Vodpod

Vodpod is a great little tool for creating collections of videos that you find online. It works much like Furl or other social bookmarking sites except that instead of saving individual websites you are saving videos to your archive. You can have different "pods" for your videos and share your collections by placing widgets on your blog or website. I have my Vodpod widget along the righthand side of this blog if you want to check it out. There is a browser extension that you can install so that when you come across a video you like you just click on the Vodpod icon in your browser's toolbar and a window is opened that allows you to pick which pod you want to add the video to and even lets you add comments about the video.

TerraClues

Yesterday I was creating a TerraClues hunt with my 8 year old daughter and I realized that I hadn't written about this tool yet in my blog. TerraClues allows you to create a geographically based hunt with a series of clues. Each clue is tagged to a location on the globe (the location is decided by you as you create the clue). You also get to decide at what zoom level the clue will be found so if you want to focus on specific cities or landmarks you can or if you want to hunt for larger things like oceans and continents, which is what our hunt focused on, then you can zoom out for a wider view. For each clue you enter an answer and even some accompanying text where you can provide more information about the subject. Here is a clue and answer we created in our hunt.

Clue: This is the only continent that is also a country.
Answer/Location: Australia
Answer Additional Text: Australia is home to the Great Barrier Reef, Ayers Rock and the Sydney Opera House.

You can add a photo for each clue, which could become part of the clue, as well as a hyperlink to additional information if you want. To answer the clues, students type into a search box and then either search the map or conduct a basic Google search to get more information. Once they search the map they may also have to zoom in or out to find the correct location. If they search correctly, they are provided with the answer and additional answer text that is provided for that clue. It may sound confusing but I think it will make sense once you try out a hunt. Click here to see the hunt that my daughter and I made for her third grade class so they could review for their continents and oceans test.

I made my hunt public but you could also create private hunts that are available only to your students. This is possible because teachers can set up their own classrooms and provide access to different hunts to their students through these classrooms. You can search the list of public hunts on the site and add any publicly available hunt to your classroom as well. Students can complete public hunts without logging in but their progress through different hunts is tracked by the site if they are logged in so that is another reason for taking the time to set up accounts and create your own class. When you create a class you get to pick a class name and password, both of which will need to be provided to your students so that they can access your classroom. Students will then need to create a nickname and password (or you could assign them nicknames and passwords) so that they can log in. No e-mail address is required for students to create an account and log in to your classroom. You can choose to allow students to be able to create their own hunts if you want, which would also be added to your classroom once they are completed.

This is a very easy tool to manage as far as creating a classroom, getting students logged in and tracking student progress through different hunts. I think the applications in geography are obvious but you could also use it to create a hunt for the major locations of a novel, historical events, migration patterns, animal habitats and more.

Flowgram

I recently read about Flowgram on one of the many blogs I follow and have put it to use for an online class I teach. Flowgram is a tutorial application that allows you to share and highlight websites, photos, videos and static text documents. You can add audio comments and callouts as well in order to draw attention to certain content or provide guidance. In addition, you can highlight text and add sticky note type comments to each element you add. The tutorials are interactive in that if you are sharing a webpage the user can scroll around the page as they listen to your audio comments and even click on different links on the page. Check out the Flowgram I created for my class below.



You may also want to watch the introduction video on the Flowgram homepage to learn more about this cool tool.

CDs for iPods!

I first read about iPodmeister.com in Newsweek and couldn't quite figure out the business plan. After looking over their website I still don't see how they are making money. They will except your old CDs and DVDs and give you an iPod, iTouch or even an iPhone in return. They even digitize your music and load it on your iPod (if it all fits) for you. I haven't tried it out and can't quite convince myself that it is legit but I certainly do have a lot of old CDs laying around collecting dust so...

Automated Reminders

A student of mine recently mentioned that she wished there was a free service that would make calls to her cellphone to remind her of upcoming events or commitments and even serve as a wake-up call service for her. This prompted me to look around the Internet to see what I could find. Here is what I turned up in my quick searching.

Telepixie will call you with reminders for free as long as you are willing to listen to a brief commercial. If you pay a "small" fee they will remove the commercials and just call with the reminder. They say that they will call your "regular" phone so I don't know if that means they don't call mobile phones. It would be worth checking on before you got to far with this particular service.

Snoozeter is similar but is a fee-based system only. It seems a bit more focused on the wake-up call aspect of things and even allows you to snooze with your cellphone so you can get a few extra minutes of shut eye. I'm not sure why you couldn't just use an alarm clock for this.

If you use Outlook to maintain a calendar you can download the free Outlook Reminder plugin to automate calls to your cellphone with reminders of events from your calendar. You can get reminders e-mailed to your phone from iCal if you are on a Mac and use that calendar tool. Google Calendar also allows for reminders to be sent to your phone but neither Google Calendar nor iCal actually call your phone.

I'm curious to know what other tools people use for this type of thing.