Sorry for the slow traffic lately. Between work, and illness, my blog-a-tivity is really down. That won’t change anytime soon, as I’m heading out to a quick pre-Xmas trip to Disneyland with the family (wish us luck, son has my cold from earlier this week). I’ll be back posting after Christmas though. I have a couple of posts in the editing queue on Michelle Rhee and her fiance, and my mayor, Kevin Johnson, and some things to share from the lab. Till then, I hope you are having a restful time, whether it is a vacation or not.

I love using VoiceThread with students. I find it easy to use, intuitive, and very flexible. It’s not for every situation, but what it does, letting you add photos or video, with narration or audio commentary, it does very well. I love to use it in particular ways, letting students pick pictures to add to a class VoiceThread. The only problem with that was finding photos, and making sure that student did the proper attribution. With primary students, I really had to add them in as you can see on this VoiceThread.

VoiceThread has just added a new feature that gets a great source of high quality public domain/Creative Commons images, and automates the attribution process. Based on a new partnership with New York Public Library, you can access their digital pool of images with just a click. When you are creating or editing a VoiceThread, click on Upload, and choose Media Sources. You will then see the usual VoiceThread choices of My VoiceThreads, Flickr, and Facebook, but also NYPL. When you click on that, a search box appears at the top, and a gallery of “collections” shows up. Click on the picture, then the import button at the top right, and voila, it’s on your VoiceThread. You can keep adding more photos, or click on the Close[x] button at the top right. When the photo is added, an active link with the source is put in, attributing the photo. Here is an example:

But wait, there’s more commons media goodness! There has always been the ability to hook up VoiceThread to your Flickr account. To get other people’s photos that were “commons” licensed, you have to go through the messy process of using the URL and adding a link back. NO MORE! Now, click on flickr, it asks for access to your account, but in addition, it lets you do a tag search on commons licensed photos by others, and when selected, will give the same active link back that will suffice as proper credit.

This “tip” came to me from the VoiceThread Twitter account. Please consider following them for updates and information.

How and why I use VoiceThread for skeptics, and others:

Looking Backwards: What Went Well: Voice Thread

VoiceThread a K-W-L Chart for the 21st Century

The VERY last paragraph of this post talks about how I used oral questioning strategies with students to discuss a written error

Here was my entry to Film on the Fly Pi Day:

Others can be found at: http://filmonthefly.ning.com/video/pi-day

And the winners of The Edublogger’s Birthday Celebration Competition are | The Edublogger and they include this post I did on Using threaded comments to build a writing community in your classroom | Reflections on Teaching. I also did this post, More than words… | Reflections on Teaching, about using images, which Sue mentioned was good, but with the large number of competitors, didn’t pick up a prize. There are totally no hard feelings about that. I actually though this post from one of the student entrants had the best point about using visuals:

When a person clicks on a link to your page or types it into a sidebar, they don’t want to see a plain white page full of non-stop, brain numbing words. No bland font or sleep-inducing posts. — Building a better blog and having fun doing it!!! | ♥Ashley’s Blog

I do think my post had good points about fair use law in the U.S., but Ashley had a more succinct and pithy approach which I think was superior.

I’d like to suggest that if Sue wants to point out a post that may have one good point,  she might consider honorable mentions. She obviously did a lot of work on this, and I’m just pleased to have one winner, so I’m not going to be piggy.

It seems this blog has been nominated for an EDDIE as the » Best Teacher Edublog 2008 in the Edublog Awards. You can click on the previous link to vote for this blog, or another if it takes your fancy (lots of great names there). I will try to live up to this nomination by posting a little more often. I have a couple of posts coming up on assessment of students, and assessment of teachers, and my weekly review of life in the lab should be up in a few days.

The nomination came from Bethany Smith at Transparent Learning, a really fantastic educator, and a fun person to spend time with at a conference. If someone else also nominated me, drop a comment, the links from feature in edublogs is a bit dodgy at the moment, so it’s hard to see incoming links.