Creative Communication – VA Educational Technology Leadership Conference

Welcome! Hope some of these resource prove useful to you while pursuing different ways to communicate.

Update——-Download the creative communication presentation in Keynote 3, Powerpoint or PDF format.

Bullets Words of Wisdom

Useful presentation links

  • Presentation Zen– a blog dedicated to better presentations
  • Beyond Bullets– another blog dedicated to better presentations
  • Dy/Dan– a blog about teaching that often covers great design as it applies to all things educational
  • Flickr Storm– find great Creative Commons licensed images
  • Stock Exchange– free stock photos (does require a registration)

Mashup Sites (their odd delivery, your content – use sparingly)

  • Bombay TV– your own subtitles on Baliwood movie clips
  • Hairy Mail– shave your email message on a hair back
  • Monkey Mail– a monkey in various costumes and with various voices speaks your words
  • Txt2Pic– just about anything you might want to put your words on (billboards, church signs, ransom notes, badges etc.)
  • Jib Jab– a number of ways to add your face to bizarre videos
  • TeacherTube– why reinvent the wheel?
  • Vixy.net– download YouTube videos to use at school (where you know they’re blocked)

5 thoughts on “Creative Communication – VA Educational Technology Leadership Conference

  1. I attended your session at the conference today. It was great- very inspiring. I’m currently a kindergarten teacher and will be certified and have my masters this summer to be a school library media specialist. I’m very interested in becoming an ITRT in my county. But for the time being- what suggestions do you have for using blogs with kindergarten students? Is there any hope- I’m just not thinking of any way to use them in my current position.

  2. Gentlemen,

    I did not get to see your presentation, but as usual, you break the mold of “typical” slides with some visually arresting content, and also as usual, a needed topic for sharing.

    But I couldn’t help but think after finishing your PDF slides if a portion of your talk was lost. I think the point you make is… it’s the person that makes for the compelling delivery of content, and not the slides. BUT–good slides can help.

    What do you think the best mechanism for delivering this message is? I don’t think it’s slides from the talk I missed. I’m not sure I have the answer–but–I’ve sometimes handed-out a written narrative instead of slides. A video of your talk is one possibility, of course… just food for thought.

  3. @John- Thanks your comments mean a lot and I agree- lots gets lost. The PDF is probably the worst of the lot as it lost all the video. You might have slightly better luck with the Keynote. I did promise I’d have that up for anyone there who wanted it so I posted it figuring some people might just hack out what they want or at least use it as a backbone for something else. I’d like to go the video route. I’ll see what time allows me to get done. I think in the future I’ll make my life easier and just record the presentation rather than trying to make time to do it again some time.

    On another note, my wife (Meghan Woodward) used to co-teach with Deb Cross (who I see is your media specialist). It’s a small world.

    @Emalee- Thanks! Glad it was interesting.

    K students might be able to use something like kidzlog but it looks like it’s not being developed anymore. It had some nice options for younger kids- including drawing tools. I don’t know if there’s anything like that left anymore.

    Now if you jsut wanted to use blogs to do thing with them, maybe
    – parent communication
    – posting student work
    – you can always have them work on things and transcribe them

    Here are two K blogs- I’m not sure they’re what you want but it might be a place to start.
    http://southwestk.wordpress.com/
    http://kdgroom102.blogspot.com/

  4. Thank you for your presentation yesterday– after your presentation, I told a HS Lib/Media specialist who was NOT able to get in, that, seeing your lowest level blog– where the teacher was posting what happened in class daily and attaching any homework sheets– I cannot understand why any MS or HS teacher would NOT have a blog! What a time-saver for absentees and forgetful students…

    I am an elementary librarian, and would like to know more about the section of your presentation where you showed the audio files, used for book reviews. Can you give me more information about how that was done? I think that would be a WONDERFUL project– could it be added to our school web page?

    Thanks for any (more) insights that you can provide!
    Jane

  5. Jane-

    Thanks for the kind words. I feel basically the same way. I can’t see where the negatives are with the basic setup and it builds skills and builds ideas that can be used later on if the teacher opts to take things to the next level.

    If you want a fairly detailed demo on how to do the book review blog there’s a movie here (this site may be down temporarily or just agonizingly slow). The rest of that site details how to use/install WordPress using a host with Fantastico support.

    Let me know if anything comes up or if I can help in any way-

    Tom

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