Video sharing sites

I explored 4 video sharing sites:
Next Vista for Learning
Teacher Tube
You Tube
ClipBlast

I was initially excited about exploring Next Vista for Learning after listening to Wesley Freyer’s podcast. I liked the idea that this was a non-profit education site where information was created by users. The “rules” for the site are: 5 minutes or less, nothing inappropriate, factually accurate, and no copyrighted material.I liked his idea that if every teacher uploaded 3 minutes of something they were very knowledgeable in that the site could become a very powerful teaching tool. I thought this was a brilliant idea and I loved the global sharing concept of it.

I explored all 4 sites with LOTE as my focus. Unfortunately, at this point in time, there were not any LOTE videos yet on Next Vista. Overall, there weren’t very many French language learning materials on any of the sites yet.

On Teacher Tube, there currently was only 1 French language video and it wasn’t that useful. I checked out LOTE in general, and there were only a few videos total—though quite a few videos for Chinese. However, I recognize that this is a relatively new site and that more things could be uploaded in the future.

YouTube is pretty cool for finding French music videos of present and past. However, there is a lot of inappropriate material for school here. I think this site is very useful if you are searching for a specific singer/video versus a general search.

I thought that Clipblast had the best selection pop French culture. I liked that it also had videos related to politics/world events; and the overall best selection of videos—either music or movie trailers.

Blogging Reflections 1

To blog or not to blog? That is the question.

I like the idea of blogging for many classes. For example, I think blogging would be a great addition in ELA classes for lit. circles. Students could see what students in different sections thought of the same book. It also is way for students to feel that their work is being shared with a larger audience, not just an assignment to complete for a teacher.

I have been thinking about how blogging could be beneficial in my classroom. Because I teach beginning level courses, I was considering maybe adding current event articles that are relevant to the target language and having students post their opinions on a blog. Or possibly writing cultural differences as posts and students publish their opinions. This is just an initial thought.

Cool Blogs

Hi, welcome to my first post. I put a whole bunch of blogs links on the my sidebar. A few that I would recommend checking out, if you have limited time are:
EdBlog Insights-links to an enormous amount of educational blogs
Cool Cat Teacher Blog

Let me know what you think.