Ed Tech Geek

Please visit the following link to listen to “The Electric Slide! Twenty-First Century Style” by Kurt Paccio and James Gates:

http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=171

Kurt and James each had their own seperate presentations in this session. Kurt introduced sPresent and James presented splashcast. I watched Kurt’s presentation on my iPod this weekend, and I couldn’t wait to get home so that I could jump online and try out sPresent. I have to say, I have had a lot of fun with this tool. It is the same type of presentation application as PowerPoint, but there is just something about some new bells and whistles that make a new application fun for me. The newness factor has taken me in. I am now trying to think of a creative way that I can use it myself.

The great thing about this tool is that it is completely web based so there are no compatibility issues. I find that to be fantastic because updates, different versions and different platforms are a part of my daily obstacle course. A web based application would circumvent those issues. I also love the ease in which you can add videos from YouTube. One of the features that stuck out in my mind as great for education is the window that pops up to let you add a link to a video or image. When you put in the URL there is also a text box to give credit where credit is due. I think that just works well as a reminder and a very easy way to add a citation.

Sadly, I don’t think this will be a tool that I use in my school with students for one simple reason. You have to log in with an email address and a password. Most of the students at my school don’t have email addresses and I am not very comfortable with the idea of giving out one general email address for all of the students to use as their user id. Any ideas or comments?

James presented splashcast, and unfortunately the archived files didn’t include video. I downloaded the audio to my iPod so I was able to listen to it over the weekend, but was disapointed to discover when I logged in this week that the full version was also just audio. sPresent was a very user friendly application and that presentation would have okay if it was just audio. Unfortunately I had a much harder time following James’ presentation.

I have now successfully created a splashcast account and a presentation that allowed me to try out the tools that splashcast offers.  The interface is not that difficult to use, but it isn’t as easy as sPresent.  The more I played around with splashcast the more I was reminded of photostory and MS Movie Maker.  The product that you are creating can be done in a similar way with these two programs depending on how much media and what types of media you are going to include.  I do like the ease in which you can pull pictures from flicker, but the main point of using this tool as mentioned by James is to post your presentation so that it can be viewed by others.  He mentions posting the presentation on a wiki.  Again I am temped to say, couldn’t we just make similar presentations in photostory and movie maker and post them either on the blog or the wiki within our school blackboard site?