Velocity of Media Consumption: TV vs. the Web Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox
Summary:
The granularity of user decisions is much finer on the Web, which is dominated by the instant gratification of the user’s needs in any given instant. Content must cater to this rapid pace.
I enjoy reading Jakob Nielsen’s website so I thought I’d pass this link along. In comparing television to the web, Nielsen posits that television is “easy” as the programming is all presented to us whereas on the web we are constantly making decisions about what to do–read, click, watch, etc.
I’d be curious as to how this might apply to gaming, too.
Tags: nielsen, tv, web
Google Web Elements
A new item from the Google today: Web Elements. I can say that the name is decent with this one 
Basically you can take small snippets of Google tools and embed them into your webpage. For example, you can embed a presentation that you’ve got in Google Docs, or a Google Map. Perhaps one of the coolest of the Elements is the Conversation one, as people can add comments to your site when they’re visiting.
I think I’m finding these interesting because part of me is reading RSS just a tad bit less and I’m going to the actual sites and checking them out. There are a lot of great designs out there and I like what I’m seeing. One of the sites that I’ve been enjoying lately is the Rapid eLearning Blog. This is a blog about designing eLearning instructional situations, mostly aimed at corporate life, but it all applies to what I do as an ITRT offering Professional Development. One of the keys to offering quality PD is simply planning it well. Having objectives and developing some kind of assessment that tells you if the people that you are teaching “got it.” It’s a good site and worth some time spent there.
~ Share and Enjoy~
Tags: Rapid eLearning
Welcome to my new blog-space. I had a blog over at http://sharpsitrt.edublogs.org, but recently decided to pick a domain name and host it myself. So, this is it–edtechnotes.com. I have decided to try and get myself back into blogging as I always seem to be in an on-again, off-again kind of relationship with it.
Feel free to grab the rss feed and drop me a note if you’d like. Contact page is above the header.
Cheers!
~ Sean
Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech » Blog Archive » Student and Teacher Blogging that Succeeds
Blogging is way more about reading than it is writing.
Dean hits the nail on the head with this one. Great post on what makes blogging succeed with students and teachers. Read it. Plus check out some excellent student blogs from Room Twelve, and Tina Coffey from Salem has some great 2nd grade blogs going on this summer.
Man, my head is going to explode I think. This summer has been full of ___________ . I’ve had some fantastic discussion on my PBS Teacherline training discussion board and am enjoying some great emails with John Hendron about this whole thing called educational technology, standards, and professional development. Perhaps for the first time I am really beginning to organize my thoughts in a way in which I can articulate them clearly, with passion and openness. It’s a little hard to explain, to be honest.
In addition to this I’ve read some compelling posts by edu-bloggers as well. Specifically this post from Will Richardson titled, “What I Hate about Twitter.” The comments here are excellent in terms of what this whole thing means to others. At the same time I’ve been aware, more or less, of what I call the ‘house of mirrors’ or ‘the echo chamber,’ that we edu-blogger techie folks tend to live in. As I’ve become more aware of this, I now want to work this next year to expand these ideas and these practices throughout my ‘overly small’ school division in southwest virginia. i’m compiling some simple goals to work towards next year that i think will help.
The area that I’ve been chewing hard on is that area that has to do with the whole emphasis on standardized testing. It seems often that the focus of using educational techology is on how we improve test scores. Not that this is a horrible thing, but it seems to me that it is perhaps a little misguided. At the same time, the internal dialogue pushes back when I remind myself that the teachers with whom I work are judged based on how their particular group of students score on the test at the end of the year. Keep those test scores up and you’re good. If they’re low then things can get dicey.
My focus is less on the test score but more on the fact that we want teachers to use technology in appropriate ways in their classrooms because this is the world in which their students live. Or will live, if they don’t already. Even in my overly small school division.
Finally, my blogroll over to the right there has some good stuff to check out. Feel free and enjoy.
~ until next time~
Tags: ed-tech, thoughts, twitter
http://blog.mrmeyer.com/
no specific comments yet, but i like this blog. i just like it.
I’ve recently begun listening to some educational video posts on a site called, Ustream.tv
Today while working on a website for one of our art teachers, I listened to Will Richardson give a presentation on using Web 2.0 tools in education. He talked about what it means to teach our students for what lies ahead in their lives, rather than what is happening today. He also spoke about the realities of teaching now–assessments, time constraints, blocking sites, etc. etc. It was quite informative. You can check out this show and others that he has done at his Ustream website.
Technology Times Blog - Voice Threads
This is a great podcast from John Hendron, over at Goochland County Public Schools. There’s a lot of potential in this tool and John does a great job of explaining it. I can’t wait to introduce this to a few teachers that I know will enjoy working with their students on this.
Field Report #11: Voice Thread (with Meg Swecker)
This is a nice GenTech ‘field report’ done by Tina, interviewing Meg. The project is such a good description of getting students involved with something that allows Meg to share her passion for diving. Enjoy this one–’tis good!
Twitter
Do you twitter? I’ve been trying this out for a bit, feeling both excited about it and also a ‘what’s the point?’ type of thing. I think that as I follow more education folks though, it starts to make sense . . . .check it out if you haven’t!
