TED is a small nonprofit organisation dedicated to promoting “Ideas Worth Spreading” and brings together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment and Design. Live events include the annual TED Conference in California, the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford, the TEDIndia Conference and the new TEDx community program.
On the TED website, the best talks and performances from TED and their partners are made available for everyone. Currently there are over 450 TED Talks to choose from, with more being added each week.
The talks and presentations are indeed excellent, being both entertaining and thought provoking. Many of the talks relate directly to education as highlighted by the two samples below.
In the first, Richard Baraniuk explains the vision behind the open source Connexions online education system, covered in a previous post.
In the second, Arthur Benjamin explains his bold proposal about making math education relevant in the digital age.
It would be well worth adding the TED RSS feed to your reader if you have not already done so!!
EduTube is an educational video search platform, which organizes the best educational video content on the Internet.
All content on EduTube is moderated and only “relevant, educational content is permitted“. Indeed, EduTube focuses on high quality, popular videos – those which get several hundred to several thousand or more views a day on the hosting website.
The videos may be searched according to category, educational level, video type, duration, language, relevant tags and copyright. Results of the search may be sorted according to title, views/day, date added and EduTube Index.
You can also keep up to date with new additions through the EduTube RSS feed.
Whether you are teaching, giving a presentation or creating a screencast, you might want to highlight your cursor so that it stands out making it easier for viewers to follow your mouse movements.
The RealWorld Cursor Editor lets you create and modify static (.cur) and animated cursors (.ani) of any size and color depth. The short little screencast below shows a highlighted-cursor that I created.
You can download this cursor, if you want to try it out and don’t want to create your own just yet. Just unzip the file to get the .cur cursor file.
To use your brand new cursor:
1) place a copy of the .cur file in the ‘windows/cursors’ folder on your computer
2) select control panel, mouse, pointers
3) make sure ‘normal select’ is highlighted and select browse
4) select your new cursor and then select open
5) finally select apply and then select OK
Don’t worry, it is easy to return to your normal cursor, simply navigate back to the mouse pointers tab and select ‘use default’ and then ‘OK’ and everything will be back as it was.
Format Factory is a one stop shop for many of your file conversion needs. Easily convert graphics, audio and video files.
All to MP4/3GP/MPG/AVI/WMV/FLV/SWF. All to MP3/WMA/AMR/OGG/AAC/WAV. All to JPG/BMP/PNG/TIF/ICO/GIF/TGA.
Format Factory also includes features for repairing damaged video/audio files, reducing file size and conversion for iphone & ipod multimedia file formats.
Academic Earth is a new website that is collating educational videos for the expressed goal of providing “everyone on earth access to a world-class education“.
Aimed primarily at third level students, the content on Academic Earth is categorised by university, subject and lecturer.
You can register on Academic Earth and bookmark your favourite finds. Have already found some useful lectures in the Computer Science section
With forthcoming features to include “integrating crowd-sourcing and wiki tools so users can enhance the experience“, Academic Earth is definitely one to watch!
Tekzilla provides daily tips on using digital technology and is a great resource for teaching/learning to use ICT. The videos produced at Tekzilla are short, clear and interesting to watch.
As of today, Tekzilla has 274 archived episodes available. Certainly, it would be well worth adding Tekzilla to your RSS reader!
Khan Academy have over 700 videos “covering everything from basic arithmetic and algebra to differential equations, physics, and finance“. Hosted on Youtube so they will, unfortunately, be blocked on many school networks!
The videos are produced in a conversational style with Salman Khan using ordinary Microsoft Paint to replicate an ‘old-style’ blackboard. They are very easy to follow and seem to be limited to around 10 minutes so great for ‘bite’ sized learning.
Patricia Donaghy
