Tool #3

1.  Visit several of the video hosting/streaming sites mentioned above. Share with your readers which sites you found most useful for your content and why.

YouTube and TeacherTube are great resources.  I use Discovery Education a lot to tie into Science curriculum.  I usually save the videos in the grade level science folder on the district server so that it is available to all the teachers without jamming the network.  I can also link it to a folder that my students can access so that they can watch the videos at the computer workstation.  I would love to add them to the Ipads and Itouches as well.  I feel that YouTube and TeacherTube are great websites to reinforce concepts.  In watching the Lattice Multiplication video, I also realized that these videos are also great to share with parents on how we teach a concept differently and how they can learn it to reinforce at home. 

2.                  Using any of the video resources mentioned above, find and select two videos that may be useful resources in your classroom. Embed them in your blog. If they do not have embed capabilities, hot link them to your blog.

             I can't wait to share this video with parents when we learn lattice multiplication.  What a great review for parents!

This is a sample video that touches on Singapore Model Drawing- which I use in math.  Great way to introduce to students and parents.  

3.                  Articulate what you learned about copyright and fair use. What was new to you?

I was glad to see that most images are safe to share in the classroom.  I did a really fun cross-curricular website last year and encouraged my students to use flickr and other picture sites that contained a lot of uncopyrighted pictures.  We had a really hard time finding pictures of Texas landmarks on flickr.  Hopefully over time these websites will have more images that pertain to our curriculum. 

In today’s society, it is incredibly important to teach copyright and fair use beginning at a young age.  My campus does a good job of this and as teachers we need to model this as well. 

4.  Login to your Picasa Web Album through Google Apps - don't download Picasa, just click on the Web Albums link. Search for a few pictures. After searching, look at the filters on the left. Use the Creative Commons or remix filter to find images that you can reuse and remix. How could you use this in your classroom?

I can use this in my classroom to create trading cards for different landforms.  I wish there were more pictures of historical figures- those can be difficult to find without copyright restrictions.  I can also use Picasa when students are doing characterization while analyzing their novels by having them find pictures that match their characters.