SEDC EMED Happenings

Enhancing Fourth Grade Math Education Through Distance Learning Technology

What's in a Transition?

Believe it or not, the transitions that you use to switch from one video clip or image to another in your podcast can help get your message across to your audience almost as much as the content itself. Don't believe me? Check out this video from SchoolTube that describes how to use (and potentially misuse) video transitions:

Hopefully this will help you all just a bit with your next round of math podcasts!

Credits in my podcast?

Do I have to credit googled images on my podcast?  Those are my images, everything else I made (charts). Will you look at it and tell me! I DON"T KNOW

 Yep, you do. Google isn't the place where these images "live", they are just pointing you to someone else's site where that image came from. That someone might not want their images reused for other purposes. You have to take a minute each time you grab an image for your podcasts to determine if they will allow you to use this for your purposes or not. Even though you got them through Google, you still need to credit the original source.

I know that you are not used to dealing with copyright - most teachers don't even consider it. The stuff that you do in your classroom does not have a lot of copyright implications. The eventual place where these podcasts will live is online, distributed globally, and we don't want any liability or lawsuits because we used an image without credit or permission. If you were just making a podcast for ONLY your class, this would not be an issue.

Same goes for any music that you use. I would even 'credit' or mention ANYTHING that goes into your podcasts - even if you were the one that produced it. "Photos by Mary Singleton" or whatever. 

It may be a bit of a pain to go back and find the source of those images that you have used. I'm sorry about that. Going forward, please just take a quick minute to grab the site URL or address when you grab any additional photos, charts or music for your next podcasts. 

Thanks for the question, hope the explanation helps.

Using Keynote Presentations in iMovie For Your Podcasts

The following question came into my Inbox this morning: "I am doing my EMED podcast in Keynote and then I want to import it into iMovie.  I can't figure out how to do that and still get the animation that I created in keynote. Do you know how to do it?  Thanks for your help!"

This is a great question. The solution is not as obvious as it could be, since the 'secret sauce' to turning Keynote presentations into a movie or video file is hidden under a somewhat-cryptic menu item called 'Export...' Below, I will show you how to take all of that Keynote goodness and prepare it for use in iMovie.

(download)

Whoda Thunk???

While looking for a diagram to hook up a VHS/Camcorder/Computer to convert old VHS clips for iMovie, I ran across this document:

It's a great step-by-step for working with iMovie '09. What I found that was even more interesting, was that there are 'Advanced Tools' that can be enabled via the iMovie Preferences. These tools include inserting cutaways, doing Picutre-in-Picture video, and adding green screen video effects. Check out pages 9-12 on how to do the green screen thing.

Might be a good option to give to your teachers if they are ready to take the creativity of their podcasts up a notch. 

Enjoy, and good luck with getting back into the swing of things. 

Problems with .mov files on the EMED blog.

It seems that a few of you are having problems getting your podcasts exported as the iPod type from Camtasia to show the video on the blog. I'm wondering if we need to try to force it to export an .M4V file. Here's the instructions on how to do that:

Try to export the podcast in this format, and upload it to your EMED blog page one more time. Please let me know if this works or not. We need to get to the bottom of this problem.

Mathematics in Movies

Media_httpwwwmathharv_gudtc
via math.harvard.edu

Thanks to Dan Armstrong at Salt Lake Arts Academy for showing me this site. A great 'end of the year' resource for you math teachers out there to keep kids engaged and hopefully keep teaching them a little math at the same time.

Be warned... these are unedited clips from the actual movies, so there may be a swear or two. PLEASE preview the clips and standby with the MUTE button if you decide to show these to your younger classes!

Counting and Math Rhymes

I was perusing some great audio 'books' from the Lit2Go Project from the University of South Florida, when a title jumped out at me for you folks. The link below will open a browser window, then quickly launch iTunes on your computer and take you to a collection of 45 audio tracks of different rhymes for math and counting. I'm sure that you'll recognize many of them, but hopefully there is something new to you and MAYBE something that will help with your podcasts:

"As I Was Going To St. Ives," "Baa, Baa Black Sheep" and "The Ants Go Marching" are just a couple of the titles available for free, and they'll all go on to your iPod Touches! Enjoy!

Using Keynote's Export to QuickTime Feature

One of our EMED'ers have been trying to use the great features of Keynote to produce their podcast, but she has run into a problem - when you export longer Keynote presentations in QuickTime, there are some big irregularities in the timing and voice recording. The exports that I have done have all been on shorter keynotes - just a couple of slides - and they have exported flawlessly. Apparently, this is an issue with the QuickTime Export in Keynote that Apple does not yet have a great solution. 

The thing that has been suggested is to use a screen capture program like ScreenFlow (http://www.telestream.net/screen-flow/overview.htm) to capture the presentation along with the audio as it plays through. I was going to try this for you, and for the first part of the presentation (before the 1-4 strategies), it seemed to work quite well. After that, the recorded timings and narrations within the Keynote presentation did not match up while just playing the presentation for me. You might want to check the timings to make sure it is doing what you want in the Keynote presentation. But that won't solve all of the issues...

So, here's what I would try next if I were you... I'd split up the presentation into two different parts - one with the skating examples and the second with the strategies that you have, and try to export them separately. When exporting in Keynote, there is actually another option for iPod at the far right after you choose "Export" from the file menu. The research that I have done has said that there are a lot fewer synchronization problems going this route. It will create a podcast-able file for you right in iTunes. Split the big presentation into two, and export each for iPod. You could then merge them back together in iMovie for the finished product.

If that still does not do what it is supposed to, I'd then take out your narration and timing in Keynote, and try to export just the visual part of the presentation. Take that into iMovie, and do the voice narration there.

If the export of just the visuals is not timed how you want it, download and try ScreenFlow (there is a free 12 day trial) and just manually advance the slide show with the timing that you want while it is recording your screen. Take the video that it creates into iMovie, and do your narration there.

It is unfortunate that the export feature does not do a great job right from your presentation. It is a hardware issue - if you had the biggest and baddest desktop Mac, there would probably be no problem. Our laptops have a hard time both showing the slides, playing back the audio, rendering the transitions and cool effects, and recording all of that simultaneously. There is quite a bit of processing that has to happen, and it's hard for our machines, as nice and modern as they are, to keep up with it all.