Week 9: Thing TWENTY

To further cater to the limited attention span of my D-Gen (digital generation) students, I've begun to incorporate short, content-relevant video clips into my lessons. Being that YouTube is unequivically blocked by our district, TeacherTube has become my go-to site for videos. As a side note, I often use a site called Zamzar to convert web videos into .mov files and play them for my class, rather than stream them -- because streaming during the schoolday is a big NO-NO.

A video that my class particularly enjoyed was that of a high school teacher demonstrating the sublimation of dry ice. I used this video during the chemistry unit of my Integrated Science class when we were discussing the transitions of states of matter.

Another video that I found on TeacherTube was one that was designed to heighten awareness of cyber-safety, targeted especially for teenagers, called "Think Before You Post" (this one is the second in a series of two PSA's). I considered posting this video on my blog, but, in spite of the fact that it is less than one minute long, I refrained, as I didnt want to considerably slow down the loading time of my blog page.

One more cool side note, spurred from the above sentence. If you have a blog, and are at all concerened/curious about the time it takes your page to load, check out Stopwatch site, by Numion. All you need to do is enter the URL of your blog (or any URL, for that matter), and it calculates how long it takes for the page to load. This is a good way to tell if you've got too many accoutrements on your page.