Something for the weekend
29th March, 2007Two new resources that are doing the rounds in everybody’s inboxes in the last few days are:
TeacherTube and the online Office 2.0 database.
Well TeacherTube is now up and running. It is buffering a lot and running a bit slow my end but seems a good venture. Read the Terms and Conditions carefully before posting – they have a very good Intellectual Property policy – I just hope the kids in the videos have been signed off.
This could lead to segmenting of specialist education video sites and I am all for that just as long as we don’t start getting “process” videos by the Gigagbyte – those, necessarily should be ‘local’ and behind a walled garden. I particularly liked the rapping Math teacher – it was inevitable!
The Office 2.0 database list shows how far online, free, distributed apps have come. The breadth of what is currently available is amazing.
Wonderful though they are, both sites are still just a resource bank. Getting the education community access and use of these is still going to be the hurdle. Teachers are still at the stage of victim when faced with ’stuff’ like this. A common response is:
‘But I haven’t been trained…’. Hmm try getting away with that in industry…
But who can blame them, especially in the case of the second site – there’s too much info – you need smart filters or smart lenses to deal with this stuff.
And look at TeacherTube again – how are you going to process all those videos – which ones are better than others? OK, users will filter out the best in time with ratings and comments and a nifty use of key words but where is the granularity of media? I want to be able to jump right to the seam of gold inside each film – maybe services like Mojito will include TeacherTube on their list of providers but, again, who is going to annotate all this stuff?
Those people who are early adopters are up to speed and can see the various models because they are used to the idea of Perpetual Beta but someone entirely new is going to get swamped. I guess that’s what blogs are for and that is what management change is about. I guess it will be some time yet before how we use this stuff catches up with the fact that it is made and out there ready and waiting.
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Bob Harrison
Ben Williamson
Dan Sutch
Richard Sandford
Leon Cych
Martin Owen
Sarah Grier
Tim Reader
March 30th, 2007 at 9:39 am
Hi Leon,
“…you need smart filters or smart lenses to deal with this stuff.”
That’s what I was getting at with my post this week about Extending the reach of CPD.
Teachers need trusted advisors who will act as the filters. At the moment it’s all in the ICT arena, but we need to encourage more people who are close enough to the classroom in other subjects to start filtering online.
Mark