And I mean “blues” in the most positive of ways! Here is Diana Krall singing that holiday favorite, Jingle Bells.

diana-krall-jingle-bells

I don’t know if it beats last year’s holiday post, The 12 Days, but it will definitely get your toes tapping! For more about Diana Krall, check out her website.

Have a safe and wonderful holiday!

Many of you have expressed your frustration about not being able to access and use YouTube videos to meet your instructional objectives. There are some really nice videos posted there. Unfortunately, there are some very inappropriate videos posted there as well. For that reason, YouTube can never be unblocked by the school district. In a perfect world, teachers would have access while students would still be restricted from the site, but I don’t imagine that will happen in our school district any time soon, if at all.

However, there are many good alternatives to YouTube available that are not blocked. The best I’ve seen is still TeacherTube.com. The videos there are posted by fellow educators and all are screened to make sure they are appropriate. I also recently discovered Edublogs.tv, and of course teachers also have access to the wonderful resources, including video, at Discovery Education (a.k.a. United Streaming – see your ITRT if you are not sure how to create an account).

But let’s say that you’ve found the perfect video for your class, and it’s only on YouTube. How can you use it for instruction? The first thing you have to do is download the video file. The best free online file downloader I’ve used recently is Media Converter. When you download the file, I recommend converting it to .wmv which is the format that will play on our school computers. Once you’ve downloaded the file, you can play it directly from your classroom computer, embed it into a PowerPoint, or upload it to TeacherTube so that you can access it anywhere at anytime from online. And that’s it!

A few years ago there was a YouTube video that “went viral” to the sounds of the Trans Siberian Orchestra that most of you have probably seen. (Note: The link is to YouTube, so you’ll have to travel down that memory lane outside of the school building)

Since then, there have been many who have tried to capture the excitement of that first light show. As I was checking online for something fun for our Feel Good Friday, I came across one that should definitely get your holiday blood pumping!

techno-lights

On a final note and along the same vein, if you haven’t had a chance to check out Anthony K.’s holiday show in our school’s Planetarium, you should really take a break and pop in there. I had the opportunity to see parts of it when he was first putting it all together and it was amazing even in it’s early stages. I imagine that the finished product is pretty incredible!

In light of the budget crisis the district is facing, I thought it would be an good time to remind folks about this site:

http://www.donorschoose.org/homepage/main.html?zone=304

Through DonorsChoose.org, teachers can identify and request funding for individual projects. Then, folks from anywhere in the world can choose to provide funding for these projects. The projects can be small or large, and the funding can cover all or part of the project.

For teachers to get started, go to

http://www.donorschoose.org/teacher/index.html?zone=304

Gesundheit!

baby-panda

For the past year, the Tech Team and I have maintained Hylton’s webportal at http://guest.portaportal.com/pwcs. However, I recently moved all of our links (and added lots of new ones!) to http://delicious.com/hyltonhs. Both PortaPortal and Delicious are online bookmarking tools. However, Delicious has proven to be much more user-friendly. It is easier to create bookmarks, and it is also easier to search your bookmarks. Once you have over 100 bookmarked sites (we currently have 297!), the search capabilities become very important!

Hylton’s Delicious site hosts a collection of bookmarked sites for teachers, students, and parents. Just go to http://delicious.com/hyltonhs, and use the tags listed along the right side to find tons of links to online tools for virtually every subject. We will continue to add bookmarks, so check back often to find out what’s new! And, if you know of a site that you would like included, forward it along to your friendly ITRT.

Hylton’s PortaPortal site will remain “live”, but no new bookmarks will be added. Instead, everything new will be posted at http://delicious.com/hyltonhs.