Meeting with Michael and new techy ideas

Wednesday, January 28th I went into school and met with Michael Amick our Dean of Technology Services. We talked shop for awhile and here are a few sites I want to document from that meeting:

1) Speakeasy.net How fast is fast when it comes to computers? This site is a great resrource for checking upload and download speeds. Find the link that says SPEED TEST in the bottom right hand corner of the page. From there you will be asked to choose a server. Michael said he always uses Chicago (so I did too). Once you click on that it will start the testing process. You visually get to watch as a little spedometer tracks your speed of both uploading and downloading. It does so in a matter of seconds. Probably would take longer to test if you were on dial-up ;)

2)I learned about word clouds which can take a text and visually map which words are most frequently used. The more frequent the bigger and bolder the word appears in this "cloud". I immediately thought about how that would be a great second part of my hope/fear assignment.

3) Michael had shared this before but I just didn't get around to exploring it before, but I need to set up my google reader account so that the blogs I follow are pooled together.

4) Michael showed me Barry Dahl's class Web 2.0 tools for which I will sign up for. It is a self-paced course which we are supposed to navigate through before the ITC (Instructional Technology Council) Conference in Portland at the end of February. Guess I know what I'll be doing that week right before! (I tried signing in but because I have a security setting that blocks cookies, I had trouble getting in. Will have to try again).

5) We spent quite a bit of time talking about the new course I've been asked to devel on social networking. Immediately web applications like "facebook" and "myspace" come to mind, but social networking is so much more. So it was nice to talk ideas over with him. The course is scheduled for the first time for Spring of 2010 so I've got a little bit of time. Definitely need to start a resource/idea page for that. Sites we discussed that I need to look into more:

NING (an umbrella application for networking sites-pull by theme, idea or subject)

BRIGHTKITE (applicaton with iphone)

LINKEDIN

DELICIOUS (book marking websites)

TWITTER (microblogging)

DIGG

WORDPRESS

I also need to get Alfred Essa's articles on facebook hikacking. Well no better time, so let me go find it...Here it is: http://tatler.typepad.com/nose/2009/02/protecting-your-privacy-in-facebook.html

Here were 2 other articles he posted right after his facebook account was hijacked:

http://tatler.typepad.com/nose/2009/01/facebook-violates-its-own-privacy-policy.html

http://tatler.typepad.com/nose/2009/01/facebook-is-totally-insecure.html

6) I put in a request to Michael to put in a request to D2L evaluators that it would be nice to have a crossword puzzle function that word work like a quiz--developed within D2L and then self-scoring!

7)We talked about Shepard Fairey, artwork, remixing, and top-to-bottom design vs bottom-to-top design which can be equated to Wiggins and McTighe's backwards design.

8) Which leads me to the website Michael pointed out to me obamiconme.com which takes your picture or one you upload and transforms it into a poster in the style of Shepard Fairey's famous Obama Hope and Progress posters. The picture included in this blog is from that site.

It was a great day full of great ideas and not enough time to explore them all--even when on sabbatical!

Video host sites

Here's an email I received from a friend who was doing research for me on video host sites:


Video Hosting Sites

Potential Issues - Many sites will make recomendations to other videos. Sometimes the recomended videos are totally inappropriate. Additionally, many districts have decided to block sites rather then take time to figure out appropriate ways to use them. Often you can get some of these unblocked if you talk to the right people.

YouTube - Most common site, but it is blocked in many schools. If you use Google Sites then you may want to use YouTube as embedding videos into Sites from YouTube is seamless. Embedding videos from other hosts is a lot more difficult (nearly impossible).
Google Video - Also fairly common. Just like YouTube, Google Video allows you to easily embed videos into a Google Site. Go figure, the video hosts that Google owns work well with the other tools they own.
Blip.tv - This is the one I use. I can upload files in multiple formats (so users can download high quality video), it allows for easy creation of podcasts, and it will cross upload to the archive.org.
Archive.org - Site trying to archive the entire internet. This one is cool because after a video completes it does not recommend other videos. Thus avoiding a potential pitfall of using other video hosting sites with students.
Ourmedia - Partners with the Internet Archive and Blip. Free hosting of a variety of files.
Vimeo - Upload up to 500 mb/week. The original files can be made available for download.
Metacafe - All videos are reviewed before they go live. The have policies against "bad stuff".
TeacherTube - This is basically a school friendly version of YouTube. There is no limit on video length.
SchoolTube - Another school friendly alternative. This one includes some sort of vetting process. Someone (or multiple individuals) serves as an Administrator for the school and will have to approve all video uploads from your school. Videos must be shorter than 10 min.
Video Editing Sites listed above

Free Music Site

I was working on my video projects last night and wanted to find some music to play in the background of some hieroglyphic shots. Deb volunteered to do some research online. She found a site called "pacDV" at pacdv.com. According to the site's terms and conditions page about liscensing, music and sound effects may be used without a fee but they'd like the user to site their webaddress. The mp3 files can easily be added to an itunes account and slipped into an imovie project. I'm going to try it today.

Editing Continues

Some more from guest blogger Deb Jacobson

I have learned so much today my head hurts. We are now working with iMovie and we want to do a little more than simple editing. (I like simple editing – but progress can’t be stopped)

1. Separated the audio portion from the video and placed in another part of the video.
a. You can extract the sound from either the project portion or the event portion of iMovie
b. Select the clip that contains the audio you would like
c. Hold down the Command and the Shift Key and drag it to the project where you would like it.
d. Don’t worry – you can always move it.
2. Changing the level of the sound clip
a. If you would like your new sound clip to be louder than the original sound tract – you can increase its volume and decrease the originals volume or tell it to “duck” – which will automatically reduce one over the other.
3. Voice Over
a. I also experimented with voice over using my built in microphone. It worked great. The voice over becomes a separate sound clip, which can also be easily moved, trimmed, volume adjustments as the other sound clips.

Happy New Year

It is happy indeed.  I was finally able to have some working video that I could edit.  All these troubles (see Deb's guest blog entry previous to this one) is really making me appreciate the ease of the flip video even more than I did before.  But I was off and running, well, ok maybe slow-paced jogging, with my videos today.  I started working on one about 11:30 am and uploaded it around 4 pm.  Of course, we ran into a little more difficulty--but at least I have something.

Problem number came with my completed imovie created on Deb's mac and my blogger account.  It did not want to accept the movie even though it was listed as one of the "acceptable" formats on the blogger account (avi format) and under the size limit.  We ran into this problem before but that was with the video created on imovie from the flip.  Don't know why.  But it works if we download it to a flash/jump drive and then upload it to the blogger account from my pc.  So problem one solved.

Problem two however came when I tried to view the video from my blog site.  The video was there but I discovered that there is no way to enlarge the video when going through the blog entry site.  Humm...not necessarily a problem with all videos, but this particular video was on Egyptian money and the details on the bill were lost when trying to view it in a little three by two screen!  So, I posted it on youtube and linked it back to my blog entry.  Now at least students can enlarge the video using the "full screen" option (little icon next to the volume bottom on video task bar). Problem two solved...

But now the quality of the video is poor.  I don't know if it is all the converting or what.  But it's pixalated and kind of blurry.  All this Scandinavian can say about the struggles over my Egyptian videos is UFF DA!!!

So we tried saving the completed videos in different formats (quick time--which saves in avi and mp4) tomorrow we may try the "widescreen" option on the imovie setup versus the "standard" size.  So it is now after nine and we have three blog entries up with videos of at least some sort: Egyptian Money, Egyptian Expressions, and Accommodations.  I'll keep you posted!

Video Editing Update--A Nightmare Explained

Guest blogger--Deb Jacobson recounts the struggles we encountered trying to find a way to make the Sony mini DVD videos usable.

Struggle??  I don't know what Kari is talking about - it was a piece of cake.  Ok - maybe not!  The game plan was to make some videos using iMovie from footage taken with a Sony Handicam DCR-DVD 301.  Sounds simple.  First obstacle -I have an iMac with a side transfer CD/DCD drive which you can not use mini DVDs.  Oh, sorry that wasn't the first obstacle.  We were going to hook up a firewire directly to the camera to make the transfer.  The camera doesn't support a firewire - but has a USB transfer but that doesn't work to the Mac.  We even traveled 60 miles to talk with some "experts" but they were not that helpful.   So back to the disks.   I have copying equipment so we made copies of the mini-discs to regular size discs so that I could load them into my Mac.  The file format from the mini-discs is VOB.  Which of course is not compatible with iMovie.  So the search began for software to convert the files to something we could use - such as Mp4 or avi  We searched the web and read a lot of forums from people who had the same problems and they suggested a number of free and inexpensive downloads  - such as: DVDZip, AVS Video Converter, MPEG2 Works Manager, 3VX, ffMpegx, and Handbrake.  I pretty much tried them all and the closest we came was it would work for one file but the next file would not have synchronization with audio and video.  It was a frustrating learning experience.  A lot of the problems came with me the operator.  I am not up with all the ins and outs of video conversion - and it is very possible that any of those programs could have been our solution - but they were our nemesis.  It was in reading information in documentation for Handbook (after that program failed me) that I read about MPEG Streamclip.  So what the hey - I downloaded it and IT WORKED.  I was able to easily select the VOB file, it checked for any time differences and  downloaded it - then I simply selected to export it as a Mp4 movie and now we can work with it in iMovie as well as Final Cut Express.  After a lot of frustration Kari is now learning iMovie (more frustration) and has already made two movies for her class.  So the end does justify the means.