Furl and Jing

Earlier this week, Jodi and I had the opportunity to present Furl to the faculty of our school. We used Jing to create a series of screencasts to familiarize them with the wonders of Furl. I had so much fun using Jing! The more I used it, the more possibilities I thought of for its use in instructing my students. I love the fact that I can do an oral tutorial to go along with the screencast. When I begin teaching my students the research process, many students will need to do research at home. Since this is the first formal research paper for most of them, they are often unfamiliar with the research process. With Jing, I will create tutorials throughout the research process and attach them to my school blog. That way, when students are at home and can't remember what I taught them in class, they will be able to watch the tutorial (or their parents can!) to help them remember what we learned that day.

I would say that the majority of the faculty members were enamored with Furl and will begin using it to help them manage the information they find as they are surfing the web. Interestingly, many teachers were equally as anxious to learn about Jing, which was not what we had planned to cover with them during this presentation, but it was a great "teachable moment". Unfortunately. Jing is not a program which we can download at school, but those who are interested will surely go home and play with it so that they can implement it into their classes as well.

Next up, bloglines! The time constraints of our staff development day did not allow for the introduction of bloglines, but as technology mentors at our school, we will definitely be sharing information about bloglines and RSS in the near future.