Technology Apps With Cattau

  Podcasting is all the rage these days as it seems like everyone starts a podcast when they try to promote their newest, latest, and greatest item or service that they are in charge of. Podcasting really is talk radio when you think about it but the nice thing about it is that it is totally customizable to your interests and needs. Listening to podcasts for learning is something that many people are doing nowadays as well as entertainment with the proliferation of true crime podcasts.  The 3 podcasting sites that I chose to try out were Anchor which is owned by Spotify, Buzzsprout, and Red Circle.  Anchor was the most user friendly and while it didn't have as many options as the other two it was also free and gave a lot of features that were super helpful for a beginner like I am when it comes to figuring out podcasting. It was pretty self explanatory and it helped me through the whole process of getting my podcast episode out there in a rather quick turn around. The fea...

  The first website that I used was Pixton to create a narrative comic.  https://edu.pixton.com/educators This website was by far the most advanced with all the capabilities that it had in order to create a full panel of comics and is for the power users. I found that the process took some getting used to as things were well laid out on the menu but with so many options it was not user friendly for someone who was trying it out for the first time. I really liked the selection of characters and all the backgrounds and animations and effects you could do. The whole creation of the comic was easy once I figured out where everything was. I can't recommend this website though as there was no way to download, share, or print without paying first. I ended up having to take screenshots which is why the pictures are small and blurry. It was really frustrating to spend that much time learning only to not get a good final product. Students would enjoy learning all the ins and outs but un...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_sI4g2qitQ   Youtube is the biggest video sharing site in the world. On average, more than 150,0000 new videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute, adding up to around 330,000 hours of video content based on an average video length of 4.4 minutes. ( https://www.wyzowl.com/youtube-stats/#:~:text=On%20average%2C%20more%20than%20150,video%20length%20of%204.4%20minutes. ) This is a great resource for anyone as Youtube has become the de facto search engine for K-12 students even before google. I actually jumped on the Youtube bandwagon and created my own channel that I did during COVID which served as my school's way of reaching out to families with a devotion since I was at a private school.  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnG7TZlozkBcF1j6Rn-vpiQ Libraries can make use of this resource and there are many clever ways that librarians have used Youtube to get useful information to their students.  The first channel that I looked at is Th...