Science Teaching v 2.0

Sprout is another useful web 2.0 tool. I have seen the logo around quite a bit on presentations but only decided to have a look at its possibilities after reading a technology web 2.0 and general nerdery in the classroom blog

This application will be invaluable in the business world and I guess this is where the people who are developing Sprout see their market. Very professional promotional material can be produced without the involvement of expensive advertising agencies. There are a number of good examples on the Sprout beta site.

Advertisers and educators have similar problems. How do we engage our audience and keep them informed? When we have created a teaching/selling moment then our educational/promotional material has to be focussed and stimulate further interest and questions.

Web 2.0 tools like sprout allow us to build media rich learning and assessment bytes for our students. They can relive the excitement of their classroom experience online at home when they may well be awake and ready to learn.

To try it out I put together some information for chemistry students before they investigated the structure and bonding involved in silicate minerals as they made a work of art in their chem lab.

It was an excuse really to test the the mashup capabilities.

• Played an old and tired looking Powerpoint and captured it as a videoclip with Jing. Loaded it onto sprout and used the resizing tool. (A cheap version of camtasia perhaps, made by the same outfit)
• video of classwork downloaded from You Tube
• Another powerpoint turned into a video clip via jing then loaded into Sprout (this seems to be an effective way of uploading jing tutorials to the blog but more later)

Finally if you are still there Sprout is an invaluable tool for producing e learning resources