Month: January 2007

My Video Podcast Trek

Dale

I’ve been tinkering with video podcasts the past few weeks. My goal is to use the podcast so students can review:

  • notes from the past week
  • the practice problems at their own pace
  • demonstrations and lab activities performed in class

I started off by writing out my notes with GE’s Imagination Cubed and then did a screen capture with Windows Media Encoder. It works but the video of the Imagination Cubed came out choppy and the Windows Media Encoder does not give you many options when outputting the video.I really wanted the video to be available as a Flash video— similar to what YouTube does. The best video converter I found for this job was the free version of Riva FLV Encoder. It was easy to use, provided many options and converted the files quickly. If you have several videos to convert, you make want to download the trial of Riva Producer. It does batch converting and allows you to edit your videos in a timeline.

To play the videos, I chose the Flash Video Player. This free player is easy to configure if you read the directions. I had one snag with the slider but I solved this by using the proper metatags in my flv files. To fix the metatags I used FLV MetaData Injector. Again, this was explained in the installation directions. To host Flash video at your site, you’ll also need to update your webserver’s MIME types to include the flv extension.

The best piece of software I encountered on this trek was Camtasia. It is not a free program but they do offer a fully functional trial version for 30 days. Camtasia is primarily a screen capture program (used to produce screencasts) but I found it does so much more.

Here are just a few highlights:

  • edit and trim your video
  • add zooms, pans and transitions
  • add a second audio track
  • insert captions and overlays
  • export to a wide variety of formats

Camtasia was easy to use and provided timeline style editing. After I finished editing the video, I was able to produce a Flash version and an iPod friendly version in just one step.

There is something weird about seeing your lesson on an iPod. What’s even weirder is seeing students use it!

The last step to any podcasting adventure is the most crucial—create the rss feed. Your media can not be called a podcast without it. The rss feed is a text file that contains specific information about your show and describes each episode. You update the feed each time you create a new episode. I used several templates as an example to make my feed. (examples: 1, 2, 3) If you want to be iTunes friendly, you’ll need to follow some of their special formatting rules. You’ll also want submit your feed to Apple so users can search for your podcast right inside iTunes.

Here is my final product. I welcome feedback, questions and comments.

No Time to Search—Try ChaCha

Dale

chacha Today, a student asked me if Florida had a sales tax. So I thought I’d put ChaCha to work. ChaCha is a new search engine that uses social searching.

As well as traditional algorithmic search, ChaCha offers the ability to have an on-site IM [chat] conversation with a “guide”, who will then go out and find the information for you. They’re launching with over 2500 guides, including college students and stay-at-home moms. What’s more, these users need to climb a hierarchy before they can get paid.

I typed my question into ChaCha’s and a guide began searching. When I came back they had the answer.

Give it a try . Enter a question and choose “Search with Guide.”

Change your Homepage

Dale

changehomepage Make any website your homepage. Change the homepage by:

  1. visiting the website that you want as your homepage
  2. drag the icon in front of the address over the house button on your toolbar
  3. click ‘Yes’ to approve the change

That’s it! Your done!

VLC Plays it All

Dale

vlc Sometimes I get video or sound clips that won’t play in Windows Media Player. To get around this, I use the VLC media player. The VLC media player “…is a free media player that supports a large number of multimedia formats…” without any special updates or other huddles.

You can download (not at my school) the player for just about any operating system (Windows, Mac, Linux, BeOS…); they even have a portable version of the player that can be downloaded and installed onto a removable USB flash drive.