Camtastic!

After a chance conversation with a fellow faculty member, I got this great idea to record feedback for my students' writing. Then I found Camtasia, which is a software that allows me to record screen shots as video and to overlay voice recording. So I've been taking my students' memoirs (recently written and handed in), pulling them up on the course wiki (http://www.uwenglishmethods.pbwiki.com/), and then using Camtasia to record video of their writing, along with my comments. I played around with posting them on the wiki, but was not able to get that to work (yet). So for the short term, I'm burning a cd for each student with the video on it. That's what I'll be doing most of the day tomorrow.

Also found this cool video: http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=119. The class apparently used googledocs to collaboratively produce the survey that they used for the video. This is interesting, as I've been talking with another colleague about how to provide ways for students to collaborate both asynchronously and synchronously.

I'm also really interested in what I might learn from the K-12 Online Conference, which is currently underway. Presentations in the Web 2.0 thread start on Monday, and I'll be eagerly accessing those next week, when I'm not teaching, recording my thoughts on memoirs, or in meetings. Sigh. Too much to do, and all of this stuff to do is getting in the way of my technogeeking.

In other news, it was not a good day for university sports as our football team and volleyball team both got beat. Interesting football game, as it was interrupted by lightning and delayed for almost 2 hours. We went home, got warmer jackets and waterproof pants, and came back to the game so we could watch our team get pounded. Bummer.