Vialogues, States with Online School Initiatives, Culturally Situated Design Tools.  This past weekend I attended (and presented at) Teachers College Educational Technology Conference. My presentation (click here for Prezi) was about a project using mobile phones to leverage opportunities for formative assessment in a math class. Below is information about a couple of interesting projects/resources/tools.

Vialogues (free)

Some folks from EdLab at Teachers College have built a really nice interface that supports asyncrhonous dialogue about videos (user uploaded or linked from YouTube).  It is a nice way to engage in commenting and idea exchanges without worrying about outside chatter that may happen on the regular comments section of YouTube. A nice feature is that you can easily attach comments to specific time codes, and during the course of playback the relevant comments become highlighted as their time stamp is crossed.

Keeping Pace with K-12 Online Learning

This group produces an annual report on US online schools and state supported online school initiatives, broken down by state. I haven't had a chance yet to read the whole report, but I do like how they make some of their infographics readily available.
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Courtesy of Keeping Pace with K-12 Online Learning, 2010

Culturally Situated Design Tools

A group at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have been doing research on tools that they have developed to connect mathematical concepts to the cultures of particular students.  The tools themselves can be a little tricky to get used to, but I really like how each subset provides the cultural information, classroom activities, and the tool itself.
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Iterative 3D Pyramid Building applet from CSDT group at RPI.
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YouTube Doubler 08/02/2010
 
Make quick side-by-side video mash-ups using YouTube Doubler. Be warned: as with many sites featuring user-generated content, this site has a lot of inappropriate and immature mash-ups in its "Top" and "New" lists.
The site has a simple interface where you enter the links of two videos.  You also have the option to include a starting timecode marker for each video. Anyone who opens the link (generated in the address bar) will be taken to page with the two videos playing simultaneously side-by-side at the starting points you entered.

If you want to avoid sending people to the actual site to view a mash-up, you can embed the mash-up as I did above using the html code. Unfortunately you have to start the videos on your own, and they do not loop automatically as they do in the YouTube Doubler site (see here). 

Note: I also did a find and replace in the html code on the video dimensions in a text editor program (Notepad) to make the embedded videos fit within my website layout.
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Weebly 05/14/2010
 
I've decided to use Weebly to host this website. It's a free website creation tool with some great templates and an easy interface.  I bought the "constructivisttoolkit.com" domain from GoDaddy, and Weebly made it very easy for me to point the domain to this site.  You don't have to purchase the domain name, I just chose to.  If I didn't the site might have had ".weebly.com" in the URL name.

Creating a site on Weebly might be a great alternative to a traditional report or paper, or even to a PowerPoint presentation.  Kids would be able to organize their thoughts, use images and video, and even host discussions using the the many pre-designed elements that are available in Weebly.

I think that kids from 3rd grade up would have no trouble with this highly multimodal interface.  The thumbnail images for the elements and design layouts do not require programming knowledge to understand the functions they perform.

As I add more to this site, I plan on testing out every feature available. Stay tuned!
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