Ideas and thoughts from an EdTech

I've long sinced moved to my new site...in case you're snooping around here...Shops closed.

Depending on how you come to my site, you may have to change your bookmarks. I've moved my site to my own domain, ideasandthoughts.org. Please update your bookmarks. If you subscribe to my feed, you likely aren't here anyway. If you are, let me know and I'll see what I need to fix. Hope to see you over at my new site.

Martha asked me about recording her voice for her blog. So now she's a podcaster! I showed her Audacity and a few basic controls and she recorded her first podcast. We placed some music as a background track, uploaded the file to ourmedia, installed a little player and voila! I submitted her podcast to itunes so soon it will be subscribeable.

The content likely won't shake your world too much but it's her space and she's quite pleased.

If you have 4 minutes to listen to her recording, do so and perhaps even leave a comment.

I've been trying to figure out how to create either easy enhanced podcasts on Windows or else simple v-logs. I know I haven't discovered anything new for many but this may be helpful to others.

Thanks to Miguel's love of open source and time spent with VLC, he showed how to rip audio from a video. I also realized from this demo you could easily transcode any video to the .mp4 format and thus make it part of your podcast subscription.

Here's the credits clipI stick on the end of my videos as a sample.

Another one of those, "I'm not sure how this will work but it's interesting".

Update1:
I'm having some trouble getting the video to download as an itune subscription. First issue was my feedburner feed was invalid. Discovered that copying and pasting from Word, creates major issues. Fixed that, now it's still not downloading the video. Posted a message to Feedburner Forum and will await their response.

Update2:
Thanks to the good folks at feedburner, they let me know the following was wrong with my video:

So, looks like your mime type is incorrect. The mime type for the video should be set as video/mpeg rather than text/plain. This is something that needs to be done from the server where the media file is hosted. You may need to contact your hosting company for help depending on how familiar you are with changing mime types. It isn't a time consuming process though once you know where to look. It's basically one click!

As soon as you get the mime type changed you will need to go into your FeedBurner account and head over to the troubleshootize tab. You'll need to scroll down until you see the "resync" link. Click the resync link and you'll be good to go.

I wouldn't have a clue how to change the mime so I'll upload it to archive.org. Hopefully it will work now.

Drive home reflections of my first time introducing weblogs to high school students. Lots of questions and frustrations.



4.9 MB
11:31 minutes

Show notes:
learner blogs
Student blogging policy
Secret Life of Bees
Bike lock blog
Gary Stager
Miguel Gughlin post on Flickr

I heard John Kuglin last year at FETC and allow Google Earth wasn't available then, he was demonstrating some other satellite technology and sparked my interest and love of geography. This year, John spent his session demonstrating Google Earth. While there wasn't much there I didn't already know, I was enjoying the "oohs and aaaws" of the several hundred attendees many of whom had never seen or heard of Google Earth.



I liked the title of his session: Smart Stories Smart Locations. The word "stories" and "conversations" may well have been the most used words at the conference which is fine by me. John not only showcased the amazing power and features of Google Earth but laid out an invitation to use it to tell stories. It might not seem like a natural fit but it really does have that potential. John continually pointed out the ability to discover tools and features not listed in any manual and that much of the potential of Google Earth is yet to be discovered but will be discovered by those willing to hack.

Today I discovered a video podcast by the School of Geography in Southampton University. They have already produced 9 episodes which are great little tutorials on using Google Earth. You can subscribe to it through itunes.

Technorati Tag: FETC2006