Category: Technology

100 Informative & Inspiring YouTube Videos for Educators

If you need a weekend/new month starting pick-me-up, ideas for professional development, training, or student inspiration ice-breakers, you might find the videos on the list of 100 Informative and Inspiring YouTube Videos for Educators inspiring and useful. Several are TEDTalks, including several of my favorites by Sir Ken Robinson and Adora Svitak.

The videos cover the topics of creativity and learning, technology, philosophy and social studies, educational excellence, inspiration for teachers, science and math, language arts, special education, physical education, and business education and entrepreneurship.

They are focused for education, but really, they are for anyone interested in learning.

Finally, the Accredited Online Colleges blog that this resources if from, is full of great lists and resources about online technology, especially for education.

Effective Instructor Quote

I’m quickly skimming through Jessamyn West’s outstanding new book, “Without a Net: Librarians Bridging the Digital Divide,” and ran across this statement that is important for any trainer teaching any level of technology to any group of students, especially those uncomfortable with technology. In a lot of ways it’s common sense to anyone who’s worked with anyone learning technology, but it’s still always good to have the reminder.

I hope you take it to heart as much as I have (and read the whole book!):

Part of being an effective instructor is about putting technology use into perspective for people and helping them find a place for it in their own lives as something other than an insurmountable obstacle” –p74, Without a Net

Naked in the Library presentation (on online security)

Liz Rea and I are giving a presentation tomorrow (Wednesday) at the 2011 Kansas Library Association conference. We constantly run into Internet security issues and questions at NEKLS, whether it’s through malware, phishing, fake anti-virus, bad passwords, clickjacking, or some other security behavior.

Talking about these topics can be boring or too technical, so we decided to give a humorous and hopefully memorable presentation on it all, beginning with the title of “Naked in the Library: Keeping your private information private, online”. The resources for this presentation are linked below. I hope you find them humorous and useful.

I know Liz and I have enjoyed trying to find creative ways to teach convoluted tech terms to our audience in memorable and useful ways. This was more fun than building our 2009 Cloud Computing presentation, and that one was quite memorable!

Our slides are available online at SlideShare.

The handout we’ll be going over during the presentation is available as a PDF.

The further resources page is available on the NEKLS website.

Brainstorming QR Code Usage in Libraries

We have a group at NEKLS listening into the Handheld Librarian online conference today and tomorrow.

#hhlib is the Twitter hashtag for the conference. [lots of great comments/posting/discussion going on there]

We lost interest in a couple of the afternoon sessions, and ended up having an in-house discussion about QR Codes and how they could be used in libraries.

Sharon Moreland, who’s been live-blogging the entire day, took the notes, but as her post is lengthy, I’m going to post the brainstorm list below. Leave comments if you have other ideas to share! We have no idea how these would work, but it would be great if they all did!

HOMEWORK (our in-house discussion) – how can we use QR codes?

  • Kids book reviews from the online catalog
  • Promotion
  • Signage/virtual tour
  • Equipment inventory – or Audiobook inventory – here is what other pieces are in this Box – list and a picture and instructions – Cabinet QR code
  • Paperless, portable – but have to have a smart phone (or a tablet in the future)
  • Memorial information – On the memorial bookplate, add a QR code with additional information
  • Series information – what’s next in the series, what’s the order
  • Award information – other award winners, interview with the author, etc.
  • “Ask us what this is”  Poster with a big QR code – get the discussion going and help educate people
  • Accelerated Reader information!
  • Software keys in IT –
  • Marketing – posters in the community – on buses
  • Scavenger hunt (it’s like decoder ring)
  • Geocaching? – add more info to the cache itself
  • The Barcode Tattoo – life information, what you do for the rest of your life (great YA book)
  • Add book discussion questions on QR code
  • How much info can they hold? – text box – depends on generator
  • Iron on t-shirts for promotion?
  • codes in the family pictures/Christmas cards
  • child identification – the future of the milk cart ;-)
  • New books are coming with QR codes printed on them – goes to a site or blog or store

Using Copyright Friendly Images in Presentations and Websites

I am going to be giving a couple of presentations this fall on using copyright friendly images in presentations, documents, and websites. I’m not quite prepared to begin working on these sessions, but I just stumbled upon some fantastic resources thanks to this tweet, and don’t want to lose track of them!

Continue reading “Using Copyright Friendly Images in Presentations and Websites”