Posts by Diddly:
Feb
7
Hello my friends.
I haven’t updated my blog for a while I am afraid. We have had a beautiful little baby, and there have been many changes to our routine. I am a little tired, but very happy. Another problem I am having is with the Internet connection. I live in the country and have to use a satellite. The weather has been really bad lately and it is taking me a lot longer to get things done online like opening threads and blogs.
Well this week I have been continuing with my investigation of video editing. I have made and edited a video with a Flip camera and posted it on Youtube. My classmates suggested using Photo Booth for making short video presentations and I have done that, though the sound quality was not great. I am going to find an external microphone to improve my presentations. I was able to add the clip to iDVD. Another classmate suggested iMovie, and I found that on my Mac. iMovie is different from iDVD in that in iMovie you make a movie from images and music. You can add text to the images and use lots of transition effects. It is pretty cool. I am really interested in how to add text into movies. So far I haven’t figured out how to include documents in a movie, but I have learnt to use Grab to make an image file of a document and insert it in iMovie. The quality isn’t great, but it is okay. I also made a power point presentation in Keynote and recorded it as a movie and put it into iDVD. That worked just great. I tried it with Microsoft Powerpoint but the video format wasn’t compatible (I think it is in Quicktime), so I need to download a video converter. Both iDVD and iMovie are easy to use and I am comfortable with them now. I am thinking about how I will use iMovie in my Moodle course. Speaking of Moodle courses we finally got access to the Moodle server at ubc so we can start building. This is where the fun really starts. I am looking forward to this next section, though I know it is going to be challenging.
Talk to you soon.
Dilip
Jan
24
Well the doctor says my baby girl will be born on the 6th of February. My wife is having contractions, but other than that life proceeds normally for us. This week I have been learning how to use Camstasia video editing software. Camstasia is a very versatile and simple to use software that lets you record and edit video easily. You can upload a file or record yourself on a web cam. You can also record the screen so that you can make a tutorial for your students with your image on the side if you want. If you make a mistake you can easily cut and splice. You can edit the audio separately from the video. It’s easy to add titles, transition effects and subtitles. What I like best is that you can make Flash quizzes to test if your students understand the video. You can stop the video at any point, then the questions appear. If the students get the questions right, the video continues, if not you can send them back to any part you want so that they watch it again. Camstasia allows you to save the video in many formats, but if you include Flash quizzes it seems to save it as a group of files. I don’t know if I will be able to upload this on to the Moodle platform when I get in. Another doubt I have is about copyright. I was editing a video I downloaded from Youtube, but I guess I am going to have to record my own videos if I want to use them in this course.
Jan
19
Hello there!
I have spent the evening trying to figure out how the course toolkit works. I didn’t have much luck with Moodle or WebCt/Vista, but I have written to Franc to see what I am doing wrong. So given that failure and my desire to do something productive in the little time I have available, I looked into creating DVD. As per the instructions, I found iDVD on my Mac. Well that was a surprise! It is so simple to produce a DVD with a menu, slide shows, movies and music. There is an option that gives more flexibility, but the Magic DVD option lets you package your multimedia in a question of seconds. I was given a little Flip video camera from some visiting American colleagues, and it is so easy to create and edit video with that. As the instructions of the exercise state, it is necessary to have a lesson plan and the media before you start the process. This was just a trial run. Tonight I will sleep on it and hopefully tomorrow I will have an idea of what to put on a DVD for my English class. I will let you know how it goes!
Jan
15
Finally made it to the weekend. It looked like it would never arrive. I scowered our little department library and came across two potential gems:
Dudeney, G. & Hockly, N. (2007). How to Teach English with Technology. Harlow: Pearson Education
(http://www.amazon.co.uk/Teach-English-Technology-Gavin-Dudeney/dp/1405853085)
and
Sharma, P. & Barrett, B. (2007). Blended Learning: Using Technology in and beyond the language classroom. Oxford: Macmillan
(http://www.amazon.co.uk/Blended-Learning-Sharma-Barney-Barrett/dp/0230020836)
Saturday is my wife’s babyshower so I won’t have much time, but I plan to scrutinize these books for tips most of Sunday with a pot of coffee and a blanket (It is really cold here at the moment).
I’ll let you know on Monday whether they are any good.
Have a nice weekend.
Jan
13
I have wanted to design a virtual component for the EFL classes we give to all the students in the university that makes use of multimedia to expose students to authentic input, and constructive principles to make learning collaborative.
All undergraduate students need to take the TOEFL test and obtain 500 points to graduate. Our classes are large and mixed level, our teachers tend to be very traditional, and our students are often not motivated. Consequently, we are not reaching the goals we have set ourselves. Building the online component is a large project, but I believe that it will make a real impact on the quality of education and the outcomes for our students. I never have time to sit down and create the course, but now that I am in ETEC 565, I am really motivated to finally get started.
Tags
accreditation assessment asynchronous audacity audio authentic performance baby shower books camstasia chat communication contractions cooperation editing EFL formative frustrations Hotpotatoes icebreaker iDVD images iMovie iPhoto lesson mission Moodle music photo booth photos Picasa podcasts quiz sleepless nights slide show summative sunday synchronous technology video welcome Wiki