fun!

Sharing Your Favourites

In February 2007, the Netcraft Web Server Survey found 108,810,358 distinct websites. That’s 108 million different websites! And that’s not including Blogs. In July 2007 it was estimated that there were 70 million Blogs!
OK, so how do you find those sites that are relevant and useful to my needs?
First you will need to search the web, then bookmark or save and manage the information for later use and reference.
But…

• What happens if you are using a different computer and you don’t have access to your favorites?
• How many other educators are doing the same?
• Are you not re-inventing the wheel?
• Wouldn’t it be nice if you could tap in to the resources that others like you have book painfully bookmarked?

In this era of collaboration the answer is but one click away.
Wikipedia defines Social bookmarking as: “a way for Internet users to store, organize, share and search bookmarks of web pages.”
There are several Social Bookmarking Tools available but one of the most popular one is del.icio.us.

To learn more about Social Bookmarking and how to use them view the Commoncraft’s video on: “Social Bookmarking in Plain English” (YouTube) or (Blip.TV)

Now that you know how it’s done, why not use of one the many Social Bookmarking services and start sharing the gems you found while searching the Web.

Pod Casting

Well considering that a good number of learners are more than visual learners I guess its time to talk about Pod casting.

Pod casting is a "digital audio media recording" that is posted on the Internet. Users can can either listen to from there computer or even download to their player for later use. Thus, with Pod casting, listeners can determine the time and the place, meaning they decide what programming they want to receive and when they want to listen to it.

These wonderful clips that can be easily created and used by students and do not require much equipment.

What you need:

• A computer with recording software (such as Audacity, free and very powerful!)


• A mike


• A place to post your pod casts.


• Then, tell the world about your pod cast!

Before you star producing your own Pods please see this handy list of top 10 things to remember.

For more information on how to Podcast visit Jason Van Orden's; How to Podcast tutorials.