PortablePD.ca

TeacherTube for Video

Jane and I played around with TeacherTube a couple of years back.  Think of it as YouTube for educators.  We uploaded a couple of videos there, nothing fancy (We used the tempermental, not-so-school-friendly Windows Movie Maker, but that’ll be another post).  I put up a video of a student teacher demonstrating the famous Pepsi/Mentos reaction, a video of some guys traveling the world in a biodeisel firetruck and another video of Leo Brooks working with students on hand drumming.  To my astonishment, my video showing what happens when you mix Mentos and Pepsi has since been viewed over 5000 times. So, I kept digging and checked out Jane’s stats.  Not that we’re competitive or anything…

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:

Tracey Nicholson from Jack Donahue Public School sent us some questions her students had about Audacity.  Jane and I have encountered these obstacles in the past and thought it would be worthwhile sharing:

Hi Nathan:

We are having trouble with exporting our “Audacity” file into a mp3 file.
We are also having trouble with coping and pasting Audacity files.

If you can help us that would be great.

I’ll take a crack at answering these questions.

“We are having trouble with exporting our ‘Audacity’ file into a mp3 file.”

When you export an Audacity file to MP3 you go to File/Export as MP3.  The purpose of doing this is to create a much smaller sized audio file that can easily be played on everyone’s computer over the Internet.

You will run into trouble if a file called the LAME MP3 encoder was not installed along with Audacity.  For copyright reasons this file has to be installed separately.  It’s simple enough to do if you are using a home computer or have permission to install software on your school computer.  Just follow this link and follow the instructions there.

“We are also having trouble with coping and pasting Audacity files.”

As far as copying and pasting files, I’m assuming the problem happens after you’ve saved your Audacity project and you decide to copy the Audacity files onto a flash drive or move it to another folder.  When you go to open up the copied Audacity file much of the sound is missing.  Aaaargh!

There’s a simple way to avoid this and, once you’ve done it, it stays in the software’s settings, meaning you probably won’t have to do it again.

Here’s what you do:

1.  In the menu select Edit the Preferences.
2.  Click on “File Formats”
3.  Select “Make a copy of the file before editing (Safer)”

This will make sure all of the bits and pieces of audio you need are included the folder you copy over.

I hope this is useful.