Link to Scott Mcleod’s talk at NECC 2009, on disruptive innovation and how it affects our classrooms. Discusses personalized learning versus online learning.
I’m getting a lot of questions from various workshops about wikis, and I’d like to point out that (in my opinion) the easiest way to get into using a wiki for your classroom is the PB Works wiki (used to be Peanut Butter Wiki) at www.pbworks.com. The link takes you to the selection of educational pbwikis, and of course I recommend the ‘free’ version. It’s a good starter.
There is also a portable wiki called TiddlyWiki. It will run on any computer with a web browser. The link is to the NCTE Inbox Blog, which describes TiddlyWiki and contains more links. A good one is this one from HowStuffWorks, which describes what a wiki is and what are the pros and cons.
I’m getting some questions concerning using a Windows video player to play flash (IFLV) videos locally rather than from Teachertube or Youtube. A program that works in similar fashion across all platforms (including a portable version for Portable Apps) is VLC Player (download link). VLC Player will play many types of multimedia files, but excels at FLV movies.
Another recommended tool for this purpose is XP Codec Pack. This download installs Media Player Classic with a number of coder/decoder tools which will play nearly any type of multimedia file.
Brian Krebs in the Washington Post writes a blog on computer security. Written for end users, this blog does a very good job of explaining current computer security threats and the whys behind malware and hacking. Here’s a link to the blog post on March 16, 2009 with details about the latest round of malware and its purpose (profits, of course!).
Bluntly, this is extortion. Don’t click on popups, unless you are explicitly expecting that popup. In addition, use Firefox or another browser other than Internet Explorer.
A complicated route, from the Discourse blog through Lifehacker, but this tool (for Windoze only) looks useful: Openwith. Another useful site for determining which program can view which type of file is FileEXT.