OK

I will be honest. I really am not 100% sure what this "multimedia" assignment entails even though I read and re-read the agenda, and watched other students' videos. But I have been wanting to do something like this for over a year now, and so I finally went for it.

I used Windows Live Movie Maker, which was very easy to download. I have never created a video on my computer before, and I didn't realize that my PC hadn't come with any kind of little freebie movie-maker. But regardless. Easy to download.

I have like four million videos of my son from pregnancy (didn't include any of the tummy-wiggling video clips - you're welcome)...but they are all so long, and I really liked the idea of setting them to music. It took me a little while to get the audio figured out. It wouldn't take to iTunes, so I ended up just finding my hard copy CD and saving it to my media folder as a Windows Media file. Then uploaded from there. When the video was complete, I uploaded to YouTube and embedded in this blog. It was really fun to cut the videos to match with the music. I think that this is definitely something that I would play around with more.

I also think that this program was easy enough that middle schoolers could use it. I would love to assign students a short (2 minute or so) historical re-enactment, using creativity and humor. I think that would be fun and easy to make, and great for the rest of the class to watch.

Web 2.0 Application

This is Meri and Meg's presentation on TokBox. We had a great time playing with this tool and a slightly frustrating time posting embedding it into our google presentation! But I think it still turned out pretty well.

TokBox does have an "upload to YouTube" button available, which would have made this project VERY easy. However, it didn't seem to work for some reason. I recorded several different vids and the uploads kept failing. When I did a little research, it sounds like TokBox isn't consistently the most reliable site, but hey it's free, and I definitely think it is SUPER useful for recording video messages, and would still have potential for application in my classroom.




By Meri and Meg!

Upload for Presentation...

Sometimes you have to jump through a few hoops to get things where you want them...

...and this is totally not what I wanted to put here, but it's kind of neat!

Skype

So, I just created a Skype account. The class demo was very interesting, and I was definitely interested in trying it out myself. I can definitely see use for this in my middle school social studies class.

I could Skype an expert on a particular social studies topic and have them do a little broadcast question/answer session with the class relating to what we're learning. This would be particularly amazing, because it would be live, the presenter could do it from home if they felt like it, and the students could ask questions in real time. It would also add a little variety to the classroom...they wouldn't just be learning from boring old Mrs. Patterson that day -- and they would get a chance to hear from an expert without having to bring in a "guest speaker".

It just blows me away that this is free and has video, when people in my office are still paying good money to conference call. What's with that?

My blog in wordle form

Web 2.0 Tools...

So. Web 2.0. I had absolutely no idea what that even meant before today's class. But now I understand that they are tools that are web-based instead of PC based so you can access these things from any computer with the internet. That's totally useful for sharing, as well as having backup in case a site goes down, for example.



So I was surfing around in the web 2.0 tools that are listed on the class site, and registered for dabbleboard. This is so cool!! Meg, Cirbi and I all sat here and scribbled on this document LIVE in about 5 minutes! I am blown away!

I can totally see how you could use this up in front of the class -- drawing arrows pointing to specific parts of a picture for example. Each kid could have rights to the document and can scribble their own thoughts on it. We could create a collaborative picture. Very neat. But for the life of me, I can't figure out how to get the entire pic up on there. I tried changing the size but it didn't seem to matter. ?

Record your screencast online

Woah, this is just way cool. This class has just provided me with so much information that I am totally using in my everyday life already!! Here is my first Screentoaster video. I'm not sure yet if it has audio or not...the original video is a Youtube video (that does have sound) of my son that I had embedded into my personal family blog. So I did the screenshot from there, and since I am not familiar with the keyboard shortcuts, I go back and forth to the Screentoaster site (which I obviously would try to avoid when doing a clean copy of something...I actually think it's kind of neat to see the back and forth like this.) Waaaaay cool!!

Reflections from OTEN