As the election heats up, so do the negative attack ads. Plus, the increasing number of forwarded emails we receive from family and friends ramps up emotions and starts rifts. How many of us have received an email that claims Barack Obama is a Muslim or that Sarah Palin has a list of banned books?
A new free service from the St. Petersburg Times critically examines many of these wild claims, on a website that is both fun and informative for students and adults. Politifact.com uses a "Truth-O-Meter" to rate the accuracy of the most recent attack ads, and a "Flip-O-Meter" to assess how consistent a candidate has been over time. They even have a version for the iPhone so you can flout your knowledge at parties!
Because it's an election year, the web is alive with innovative ways of keeping people up to date on the latest political news, including what the candidates say in their speeches. But if we rely solely on what the traditional media outlets (CNN, Fox, MSNBC) report, we as teachers know how much selection and bias really come in to play.
What if we could sift through the innumerable speeches of both McCain and Obama, and then search for our own topics, bypassing what the media "gives" us? Thanks to online video sites and some pretty sophisticated speech-to-text technology from Google, we now can!
It's easier to just try this tool rather than have someone explain it further. For example, type the word, 'withdrawal' (no quotes) in the search box and see which speeches and subjects emerge. You can even type specific phrases in the search box, as long as you set them off with quotes, eg., "No Child Left Behind".
>Image via CrunchBaseAs a Technology Staff Developer (TSD), placing a YouTube video into a PowerPoint presentation is easily one of the most requested "how-to"s I hear from fellow teachers. And unfortunately for Windows users, it's not a straightforward process, by any stretch. But I will show you THREE proven methods that I have used again and again. Since our school has switched to Microsoft Office 2007, these techniques apply only to that version of PowerPoint.
METHOD 1
Embed a reference to a YouTube video without actually downloading the video. This method will only work if you have a live and robust internet connection. Otherwise, you're out of luck. I can't take credit for this method: I found it on YouTube, and the creator/narrator is a woman named Laura Bergelis, who seems to know a lot about presentations and technology. You might enjoy reading many more tips at her website, Maniactive.
METHOD 2
Download a special extension ONCE to install into PowerPoint. Click on this link to see a pop-up video: *YouTube into PPT* NOTE: if you'd like to share the presentation with others, make sure you save it as a "macro-enabled" Powerpoint presentation. It will actually work for people who don't have the extension installed.
METHOD 3
OR, you can actually download a YouTube video and embed it in your PowerPoint presentation. This method might take a little bit longer, but will result in a PowerPoint that will play regardless of whether you have access to the internet.
Download your video using a website called Mediaconverter. Just paste the video's url (eg., http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMJuy0JIyVA) into the "conversion wizard" where it says, "Convert a video or music by url"
Choose the file type to convert to: WMV
Click through the next steps without changing any settings
Once that's done, click "DOWNLOAD NOW" and make sure you remember where you saved the file.
Open PowerPoint. Click the INSERT tab, then the MOVIE button, and choose your downloaded video. That's about it!
>Image via WikipediaOne of the trickiest issues for teachers is determining what constitutes "fair use" when utilizing copyrighted material, for ourselves or for our students. In the past, many well-intentioned educators published "fair use guides" on the web that were overly cautious or just plain wrong, focusing on, for example, the amount or percentage of time supposedly allowed when excerpting a clip.
And certainly, the general public propagates many myths about what can or cannot be used. For example, take a look at this seemingly harmless (and mercifully short) 29-second video posted on YouTube:
You might have missed it, but Prince's classic song, "Let's Go Crazy" was playing in the background. According to Wired magazine, this video "was removed last year after Universal [record company] sent YouTube a takedown notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act."
But you might have also missed the fact that, "after being taken down for six weeks, the video went back online last year, having now generated about half a million hits." (emphasis added)
Fortunately for budding video directors (like our students) and us, the courts are more recently and more often siding with the creators of such videos, according to the Center for Social Media of American University: "In reviewing the history of fair use litigation, we find that judges return again and again to two key questions:
Did the unlicensed use 'transform' the material taken from the copyrighted work by using it for a different purpose than that of the original, or did it just repeat the work for the same intent and value as the original?
Was the material taken appropriate in kind and amount, considering the nature of the copyrighted work and of the use?
According to Peter Jaszi of American University, "Fair use is like a muscle that needs to be exercised, but people can't exercise it in a climate of fear and uncertainty." I'm no lawyer, but it seems to me that if we and our students follow a set of "best practices", not unlike what we already do with written work, we are unlikely to be challenged on legal grounds. Based on the 2 legal questions above and our own previous experience with quoting and paraphrasing, our best practices should then be easy to articulate:
The use of the copyrighted work is transformative.
The kind and the amount of the copyrighted work used is appropriate for the assignment.
This is the last post I plan to write about the sessions from the National Educational Computing Conference, or NECC. The last speaker I saw, Mike Ribble, of Kansas State University, is the author of Digital Citizenship in Schools, which is a forward-thinking work dealing with the ethics and the legality of student behavior on the internet, "emphasizing the positive aspects of technology usage: collaboration, learning and productivity".
Ribble argues that too often we as educators (and parents) provide our students with the latest technological tools without really explaining how to use them properly. We have already witnessed the many abuses under the current laissez-faire system: cyberbullying, illegal downloading, creating websites to complain about teachers, and using cell phones during class. As a response, most schools' Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs) tell students what they can't do, but "do not teach students what is appropriate and why" (9). Under this umbrella of digital citizenship, Ribble identifies nine themes (all defined at his website):
As I sat in this session, I immediately thought of New Trier's Strategic Planning initiatives, specifically our Ethical Conduct and Global Citizenship (ECGC) action plans. After the success of the ECGC discussions in Advisery last year, and considering how involved our students are in social networks like Facebook and with technology in general, "digital citizenship" might be the next step in implementing our action plans.
Although this blog is authored by New Trier High School (NTHS) staff, the audience is global and the views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of NTHS as an institution.
Copyright and Fair Use
This site contains images and excerpts the use of which have not been pre-authorized. This material is made available for the purpose of analysis and critique, as well as to advance the understanding of technology in education.
The ‘fair use’ of such material is provided for under U.S. Copyright Law. In accordance with U.S. Code Title 17, Section 107, material on this site (along with credit links and/or attributions to original sources) is viewable for educational and intellectual purposes.
If you are interested in using any copyrighted material from this site for any reason that goes beyond ‘fair use,’ you must first obtain permission from the copyright owner.
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