education building

Thanks to Clarence Fisher of Remote Access for leading me to a new open media resource, The Webcast Academy. Two actually. Teachers Teaching Teachers produces their webcasts at the Academy on the topics of…

Skyping, Webcasting, and Podcasting By and For Teachers

They leverage the academies’ rich portal which serves as a both a forum for the media, and at the same time as an indepth training resource for anyone interested in doing webcasts. It even has an apprenticeship program which I’ll have to take a closer look at.

Overview
The goals of the Webcast Academy include

• increasing the number of people who are capable of producing live, interactive webcasts
• applying the open source community approach to skill development
• creating a place that formally recognizes proficiency, excellence, and innovation in these new media skills

This looks to be a really amazing and open resource for teachers, learners and the general public alike to learn about and experience webcasting. I’d be very interested in hearing any experiences people have had with the Academy.

Of course these days there are always more than one way to skin a, err… to produce fine, useful media and distribute it to your audience. Doug has done nice video on Getting Started with Blogger, using the amazing YouTube as a publishing mechanism, which by all accounts is currently the leading video tool of choice.

I intended this to be a 5 min. presentation, but it ballooned to just over 11. I’ll likely be going to back to edit it down, and/or ’shoot’ it over to make i a bit more concise. I’m told these should actually be about 2- 3 minutes, because of users low attention spans, so I might even do it in smaller chunks.

Another caveat, this was my first attempt at using Camtasia, so I dont think I have figured out the best way to optimize/present this file. For now, you will have to stream it off a webpage using the Flash format, as it was the smallest file I could generate.

http://www.sfu.ca/~jtoal/presentations/g_reader/googlereader.html

I am gathering some google related resources with follow up links on this presentation on a wiki page. This is just getting started, but I intend to keep building this up and punctuate interesting tools with screencasts. Then, on to Yahoo!, Microsoft and a bunch of the other “big players” in the software business. You can tell they are watching the open source/social software movement closley, but we’ll see if their implentatons ring as true as many of the tools we present in Social Learning.