Last week I attempted to have a session in which I taught teachers about what RSS is and then helped them make their own, personalized readers through www.netvibes.com. It did not work out as I had intended. Here is the I wrote to my staff as a follow-up. The attached pdf referenced in the email can be accessed at http://www.drop.io/JennieDocs.
Email to staff:
I wanted to thank my sessions’ participants for attending and for your patience as www.netvibes.com refused to cooperate with me. It was Murphy’s Law at its best (or is it worst) – the site was down for maintenance and was back up by 5 pm that night. I will work on a video tutorial on netvibes this weekend, so there will be a follow-up for those who attended (and even those who didn’t).
In the first session, when the website wasn’t loading, someone had the comment that this is often what teachers go through – lots of planning around something on a website and just when you go to use it, it’s down. I agree, it can be frustrating and whenever possible, I try to have a back-up plan. So in the spirit of trying to turn yesterday’s problem into today’s teachable moment, I wanted to share with you a strategy I use for downloading videos off the web. The attached pdf (downloadyoutubevideos.pdf) gives step-by-step instructions with screenshots for how to download videos off of YouTube.
The benefits of downloading are:
1) Once you’ve downloaded a video, you don’t have to worry about whether the internet is down. The video is on your computer and available for viewing any time, anywhere.
2) You don’t have to sit and wait for the video to load during the lesson, which depending on the length of the video and internet traffic can be a very long time.
3) Sometimes a perfectly appropriate video has inappropriate comments underneath it in YouTube.
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