Why are you re-inventing the wheel? Use these education videos!

Almost every day something comes across your Twitter feed which is a golden nugget. A perfect little resource, tool or story that can help you in your practice of being an educator. However, once in awhile you hit the mother lode. Such is the case today with a blog called Open Culture: the best free cultural & educational media on the web. I was compelled to visit the site with their recent posting entitled 125 Science Videos: Our Greatest Hits. Wow – it’s a very appropriately titled post. There’s some great free videos on this list that touch on subjects relating to Astronomy, Space Travel, Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics, Neuroscience, etc. Some of these videos could be used to augment a distance learning class or they could be shown directly in a face-to-face classroom setting. I took the opportunity to view a few of them. Some particularly interesting ones from my perspective were the Physics of the Bike, the Periodic Table of Videos project, and of course the very funny bit that Technology is Awesome but Nobody is Happy.

There’s a lot more interesting posts on this great Open Culture blog. So quit making plans to re-inventing the wheel by mounting your own video production company. Instead take the time to peruse all these free media objects. There will certainly be some appropriate ones for almost any course topic.

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Take your students back in time with video!

In September 2010, the YouTube Time Machine (YTTM) was born. The concept is simple. Select a year anywhere from 1860 to today and this service cues up videos found on YouTube pertaining to that year. Everything from TV commercials, to news reports, to music videos, to sports and movies. It’s quite the trip down memory lane to dial in the year you were born for example. I was born in 1969, and the first thing that the YTTM played for me was a very disturbing TV Commercial for the International House of Pancakes. I can’t imagine what the marketing geniuses were thinking when they made that! Anyway, this fantastically simple service can have some very interesting applications to teaching and learning. The obvious examples of history or sociology courses come to mind. Want to know a bit about the culture of a particular year? Well then YTTM is a great place to spend 15 minutes of time. Check it out and let us know if you integrate this tool into your teaching or learning by leaving us a comment below.

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Technology Training Videos for Teachers

Let’s face it, whether you are a teacher, instructional designer, teaching assistant or multimedia developer, the sheer amount of new tools being released on the Internet makes it difficult to stay up to date with what’s new and what can apply best to your specific discipline. So instead of wasting hours randomly searching for new things when you have a spare moment (or clipping Dell coupons), I would suggest you consult regularly with Russell Stannard. He runs a great site called teachertrainingvideos.com. Already he has a multitude of great videos that I have sampled, including videos on topics like:

• JING-Fantastic Screencasting Tool
• Easy podcasting
• Introduction to Moodle
• Make on-line surveys
• Downloading from YouTube
• How to use Blogger
• All about Delicious
• Photoshop basics

All free for you to use. Russell Stannard is a principal lecturer in Multimedia/ICT at the University of Westminster in London England and his academic focus is on English language teaching. He has taken the time to create several videos outlining tools and websites that are specifically useful to English language teaching, such as:

• Amazing 3D dialogue builder
• Best ELT sites 2008
• Best pronunciation Sites
• Great dictation site
• Voicethread presentation tool
• Review of the best ELT podcasts

So overall he provides a fantastic repository of short videos that can help you in your research for useful tools in your teaching related practice. You can keep up to date with Russell’s new material by either subscribing to his email newsletter on his website or following him on twitter.

If you find any of these resources especially useful, let us know by leaving a comment below.

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Hot Topic: Nursing Simulations in Second Life!

The most frequently visited posting on this blog was written on March 7th, 2008 on the topic of Nursing Simulation in Second Life. If you visit that old posting, you will see that the architect behind leading edge nursing simulation in Second Life is John Miller, a professor of Nursing at the Tacoma Community College of Nursing in Washington, USA.

John actively writes about this topic on his blog. If you are interested in keeping up with his experience, then it is a must read!

John has posted to newer videos on YouTube that demonstrate how he uses Second Life to support learning at his college. The first video is demonstrates a high tech emergency room nursing simulator that he has developed. Together, three participants actively participate in a simulated critical event. A student operates the virtual patient who is placed on a bed and reacts to the treatments administered by the virtual nurse (played by a second student) and a virtual nurse supervisor (played by the instructor). It's a must see video for anyone interested in nursing simulation in the emergency room.

The second video that John has made available shows Centralia island on Second Life that John uses to host learning units for his students on the topic of nursing. Many of the items on Centralia Island link directly to free resources on the web. A simple way to integrate Second Life with other Internet resources.

Are you working in the nursing field, if so, let us know what you think of John's work by leaving a comment below.

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Free Academic Videos for Everyone

It's new and it is in a 'beta' state; however, Academic Earth is something to keep your eyes on. Currently, it offers thousands of post-secondary lectures from authorative sources - all free. The creators of this repository have worked hard to integrate features into it that make it extra useful. Each lecture has a side bar with a slection of special options, such as a download to iPod option, a citation option, an 'embed' option that gives you code you can copy and paste into your website (this means that you can distribute the video to your students without having to host the video on your server. Nice!). Each lecture is rated by registered users of the website (registration is free!). So over time, the most highly rated lecture will float to the top. While in the 'beta' state, Academic Earth strongly encourages users to leave feedback on any bugs you find as well as to make suggestions on how to improve the service. At the time of launching, it is billed as "Thousands of video lectures from the world's top scholars." Not bad for a start, where will it be a year from now! What do you think?

Photo credit: Here.

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