The Educated Kiwi
Posts tagged video
Four Chord Song
Jun 10th
A little light relief. Australian comedy group ‘Axis Of Awesome’ perform a sketch from the 2009 Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Footage courtesy of Network Ten Australia.
See http://www.axisofawesome.net/ for more details of the comedy trio including Jordan Raskopoulos, Lee Naimo, & Benny Davis.
Bad Gramma, the video.
Jul 27th
Despite Evan distracting me with good humoured music, after a revisit of jamesatwar we watched Bad Grammar. At the end of the video it thanked HotForWords which made me curious So with a click I found the site of Marina Olvova. Not that it needs much explaination but as wikipedia states the theme of Orlova’s YouTube videos, which begin with the tagline “Intelligence is Sexy”, and of her website is tracing the origins of English words. This video from AP gives some insight or the site is here.
Newsmaker.app Great Fun
Apr 1st
Since Learning@School we have been waiting for the release of Newsmaker for Mac and PC. Now we have our full site license we can move on from our enhanced garageband podcast to full video.
In using the app I have found it to be very simple with a small installed size (27mb) and a very quick learning curve. Overall I can see students being able to write and draft their work in this and then publish in a number of periods. The results of which will be both fun and a positive experience of using video and IT for our staff who can often be put off by the time required to produce anything with video.
At $500 NZD for a site license I felt it was a reasonable deal.Boinx TVwhich I had looked at is $199 USD for a single License and was possibly a bit to complicated for most staff (although I have brought the machiest bundle in the hope it will be unlocked for our official school newscast but hey thats just the tech snob in me as my year 12 and 13 class would say.
Flip4Mac Drive-in
Oct 15th
Software for copying your dvd’s to your Harddrive $39 US. I am not sure whether I have a big enough Hard Drive for all my dvd’s but it is interesting that here is a company that is allowing you to copy dvd’s legally.
NZ election debate questions
Oct 7th
Following on from all the US political excitement, here in NZ we can ask questions of our politicians through youtube it would seem. Now I just have to think up what to say about education. Hmm limited to 30 seconds.
BoinxTV
Oct 5th
BoinxTV – Seed 4 – Click here for more blooper videos
I got my prerelease copy of Boinx Tv which seems like a great tool. I look forward to using it at ulearn I just have to convince Kelvin to go on camera again after our last video attempt.
Flip Video in Schools
Aug 29th
For the past year we have been interested in the flip video, This Video from David Pogue illustrates it pretty well.
Now finally we have been able to get our hands on some in New Zealand from edsoft. At less than $300 dollars the Flip finally brings the possibilities of video to the average teacher. No more waiting for it to download to the harddrive, fiddling around renaming MOD files to mpg. You simply plug it in and the software is on the flip. The software then allows you to make simple movies for web distribution from a number of templates. The result looks great and as one teacher said “It takes six minutes to make something look good and post it”. Now we can argue that they could do this before but in reality until it is made this easy it is really not an option for most teachers given time constraints on a class period.
So do you rush out and get a flip? The video is good and low light performance is excellent. It is idiot proof in its usage but I do feel it is a time limited device, fairly soon our cellphones (N95‘s already do) will have this sort of video quality and you will not have to carry around another device. So for now in a classroom or for that matter around the home these are fantastic.
I am looking at the Aiptek which kmart are importing at $199 at the moment and will post if I get my hands on one of these.
In the hours since writing this I have found yet another reason the Flip is so good. I went to get my $2000 camera out to get some footage of my daughter and again the battery was flat. With the Flip using two AA batteries this is never a problem as I can always cannibalise the TV remote.
As another point the Flip should be a required purchase for all school english and drama departments, or for that matter anyone who has to shoot video for moderation. It turns this chore into a breeze, forget clumsy dvd/hdd/mini dv cameras get yourself a Flip (it even has a tripod mount).
Adobe Visual Communicator3
Jul 2nd
Was fortunate enough to get some of the gossip from Andrew today about NECC and one thing he mentioned briefly was Adobe Visual Communicator. I have now spent the past hour going through RobZ’s resources on the Adobe website about how his students complete a daily tv show at their school. 
Again it’s another thing that I would love to try with a class. Now which unsuspecting teacher will I show this too?
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