Clark's ICT Blog

Perception Links

kcburt — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 01:23:20 +0000

One of the great things about the Internet is the vast resources that help support students’ learning. Instead of having to teach students all aspects of a particular topic, such as Perception (in Communication), there are a variety of web sites and activities that allow students to do “hands-on” and more engaging work.

Some optical illusions:

http://nldline.com/optical.htm

People’s Perceptions:

http://peoplesperceptions.wordpress.com/2010/page/2/

Perception of Beauty:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAnRQncZ_uk&feature=related

Can you read eyes?

http://www.questionwriter.com/samples/eyesquiz

Humanities Documentaries

kcburt — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 23:06:48 +0000

A great resource I wanted to share is Frontline, a U.S. news/documentary program partially sponsored by PBS (Public Broadcasting Service).

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/

Frontline’s main website offers weekly hour-long documentaries related to a current event or topic. For example, a recent video “Flying Cheap” discusses U.S. airlines safety practices in the wake of an airline crash where it was later revealed Continental Airlines outsourced the flight to an unknown carrier who was not meeting safety standards. While most videos such as this do not have dedicated teacher resources, each video has a dedicated web page with links to additional content such as a discussion board and other articles.

What a teacher should do when browsing the site is to click on the “Watch Online” link which lists topics and all videos available for downloading. This can be filtered though there are less than 100 total videos available as of September 2010.

As a general video resource, teachers can look at Frontline on the chance there is a video on the topic. If students are doing a specific project, teachers can suggest students try to find relevant Frontline videos. However, because Frontline’s general videos can be specific to the United States and there is not a wide range of topics, teachers may want to investigate this first before recommending it.

Thinking out loud

kcburt — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 23:36:39 +0000

A colleague has developed a simple assignment for a marketing class. He went and created a wiki on PBWorks.com

His idea was that students go to this page, see the questions he posted, download a case study, and follow a company link for additional information.

But then I recommended more: have students create their own pages and answer questions. And perhaps link to YouTube videos, etc. If they are already on a wiki, then why don’t they use the technology to make an interactive document (what hypertext was meant to do!).

Then I had an even bigger idea, what if part of their project they need to talk to a real company. Cadbury, for example, I know is really good about answering product questions and suggestions. What if students suggest a product or marketing campaign to them. Now that is using the Internet for Education in ways never originally intended!

Print Screen

kcburt — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 22:26:52 +0000

For a Marketing Handout I created a A4 page list of questions and on the back of the sheet I wanted to show an advertisment. I got a few out of the newspaper but I wanted one for Jim’s Mowing. Since I couldn’t find an Ad, I just used the homepage of their website. And I did a Print Screen which is to click on the Print Screen button on the keyboard and go into MS Paint or Photoshop and click Paste. I used MS Paint because I just quickly wanted to print it out and in MS Paint after you Paste the image, you can quickly go to Page Setup and just select to print on a 1×1 page.

Downloading YouTube Videos

kcburt — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 22:35:15 +0000

Let’s say you uploaded a video of your own to YouTube and mistakenly lost your password and wanted to download said video (for totally legal and copyright-compliant purposes of course!).

Well instead of downloading a program that will do it, I found a great tutorial. Because I don’t trust those programs, all you need is Firefox and the “Add-on” Firebug.

Here is the link to the tutorial http://www.haykranen.nl/2008/03/11/howto-download-youtube-videos-using-firebug/

And then, once you have the FLV file downloaded, go to this site: http://www.media-convert.com/

That site allows you to upload a file, it converts it into whatever format you want (I generally select MP4) and then download it again. Warning this does use plenty of your Internet bandwidth and you may not need to do this step if you are happy with the file in FLV format (players like VLC play it).

Hope this helps!