Tagible-Create Customized Learning Video Channels

Tagible- Create customized video channels for your classroom/school

What it is: HOLY SMOKES! This is the coolest new tool! I’ve spent the morning building out our Anastasis Tagible page (link at the bottom of the post), and I feel like my head is spinning with possibilities.

Tagible is a brand new video manager site. It allows you to create a completely customized channel for all of your school/classroom videos. Videos can be imported directly from your YouTube or Vimeo channel. Once you set up the import feature, Tagible automatically imports any video that is added to your channel. Best of all, Tagible gives you the ability to tag videos with categories and then tags within that category; videos and customized channels are really easy to create. The channel that you create is easy to share with anyone through social media or it can be embedded directly on your school/classroom website.

Features:

  • Create a one-stop-shop for ALL of your videos that is completely customizable and branded just for your classroom or school.
  • Tag videos in new ways using categories and sub-tags, this makes it simpler than ever to find exactly the video that you are looking for.
  • Create customized channels based on categories and sub-tags. Each time a new video is added with a category/tag, it gets automatically added to the channel.
  • Embed channels on class or school websites. The embedded channel is ALWAYS up-to-date because all content tagged for that channel gets added automatically. (Set it up once and let Tagible do all the work!)
  • Tag videos under multiple categories and subcategories.
  • Connect your school/classroom YouTube or Vimeo channel to automatically populate your Tagible channel with content.
  • Customize your Tagible site with your own backgrounds, color schemes, and logos. (This is SO easy to use, you can even drag and drop images for your background onto the “upload here” buttons!)
  • Import any video from YouTube or Vimeo (not just your own). Curate video to create a customized channel just for you and your students!
  • Share your videos easily using Twitter, Facebook, and email.

How to use Tagible in your classroom or school: There are all kinds of video management tools, but Tagible is absolutely the most useable and useful for schools! Video is such a rich way to share learning. Our students are constantly uploading video projects. Tagible would make a fantastic video portfolio. Create a “Team” page for your classroom and then create a sub tag for each of your students. As your students upload video to your YouTube channel, tag it in Tagible with the student name. Now each student can have their own “channel” of their learning journey. This becomes a living portfolio that continually gets added to throughout the year (or years). Record student presentations, class participation, special events, etc. Whenever a video gets tagged with that student, it automatically gets added to their channel. You can share a student’s specific channel with their family, now they don’t have to wade through everyone’s video to find their child! If your students have their own blog or website (Weebly.com or Wix.com are awesome for this!) they can embed their channel directly on it. Now all written, photographed, and video work is accessible in one place.

Create learning channels for your students. Import the videos that your students can access to learn from, or be inspired by. Each video can be categorized according to unit and topic. Students can go through a units “channel” to access all learning videos that you recommended for the unit. This is definitely textbook of the future! I’m excited to utilize this idea for our inquiry units. As the students and I find video, we can add it to our own customized learning channel. This channel can then be embedded in student projects, websites, and shared through social media.

Set up a video learning station on classroom computers. As your students are rotating through learning centers, one of the centers can be video relevant to the learning. The great thing about using Tagible: you don’t have to be concerned about students clicking on “related videos” on YouTube that aren’t yours.

As a school, create a professional development tool for your teachers. Create a professional development category with sub tags like: assessment, technology, philosophy, teaching strategies, common core, etc. Add videos and create channels that teachers can access for on-demand professional development.

Keep your school or classroom websites up-to-date with the latest video content without contacting your web provider or logging in to add new video. Create a category called “Home Page” and create a channel based on the category. Any time you tag any video with the “Home Page” category, the channel will be updated to include the new video automatically. If you’ve embedded that channel on the homepage of your website, all of the video is automatically included, no need to edit the website.

Tagible is a great way to foster a home-school connection. Record student work and share via a unique channel with families. This would be an incredible look inside your classroom for families who don’t get the opportunity to volunteer at school often.

At Anastasis, I’ve created categories for Field Trips, Special Events, Teams (classrooms), Inquiry Blocks, Explore (videos we like), Crave classes, School year, and Student Created. The great thing about the categories is that you can use them to quickly narrow down videos for a channel. For example, we could create a channel just for “Inquiry Blocks” in “2013-2014” school year. Students and families can find exactly the videos that they are looking for all the time!

Are you an educational speaker? Create a channel of your presentations to share with others, and create a channel of videos that you used during your presentation. These can easily be shared at the end of a conference.

If you “flip” your classroom using video, Tagible is ideal. Make it easy for students to access video based on your own customized categories. Your flipped channel can be embedded directly on your blog/website and update automatically every time that you add a video. Create “review” channels that automatically collect videos from a unit or topic so that students can go through the channel to review and study. Invite your students to come up with categories that they would like to be able to search by.

Tips: Tagible is a brand new startup company. They are still working some bugs out of the system, and are regularly adding new features. In the bottom, right corner of the site you have the option to “Send Feedback” click on the portion of the site that you want to send feedback about and let them know about any bugs you find or features you would like to see.  You can try Tagible for free, they do have advanced features with monthly subscriptions. Be sure to mention Kelly Tenkely, they may be able to help you out with premium features. Tagible was started by one of Anastasis Academy’s board members and founding families. It has been incredible to watch this thing take shape! Just like the school, it started around this family’s kitchen table.

Want to see what a customized Tagible site looks like? Check out Team Anastasis here.

 

Rodan + Fields Consultant

Colorado Podcast Summit Revisted

As promised the Colorado Podcast Summit that I participated in is now online. Be sure to listen to the Keynote speakers podcasts for truly inspiring ways to use podcasting in your classroom. If you are looking for my poster session, you can find it under the Poster Session section. Make sure to check out the Resources page where you can find downloads for podcating story boards, rubrics, research, copy right information, and more. You can get to the Colorado Podcast Summit online here: http://www2.bvsd.org/ipodsummit/Pages/default.aspx

Links Galore!

Normally I don’t like to just list links…I would much rather give you a snapshot of a website, give you ideas for implementing it into your classroom, and tips on what has worked for me. Today is different. If you are like me, you read a new idea and immediately want to implement it in your classroom but don’t always have the right resources to make it happen. I have so many links for podcasting that I am going to give them all to you in one shot and then break them down in another post. If you have the podcast itch, get podcasting and browse the links below for some hosting ideas.

The following links are FREE podcast hosting sites (a place to store your teacher or student created podcasts where listeners can access and/or subscribe to your podcasts).

Global Classroom http://globalclassroomusa.org- Expect to see a post dedicated to this one, it is so much more than just a podcast hosting site.

My Podcast http://www.mypodcast.com

Podango http://podango.com

Switchpod http://www.switchpod.com

Podbean http://www.podbean.com

Podcast Summit

As promised I want to share some of the incredible uses of podcasting in the classroom that I heard at the Colorado Podcast Summit yesterday. One of the keynote speakers was ISTE Primary Teacher of the Year Carol Greig. Her Keynote entitled “Podcasting for the Struggling Reader” was truly inspiring. Carol teaches kindergarten in the Eugene School District in Oregon, here she started a podcasting program for her struggling readers called Reading Buddies. The Reading Buddies program uses several iPod shuffles that are loaded with reading lessons (created and recorded by Carol) that go home with the students. Carol said something that I think rings true with educators everywhere, “No one can teach my students as well as I can.” Reading Buddies allowed Carol to go home with her students every night using the iPod. The goal of the Reading Buddies program was to help struggling readers reach the benchmark. Carol loaded the iPods with reading lessons based on the individual child’s needs, this provided guided learning at home with and extended student learning. In the Reading Buddies packs Carol included vocabulary picture cards which she created, fluency cards, a book or two and the iPod Shuffle. A sample lesson might sound something like this: “Take out the green picture card. What picture do you see first? That’s right, a cat! Cat starts with the letter C. Cat, Cat. What is the next picture?” Carol pauses after a question so that the students have time to think and respond. The Reading Buddies program helps kids with vocabulary, fluency, alphabetic principal, rhyming, phoneme segmentation, and literature. The iPod “buddies” have been a huge success with 99% of students reaching the reading benchmark by the end of the year. Carol started getting calls from parents requesting that their student be a part of the Reading Buddy program, parents and other educators in the district started offering help to create the recordings for the Reading Buddies. At the end of the first year a parent called to thank her for the wonderful program and things it had done for her son, but she also benefited. After her son went to bed, the mother would listen to the reading buddy and follow along, she learned English by listening to her kindergarten son’s Reading Buddy! There are some good rules that were set up for the students who have reading buddies, each child was told that only the child who was given the Reading Buddy was allowed to use it, if a Buddy was lost or broken the students family was responsible for replacing it. It is a privelege that can be taken away if the Buddies were not cared for. They have never had to take a Buddy away or replace one that was lost or broken by a student. The future of the Reading Buddies program includes expansion to other grades, older students could have their anthologies or science text recorded on the Shuffle. The Reading Buddies program won the presidential award for reading and technology…it is easy to see why!

The new iPod Nano would be great to use as a reading buddy because students could have audio and visual presented. The Shuffles are nice because they are so affordable (the 1G just dropped to $49 yesterday!) I am hoping to get a Reading Buddy Program up and running at my school. I will keep you posted with any success stories or lessons learned!

ClickCaster

What it is: ClickCaster allows you and your students to create a podcasting channel that can be subscribed to via RSS feed as well as publish and embed your podcast for integration with classroom blogs or wikis. The ClickCaster platform is extremely easy to use with professional results. ClickCaster offers different levels of service the most basic is free but only includes 125MB of storage. The other levels are very affordable and ClickCaster gives teachers $3 off of their standard package.

How to integrate Click Caster into the classroom: ClickCaster is a great way to publish your classroom podcasts. Other classrooms and parents can subscribe to the podcast through RSS feed or visit your channel for a complete list of your podcasts. Publish a weekly radio show where your students give a synopsis of what they have learned throughout the week. Or, create podcasts where your students get to be the “expert” on a subject. No matter what the subject, ClickCaster will make publishing your podcasts for others simple.

Tips: Sign up for the basic limited account (free) to find out just how simple ClickCaster is to use…you will be hooked in no time!

Please leave a comment and share how you are using ClickCaster in your classroom.