Please take 5 minutes to discuss in pairs as to how you might use blogs to support your students in their learning.

For instance how might you use them alongside existing methods of instruction? Wat are the challenges? Would you blog yourself?

Please use the comments facility at the base of this entry to add your views.

Presented at the eTech Ohio 2008 conference by Alvin Trusty and hosted on TeacherTube (www.teachertube.com).

A very good PowerPoint presentation which manages to make the subject of copyright actually interesting. Half of the talk focus’s on copyright while the other considers how you can create a good PowerPoint presentation. Basically he discusses a particular copyright topic on the slide then briefly shows how he created the visual effects on that slide before moving on to the next copyright topic.

There’s some good stuff here about copyright. Including the issues of putting videos on to YouTube under the Fair Use terms (the bit about the NFL vs. a Professor of Law is amusing and enlightening). Other laws affecting copyright are also looked at including the Teach Act 2001, Time Shifting, Space Shifting, Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Creative Commons. Excepting Creative Commons some of theses acts are obviously US centric but I don’t they have international equivalents.

There’s also some pointers to useful resources. For example Flickr (www.flickr.com) hosts images released under Creative Commons. In fact if go to www.flickr.com/creativecommons you can see there are 63 million images you can use without having to contacting the author (but you must citate them – always remember that).

DISCLOSURE: however I’m not a lawyer so please don’t quote me on any of the above.

With regards to designing presentations advice is given on creating simple animations and removing bullet points. He also states that you should avoid reading out your slides as the audience often read faster than you do and reach the end of the slide before you do. So you might as well send the audience the slideshow and not turn up. This is an obvious point but so many speakers are guilty of this, myself included when I have had to little time to practice.

Viewing the presentation I released that many of the slides had very little text and most were images. And as such they sat very well with the speakers voice (recorded at the session). It made me realise that a truly effective PowerPoint slide, if it is really doing it’s job in terms of enabling the speaker to get the points across, should be incapable of acting as stand alone resource, that is without the speaker’s voice.

Download Video: Posted by proftrusty at TeacherTube.com.

View video