Thing 11

What do you like / dislike about leaving comments? How did you feel when you received your first comment? Why do you think commenting is so important in online communities? What might this mean for students who share their writing online?

Leaving comments - just like posting to a blog in general - is a little bit scary. A lot of things ran through my mind as I wrote: What if my comments are really trivial? What if someone takes my post the wrong way? Do I have anything worthwhile to contribute? It seems harder to comment when the blogger is a person unknown to you. People do get to know one another communicating through blogs so maybe "conversations" will be easier once a dialog is established.

I am slowly coming to the realization however, that posting to a smaller, defined community rather than the world at large also makes a difference. If I talk to people through a blog who have a common interest and experience, it's much less daunting. I may never be comfortable posting to a YouTube site that is viewed by thousands of people ... but I could easily post to a blog with comments for teachers and media specialists who share some of the same issues as myself. That's probably an obvious thing but it really helps me feel less intimidated.

I've only gotten one comment other than the 23 Things moderators. It was nice to think that someone read my blog but it makes me even more aware that I need to be coherent and try to say something worth reading. That's an important concept for students also who struggle to develop writing skills in any venue. Knowing that there is an audience besides the teacher might just be the thing to help them focus more on the quality of their writing.

Thing 10

Below is a great video using 1920's style animation. This video was a student project made at Cornell University in Lynn Tomlinson's Film 325 summer course.



Add comments to the video you embedded. Why did you select it? Were you also able to download a video?

I selected this video because it showed an incredible creativity in faithfully recreating the style of animation shown in early Disney and Mickey Mouse cartoons. It's interesting to see just how much can be conveyed in simple (??!!??) drawing and carefully chosen sounds. This is one of the few videos I found on YouTube that exhibited a high level of planning and execution and quality in the final product.

I was able to download a video to my computer. Zamzar opens up a lot of options for me and for my video production course. I'm going to do some additional exploring and will be thinking about YouTube in a somewhat different light.

Thing 9

What do you like or dislike about YouTube? Did you find videos that would be useful for teaching and learning? Is YouTube banned in your building?

Many of the videos in YouTube are humorous ... but I found the quality of most to be lacking. I looked for videos dealing with Information Literacy (something I teach) and more specifically, Boolean searching. I was disappointed to find nothing really usable for either my middle school students or adults. While conceptually a couple of the videos were interesting, the production quality was poor.

I'm sure if I spent more time I might find videos that would be useful for teaching and learning but going to a paid streaming video source is probably a better bet for educational purposes. It's like the Internet at large ... the best stuff ... the 'hidden web' can't be found with a general purpose search engine. Better quality and content usually costs money and/or requires a different search strategy in order to find it.

And yes, YouTube is most definitely banned in my building and throughout the district.