ideas for IT in teaching

Want to do a group project with some other people, or make a form/group space where people can work on things together?

Some time ago Google acquired the wiki site, JotSpot, and has been developing it ever since. Now it has been re-born within Google’s new application, Google Sites, which makes “creating a team site as easy as editing a document”. “People can work together on a Site to add file attachments, information from other Google applications (like Google Docs, Google Calendar, YouTube and Picasa), and new free-form content. Creating a site together is as easy as editing a document, and you always control who has access, whether it’s just yourself, your team, or your whole organization. You can even publish Sites to the world. The Google Sites web application is accessible from any internet connected computer.” Google Sites is available from within Google apps Each Google Apps account receives at least 10GB of storage in Google Sites.

There is a load of great stuff on youtube for us to use, but unfortunately we can’t access it through the Wigan network, so here are some ways to get around it.

The videos on youtube are in a ‘Flash’ format. The normal software on your computer won’t play this, so you need to either convert it to AVI format so it can be played, or download an FLV player.

Here is a good video showing what you need to do to either convert or download the videos.

Unfortunately this download service is no longer running but the principle is the same for vixy.net – just paste in the web address of the video you want into the box and then convert it to AVI/MP3. This format can be embedded in powerpoint if you want.

youtubecatcher is another free site, but it won’t convert it to a windows-friendly video format for you, so you will need to download an flv player to your computer to play them.

The only problem with the free sites is that they can become so clogged up with users that it is impossible to use them, so if you feel you can afford £9 or so and you will use it quite a lot I would recommend naevius’ youtube converter software which is pretty neat and far quicker than a free web-based one.

Enjoy!