Inserting countdowns into a PowerPoint presentation

For a session that I will present this afternoon, I wanted to add a pair-share activity, but I need to limit the time of the activity as I only have 15-20 minutes in total to present.

I thought, there must be a clever way to add a countdown timer to a slide... please YouTube, show me the way! 

Here is the video that I found and the corresponding PowerPoint presentation with various time gadgets embedded within the slides.  All you need to do is copy and paste the time limit that you want and voila!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDeRcfhsR2U&noredirect=1 
http://a6training.co.uk/resources_powerpoint.php

Thank you YouTube, you made it incredibly easy to add the counter to my slides!

YouTube and Podcasts

I am sitting here staring at my computer with a seeming lack of something to say about either of these "things"... maybe that is because it is Friday!

With the YouTube video that I choose to embed within my blog, I challenged myself to edit the HTML code; resizing the video and also adding a commentary below the video. I immensely enjoyed working with the script and trying to make it work within my blog. I also love that video!

I explored several of the Podcasting sites that were suggested in the assignment. I selected the book podcast from NPR mostly because the catchy titles caught my eye. I like the concept of Podcasting to share ideas in short segments. I think Podcasting has huge potential for conveying search tips to students. When I worked at ProQuest, we often created full length training videos and then isolated individual concepts for Podcasts. When I was training, I always used to say that Podcasts were an excellent way to share a database with students and/or instructors, simply because of their length! Podcasts are also an fabulous way to reinforce skills.

I guess I had more to say than I realized.