Jane, always the master educator, made a couple of videos of students teaching the science of elastic and potential energy (The Comeback Can and the Wind Up Tractor). Typically, she left me in the dust. As of this posting, her video, “The Comeback Can” has been viewed over 8981 times. Not quite viral, but pretty good for a grade 5 science lesson out in the portables.
One of the cons of TeacherTube is the advertising. I’ve only encountered education related ads, but I still prefer to steer students away from them. However, embedding these videos in your own blog helps reduce wandering minds.
TeacherTube gives you the necessary code to embed videos into your blog. Here’s my exploding Pepsi video:
And Jane’s comeback can:
TeacherTube for Audio
It turns out that TeacherTube now hosts MP3 files as well. For me, this is a big deal. Jane and I have been on the search for an easy-to-use, free, unlimited storage space solution for our podcasts. We now have three seasons worth of Portable Radio and one season of Portable PD and are reluctant to take any of it down. TeacherTube appears to fit all of our needs – even the one about unlimited storage space. So, fingers crossed, I’ll experiment with uploading our next podcast there.
TeacherTube even gives you the code to embed the audio in your blog. A nice feature since Edublogs (the provider of this blog) no longer generates a player for audio. Here’s our latest podcast:
I have spent the day at an excellent workshop that was offered by my school board (Ottawa Carleton District) on the Small Wonder camera. I have used one before but I like going to workshops to see what I haven’t discovered myself or to learn what other people are planning to do with their classes and the technology. It is also a great opportunity to reconnect with people who I haven’t seen for a while.
We spent the morning playing around with the cameras. The cameras are fairly inexpensive, about $100.00. They are really easy to use. Big red button means record. Delete means delete. On and off, well they let you turn it on or off. Kids would have no problem using them. I can think of many different uses for my class next year. There is one downside though…. Movie maker!
The Small Wonder cameras are plug and play making it easy to import video, and still pictures, into the computer. Once on your computer the material can be edited and combined to make a “movie” that can be shared or uploaded. Movie maker is what we are using to do the editing and so far today Movie Maker HATES ME. I have copied my video onto the computer. I have created a folder to store it all in and I save every two seconds because Movie Maker keeps crashing. I don’t know if I want to put my students through this.
The advantages of Movie Maker are that it is free and that it is already on my school computers but I think these might be outweighed by the crashing issue. Does anyone have a solution for me? Please don’t point me to iMovie. All the computers in our schools are pc. I would love to hear how others deal with the crashing problem.
And for your entertainment, I was going to add my little video created this morning with the Small Wonder and Movie Maker. However, I saved all my video files, I saved my Movie Maker project but…I did not do the final step of finishing the video in Movie Maker to make it a final copy. I thought that I could take it all home, do some finishing touches to the project and then publish something truly great and Oscar worthy. Now on my home computer I can see all my video clips in my storyboard but when I play my video I just get the sound and a black screen. AAARGH! This is all good learning, I guess. It would be really frustrating to encounter these problems taking student work back and forth from home and school.
The long cool summer drinks are helping. Thanks for the red wine suggestion Roger.
This animation was very easy to make. Honest. Try it out yourself at goanimate.com.
I don’t plan on setting my grade 5 students loose on the site for the time being. There are too many bikini-clad characters, bars (of the drinking establishment kind), weapons and the like. Most entertaining, which, of course, is a tad risky for our ultra-conservative sensibilities.
There is mention on the site, of creating a teacher-friendly version. I’m hopeful that will happen.
Still, it’s a fun way to hook people, young or old, and the results are pretty professional. I can see it being used at the start of a presentation or lesson.
Another con: Edublogs and Wordpress don’t allow the movies to be embedded properly. The Firefox browser almost seems to work – but doesn’t. Internet Explorer just creates an empy box. This issue is discussed in goanimate.com’s forums:
Blogs based on Wordpress do not allow embedding videos. The code that
you pasted got trimmed when you saved your post. Only embedding from
certain sites (like YouTube) can work as a result on EduBlogs. We are
working on our side to contact Wordpress and see if there is a way to
enable that in the future, but for now nothing much we can do. We will
keep you posted if we find any way around this.
So, I faked it. I took a screenshot of the opening frame, cropped it with Fireworks (similar to PhotoShop) and uploaded it to Edublogs as a picture. I then made the picture link to the goanimate.com site.
Our board is developing a place called NetCaster for teachers to upload and share different types of media. Due space restrictions, video must be uploaded in the FLV format.
It now looks like video conversion won’t be an issue. Tim Hawes from B< has improved things at NetCaster:
Netcaster can now automatically convert uploaded .avi, .wmv, and .mov files into .flv for you. Still experimental, but works in most cases. Still limited to 15mb files.
There is also an upload progress bar now too.
./tim
Still need to convert files?
I think most of us would be converting from WMV (files made from from software like Windows Movie Maker) or AVI. The following sites have free software to download to accomplish this task and appears to work well. See what you think:
Any Video Converter You will then need to scroll down to find “Download Any Video Converter Free Version”.
Another solution is to visit Zamzar.net. This might be a better solution if you’re working on a board computer. You just upload your video to their site, provide an email address and, usually, in a couple of minutes you receive a link where you can download your converted file.
