This weekend I attended the VSTE Conference in Virginia Beach. It was a great conference, and I learned lots of new ways to use technology in the classroom. I also presented a session with Alfonso Favale. The title of our presentation was “Make Meaningful Media with the Virginia Trekkers.” You can see our entire presentation here. The tool we used to create that website is actually one that you and your students could use too. It’s called Tackk and doesn’t require a login to use. It has lots of cool features like embedding videos and maps which I tried to include in our sample site. We started our presentation by sharing some of the latest updates to the Virginia Trekkers. This summer we traveled across the country thanks to a HEF grant. We went from Virginia to California, passing through seven other states along the way: Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada. We added those videos to our USA Trekkers page to help 5th graders with their study of the United States regions. After telling about the updates, we wanted to show teachers how they could create videos with their students like the Trekkers do. So we gave them a variety of resources and web tools that you can find linked on our Tackk page. Try some of them out and let me know how I can help you. You might even consider entering one of your videos to our Video Contest. After our presentation, the Trekkers took a Polar Plunge into the ocean and we made a “pop-up video” using a cool web tool we learned about at VSTE called Popcorn Maker. Students can use it to add pop-ups to their videos including maps, twitter feeds, text, pictures and more. Check it out!
