WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at dougbelshaw.com...
I’ve been thinking. There’s a few things that I don’t do because I haven’t got a pedagogical model in place for it. That’s where YOU come in. Help me out in answering the following please - I’m sure that I’m not the only one trying to figure these things out! 
1. I want record the contributions students make in my lessons somehow. Not in terms of using a microphone, but in terms of the quality of them. How can I do this in a practical way? Does anyone who currently has such as system share what they’re doing with their students?
2. I want my students (11-15 year olds) to do more presentations to the rest of the class. However, how do I get away from the now-standard (and boring) model where embarrassed students stand at the front reading from an extremely badly designed Powerpoint or head-down reading a set of notes? I had an idea after talking with Nick Dennis for them to video themselves using their cameraphones doing presentations and then editing it together. Has anyone done this? What software did you recommend for them to edit the .3gp videos from their phones?
3. A more specific one this time. I want to embed interactive timelines on my website. Whilst I’m aware of the excellent Simile project at MIT, getting one up-and-running is far from straightforward. Has anyone either got an idiot’s guide to it or suggestions as to how I could produce something similar? (Exhibit looks interesting…)
Your contributions are very much appreciated both by myself and those poor teachers searching Google for help… 
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Hi Doug,
Correction on earlier comment: Dan, not "Grant", MacDowell wrote the Ant Farm design. Oops.
Re: Q1: I haven't done it, but plan to: Record class discussions on my Mac, and have a class scribe timestamp when the best comments and discussions happen. Then use that timestamp to quickly find and post the highlights of the class as a podcast. Nobody wants to hear a whole hour, so this would (I hope) enable quick editing and posting of highlights. Can't wait to hear other input.
Re: Q2: I've got my grade 9s (15 y-o) teaching sentence style via sentence patterns, presenting in pairs, and am wrestling with the same question. I floated the idea of non-physical presentations via web 2.0, and one student did this: https://burell9english.wikispaces.com/Sun+and+Jessica
I love the potential. Offered to replace dismal vocab quiz scores with 100% for any other students who used YouTube to embed their video presentations and showed them this one. We'll see where that goes.
Keep those questions coming: you're right–we're all so busy, so it's good for you to call for everybody to offer what they're trying.
C.
Doug,
We are doing a lot with wikis for research projects. Students can add information, pictures, video, audio, etc. They can work on these individually or as a group with each adding to the wiki. Presentation are then made via the computer and LCD projector. Plus, anyone with internet access can see the work and provide comments.
Also, have you done any digital storytelling with programs like PhotoStory 3 and Movie Maker from Microsoft and iMovie from Apple? These are very cool and motivating for kids.
Dave
Kristian Still's been having problems adding a comment, so he emailed me. Here's what he wanted to say: