Week 10 - eContent and The End

I love eBooks and eContent. I love that I can carry all that stuff around in my handbag. But I hate all the platforms. I hate that I can't use them seamlessly. I live in a mixed up world of Macs, Android including the Kindle Fire (don't ask) and Windows...one word...frustration.

eContent -  I recently discovered Librivox and listened to Pride and Prejudice. Some chapters were better than others as there were different narrators for different sets of chapters (hey it's free). And we all know that with audio books, the narrator is the most important part. Even a wonderful book can sound clumsy if the intonations, pauses and speed of the speech are incorrect. In this vein I also tried free audiobooks on YouTube by Librivox. Some of the books have powerpoint style videos to go with the audio -somewhat irritating for me but I showed the YouTube channel to some students and they really loved it....sort of let them do 2 things at once.

Scribd - I do use Scribd to access document and presentations for the web when I find them online but for work I use Slideshare to upload. It is great for sharing resources online with students (yeh! no more paper print outs). It also allows students and other interested people to have access to these resources - I am all for sharing these resources and making them social (isn't that phrase great... not sure where I heard that one first).

Clipped from Slideshare.com

Anyway, not sure why I chose Slideshare over Scridb but in reflecting on my choice now and comparing the two, it seems you can download documents etc off Scribd and convert from text to speech. That sounds like a great feature and one I shall look into soon...maybe, it is best to use both?

Digital Storytelling - the iLearn link to the 31 of the best digital storytelling sites caught my attention (who said there isn't enough time to explore them all!!!!!). At school, students have used ToonDoos and also a great resource from ACMI (Australian Centre for Moving Images) - storyboard generator. Both great fun.......

As was this whole program. There is still much more I want to explore (hopefully we still will have access to the modules?) and refresh some of the tools I am already using.