I love to listen to a good keynote presentation. Dan Meyer'sMath Class Needs a Makeover is still one of the best I've seen in terms of challenging status quo in education. Angela Maiers and Vicki Davis speak with passion that is infectious and unsurpassed. And when I am given the opportunity, I enjoy giving the keynote at a conference. That said, I enjoy even more the opportunity to spend hours working with teachers in hands-on workshops because at the end of the day I know for sure that those teachers are walking away with something new that they can use. That is why I every spring I start to get excited about the Practical Ed Tech Summer Camps.
The Practical Ed Tech Summer Camps provide you with sixteen hours of hands-on learning in a small, collaborative environment. I hope that you can join us this year. Discounted early registration is available for five more days.
Beautiful Audio Editor is a free audio editor that you can use in the Chrome and Firefox web browsers. Beautiful Audio Editor lets you record spoken audio directly and or import audio that you have previously recorded in MP3 and WAV formats. You can edit and blend multiple tracks in the Beautiful Audio Editor. When your audio editing project is complete you can download it as an MP3 file, download it as a WAV file, or you can save it in Google Drive.
For the last few years I've recommended using Twisted Wave to record and edit audio on Chromebooks. Beautiful Audio Editor offers more options and is what I'll be using on Chromebooks from here on.
Applications for Education Beautiful Audio Editor could be a great tool for your students to use to create podcasts on their Chromebooks. The use of multiple track editing will let your students fade-in music or other canned introductions. Likewise, they'll be able to splice in audio samples in the middle of spoken tracks and or under spoken tracks as background music.
Explore.org offers the largest collection of live nature webcams on the web. In the gallery of live webcams you will find video feeds featuring owls in their nests, ospreys in their nests, and bald eagles in nests, and video feeds featuring puffins. As it is spring in the northern hemisphere, the bird videos feeds are the best they will be all year because birds will soon be hatching in those nests seen the webcams. For the last ten minutes I've been listening to and watching the nest of this Great Gray Owl in Montana.
Applications for Education
Birds aren't the only animals featured in the Explore webcams, they just stand out right now because the rest of the year the nests will be empty. Your students can certainly explore all of the other webcams on Explore that feature polar bears, tigers, goats, and many other mammals. All of the webcam feeds have a little pop-up menus that contain more information about the animals featured in the feeds. All videos can be streamed via YouTube or the Explore website. I kind of like just having the owl webcam on as soothing background noise, students might like that too.
Explore.org does have a dedicated education section that offers free lesson plans based on the videos available to stream and or download.
