Just wanted to share a good resource: Academic Earth offers “thousands of video lectures from the world’s top scholars” (that’s the tagline on the site, not my words).
You can browse by Subject, University, Instructor or Playlist (i.e. thematic groupings such as “Understanding The Financial Crisis”, “Social Entrepreneurship 101″ or “Wars Throughout History”). You can also search for videos by keyword.
One piece of advice: a 50-minute lecture video can take a while to load, so I recommend starting the video file and pressing pause and then just going for a coffee or something. When you come back, it should be ready to play. Otherwise, you’ll be waiting a lot during the viewing for the rest of the video to load.
“Nocturne, of Chopin, so beautiful music. But few people will appreciate the music if I just show them the notes. Most of us need to listen to the music to understand how beautiful it is. But often that’s how we present statistics; we just show the notes - we don’t play the music.”
- Hans Rosling (creator of Gapminder), at the OECD World Forum in Istanbul June 2007
Gapminder is a fantastic resource for anyone doing a unit on human development. It is an online resource containing a real treasure trove of dynamic and flexible animations to illustrate how countries and regions over the last quarter of a century have developed as a result of many different influences, in terms of population size, life expectancy, years of schooling, literacy, health, gender, income levels and more. The animations allow you to select which countries or regions to display, and you can click to see a year-by-year breakdown, or else see the trends in one smooth, dynamic, visual animation.
Several posts on this blog have addressed the topic of presentations using PowerPoint slideshows in particular and good design more generally (for example Presentations 1o1 and Understanding Presentations by Design), and I get the sense that another list of “design rules” would not be all that useful. However, I would like to ask a more fundamental question:
why use a slideshow at all?
I think anyone who’s attended a conference in the last decade would agree that “presentation” often seems to equate to “PowerPoint” (or perhaps its more suave cousin, Keynote), and I’d venture a guess most will have seen striking examples of ‘PowerPointlessness’ or ‘Death by PowerPoint’.
In contrast, just to pick one example, David’s normally low-tech (or even no-tech) presentation to potential new hires at recruitment fairs is usually among the most personal, refreshing and dynamic events at those gigs, and this leads to my first point, which is often ignored or forgotten:
a presentation is a performance by a presenter, not a file playing on a screen
There’s a wealth of excellent, up-to-date information on the Internet, in a range of formats: text, images, audio, video, animation and probably even more. The question is, how do you find it all? In this post, I’ll focus on audio content, more specifically podcasting.
Thanks to all the presenters in this morning’s Tech Expo session, and also to all the people who came out to watch, listen, think and ask questions. Several sessions were so full there were hardly enough seats, which was good to see. I managed to record many of the sessions, and I’m hoping the audio files may contain some useful material. If so, I’ll post them as podcast episodes here. In the meantime, however, here are a few handy bits of information for those who’d like to get started…
Publishing to a wider audience is something many teachers mention they’d like to be able to do with their students - to other classes, to parents and other relatives, and to the whole world. One relatively straightforward way to share work with the world is to use a blog. Navigating a blog is pretty easy for visitors, you can post written work, and you can embed other types of media (podcasts, videos, photos).
However, some teachers worry about the time committment involved - they worry that once they start writing, readers will come to expect a certain level of activity on the blog. This need not be such a big problem however, as the software allows a blog to have multiple authors.
Scott argues that much current professional development simply isn’t good enough, doesn’t deliver what school vision statements typically promise about life-long learning, and doesn’t draw upon the often considerable expertise within schools, including that of the students (especially when it comes to technology).
Scribd is an excellent site for publishing your documents to a wide audience, and also a place where you can find a lot of useful documents. A number of posts on this blog lately have touched on the idea of embedding documents in your webpage (e.g. embedding in your portal class site), so I will embed a file I found on Scribd on developing maths skills:
Just wanted to share a good resource: Academic Earth offers “thousands of video lectures from the world’s top scholars” (that’s the tagline on the site, not my words).
Several posts on this blog have addressed the topic of presentations using PowerPoint slideshows in particular and good design more generally (for example 
Publishing to a wider audience is something many teachers mention they’d like to be able to do with their students - to other classes, to parents and other relatives, and to the whole world. One relatively straightforward way to share work with the world is to use a blog. Navigating a blog is pretty easy for visitors, you can post written work, and you can embed other types of media (podcasts, videos, photos).
