Both of these sites are featuring lectures from the likes of Yale, Harvard, and MIT. But each have their own layouts, organizations, and niches. YouTube for example, features the well known “YouTube” interface that most of us are familiar with by breaking it down into “Most Subscribed” “Most Viewed” “Channels” and a Directory which is a staggering list of  the schools. Breaking it down by school is probably more useful if you are a student at a particular university, the rest of us will probably be hitting up the search. Regardless, it appears that YouTube is more of a casual lecture by lecture viewing.

Academic Earth, while not appearing to have as many schools on board, really shines when it comes to checking out lecture series and courses. Hit up the playlist and you will see what I mean. It also seems to do a better job at helping you find what you want by allowing you to narrow it down to topic, speaker, and university. Academic Earth also makes everything open meaning it is all able to be downloaded and embedded.

Living in the times we are in, a lot of content tends to be condensed, and broken into bite size pieces for the casual viewer. Since both of these sites are focusing more on the raw lecture and entire courses, it really lends itself more to the TED crowd, or those looking to down entire subjects. Regardless, they should be checked out.

You will need: (This guide uses Office 2003)

1 Word Document (that you want to add the names to)

1 Excel Document (that you wish to pull the names from)

Setting Up the Excel Document

For the purpose of adding names to our Word document, we will want to create an Excel sheet with a column of names. So go ahead and fill in your list of names in Column A. Place the word “names” in the Cell A1as the title.

Working with the Word Document

Open or create the document that you plan on adding the names to. This could be a letter that you want to place each name in as the recipient, or a handout that you want to personalize for each student. With the document open, go ahead and place the cursor where you will want the names to appear.

Step 1 – Unhide the Mail Merge Toolbar. This setting is found under the tools menu.

Tools>Letters and Mailings>Show Mail Merge Toolbar

Step 2 – Tell Word which Excel document you will be pulling the information from by selecting the “Open Data Source” button.

Step 3 – Choose the Excel document that you will be using.

After selecting your Excel file, a Select Table dialogue will pop up. Hit OK.

Step 4 – Select the “Insert Merge Field” button. From this menu, we will tell Word how to pull the data from our Excel file.

A dialogue should a appear with the “Names” column from your Excel sheet. Select “Names”, and hit Insert.

Step 6 – You will now complete the merge by selecting the “Merge to New Document” button. This will make a copy of your document for each name in your list. When finished, you will have a new document that contains every copy. Print and enjoy.

This is nice to have when you are reviewing information covered in a video, or are wanting to highlight something from several websites and don’t have time to navigate to each. Plus with image editing tools you can highlight certain areas, make side notes, or arrows.

SlideShare, put simply, is the Youtube of slide presentations. Users of all sorts go there to post their slides from their presentations, and the amount or variety in the topics play in favor to almost any educator. For example, searching for all presentations tagged with education will bring up around 13,000 results. Most of which are accurately on topic. Algebra brings back almost 500, and American History brings back around 19,000. Granted, not every presentation will be exactly what you were wanting, For example with American History you get everything from American Indians to the History of Blue Jeans, but with some creative searches you are undoubtedly able to find something of what you are looking for and often with an interesting perspective.

But why be a borrower and never the lender when posting your slides could be so useful? Not only will you help other teachers by adding to the resources, you also make a great place for your students to catch up on missed work or extra credit. The possibilities of sharing presentation resources across schools and districts is another great reason to dig into this resource.

Slideshare.net

After you have completed your slide show in PowerPoint and have typed the notes for each slide in the notes area, you can send both to Word to edit. In PowerPoint 2007 the option is under the publish option when hitting the start Orb. It should say something like “create handout in Microsoft Word”. In earlier versions you can find it in File>Send To> Word. After telling it you want to edit in Word, it gives you a few options. You can place your notes or blank lines next to your slides if you want three slides per page, or you can put the notes or blank lines under the slides if you want a larger, one slide per page. Editing your handout in Word will give you quite a bit more editing power as opposed to printing the handout straight from PowerPoint.