Last week in place of a blog posting, I emailed out the first issue of the BITS AND BYTES newsletter. This newsletter is my effort to reach out to those who are not readers of this blog. However, I hope that all of you read it as well. I plan on sending out a newsletter the last week of each quarter.
http://www.zamzar.com/ is a website that I use with my students all the time. They are constantly bringing in files that have been typed at home in some software program that we do not use on campus. I also get a lot of questions regarding video formats and capturing you-tube footage. ZAMZAR is able to solve all of these problems. This website will allow you to upload a file or a YOU-TUBE link to be converted into a different format for FREE. Once your file has been processed by the website, a link will be emailed back to you with a link to your converted file. This website will support a long list of image formats, document formats, music formats, video formats, e-book formats, and others.
The downside to this is that you have to plan ahead. Sometimes it takes about 15-20 minutes to receive your converted file. Sometimes it takes 24 hours.
YOU-TUBE
SAFETY MODE
SAFETY MODE
I am not sure that you are aware, but there are many, many schools out there that block YOU-TUBE on their school network. We are obviously not one of them. I see this video sharing site as an important resource for our students and teachers. However, it is our responsibility as educators to communicate to our students and model for them the best way to utilize this resource.
SAFETY MODE is a feature that I was not aware of until recently. By default it is turned off. However, it can easily be turned on and saved so that it is your default setting for the YOU-TUBE site. (A Google account is required.) Below is a short video explaining the features and step-by-step instructions for utilizing this setting. If you are a parent and/or a teacher of student who utilize this site, I encourage you to check this out.
http://www.lexipedia.com/ is a website that I think you and your students can really use in the classroom when discussing vocabulary terms. This site allows you to key in a word and it will provide you with a Noun, Verb, Adjective, and Adverb defination of the term and examples. It will also provide you with an idea branch of terms to pull from. In the example below, the term WELCOME is used as an example. You can see that there are selection boxes next to the parts of speech and relationship options for you to select from.
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