Embedded here please find the keynote address, in its entirety. Please understand this is my first keynote address, so that might explain my nervousness!
I want to thank Jeff McCoy, Tim Van Heule, Tim Cushman, Cathy Arnold, Kevin Merritt, Donna Goldsmith, and everyone who attended for your support.
A special thanks to MaryAnn Sansonetti and Cathy Nelson for their unwavering support in helping me so much over the years.
If you haven’t caught me announcing this on Twitter, consider this the official announcement!
A few weeks ago, a couple of my students were joking that there was YouTube, and we needed our own video sharing site! We discussed it a bit and SpanTube was born.
Now, before you jump all over me for creating a new site when there are ample good video sharing sites out there, i.e. YouTube/Vimeo/TeacherTube/SchoolTube, etc, I do not claim to replace them nor compete with them. This is different.
The goal of this site is to invite Spanish teachers, Spanish speakers, and anyone else with an interest in teaching Spanish to register and upload videos.
I do not have any ads on the site, and I am paying for this myself. This is (as of right now) not a profitable site, nor is that really the intent. I just wanted to have a space to put all my students’ work in one spot where folks could come.
So please, stop by, register, and comment on some of my student videos. They’d love to hear from you!
And if you know a Spanish teacher, maybe let them know? We welcome new videos.
I happened to notice that Dr. Mike Wesch was able to embed a livescribe pencast in his blog today. I wondered how he did it.
Now, there might be an easier way, but all I did was hunt for his code, and then copied it and pasted it. I then viewed the source of one of my pencasts and changed the relevant data. Let’s see if it works…
Update: Didn’t work, threw an error of being unable to connect to the Livescribe server. I’ll have to wait for Dr. Wesch to respond.
Update 2: I found code here to use, let’s see if it works. Sigh, nope.
Since I was a bit wrong about Papershow’s purpose, I wanted to clear that up. Here is a bit straight from the US distributor.
The purpose of Papershow is to allow presenters, teachers, marketers, etc. to give interactive presentations while also having the ability to annotate their presentations on the fly. While aspects of the Papershow pen are similar to the Pulse Smart Pen, Papershow as an entire product, which consists of three components, is very unique. The Papershow interactive paper, USB key and Bluetooth pen working together allow someone to give a presentation, conduct a brainstorm or teach a class all from a notepad, and that person can be 20 feet away from the computer. After annotating a presentation or conducting a whiteboard session, Papershow allows you to save all of the notes as a PDF, and then print or e-mail them to anyone you would like.
Papershow is a similar concept as the SMART Airliner wireless slate and eInstruction tablets, but it is much less expensive, it’s just $199 for the starter kit. Also, with Papershow, you are physically writing with ink on paper, rather than an electronic tablet, and this is then projected on the screen which creates more of a “magic” effect. Papershow is very portable too, and easy to carry around, as it’s just the pen, USB key and pad of paper or presentation binder.
You’ll note the comparison against SMART Airliners (which I don’t like much) and other tablets. This is because I mentioned that it seemed a likely market for Papershow.
I’ll test it out a bit this week with students to see how they like it compared to the Airliner.
A few days ago I got my new Flip Mino HD in the mail. I charged it overnight and then began to play. Last night, I shot a quick bit of footage in low light situations. First I recorded my Christmas tree and then my Christmas lights outside. I uploaded it to YouTube using the included FlipShare software.
@thekyleguy mentioned via Twitter that YouTube does not do well with HD footage, despite being newly HD and widescreen capable. He recommended blip.tv as a viable alternative.
I decided to compare them head to head, well, to head. I added Vimeo to the mix, as it is my sharing service of choice when publishing work for public display. My little less than one minute video was roughly 70 megs when copied right from the Flip.
Here are the three videos. Keep in mind I uploaded this without any changes at all. This is raw footage, compressed using the Flip’s internal H.264 compression and then the sites do with it what they please to display it. I also did not change the default embed code in any way, despite Vimeo’s delicious method to change the size, color, etc of embedded videos. I had to change all the embed code to the same size. Since YouTube’s embed code used the size I liked the best (560×345) I stuck with that all around. This post looked awful with three videos of all different sizes. In hindsight this should have been three posts.
The first thing to notice is that the blip.tv player borks my theme because of the width. It plays HD video in the native resolution of 1280×750. I could change that in the code relatively easily, but in keeping with a direct head to head to head comparison, to heck with my theme.
YouTube
Vimeo
So the Vimeo embed wasn’t HD. You have to go to the Vimeo site to watch it in HD. Odd.
A few weeks ago I read Tom Barrett’s Google Earth posts with interest. The idea of using voice inside Google Earth was intriguing, as it opened up new ways for my students in Spanish class to use the language.
So I tried Vocaroo. It didn’t work.
I emailed my principal and it was then forwarded to the district level for consideration. The district folks determined that when pressing Record, the request actually went to a different server. That server was blocked by our filters for being a known proxy hosting server. I accept the need to block that server, and wrote off Vocaroo.
However, I decided to email the Vocaroo folks and let them know. Originally they had me check to see if port 1935 was open in our district. It is. A few days later, I got an email from the Vocaroo folks saying..
Hi, just an update on this.
Vocaroo has now moved to a different server, so you should be able to
access it now (unless they deliberately block the vocaroo.com domain).
Wow! Vocaroo works like a charm now! Yay!
I asked whether this was directly related to my emails from earlier and they said:
Yes it was in response to your request – and thanks for reporting the
problem. The more people that can use it, the better
Wow again! I’m impressed. A very public thank you to Vocaroo for being willing to make this change so that my students and presumably many others can use the service.
For some reason, this is interesting to me. The entire conversation regarding my disagreement with Terry’s last two minute tips video took place entirely on Twitter, which he mentions.
Now’s he’s responding to me via Seesmic.
Honestly, I’d have preferred a blog post or something a bit more text-based to make it easier to process (he mentions this as well).
Here is the video for your consideration. What do you think?
Does a subject matter expert a good test creator make?
June 26, 2009
Tagged with: utc09 • utc2009 • utc2009craft
6 Comments »
content rss
