Tuesday, February 22, 2005

Away for too long

I haven't been posting lately because I have started working and therefore juggling to get things done. I have not been participating actively in the discussions but I do manage to read all the digests and I have also done most of the readings. In fact last week I had to decide on my priorities and I thought that focusing on the Week 5 activities for the BAW group would be the best.
I am quite satisfied with my achievements up to now: I have managed to get several blogs going, I have created my webpage and have managed to use most of the programmes recommended for creating online exercises. I have also added zillions of links to my bookmarks which I hope to be able to read and analyse during the year. There's so much interesting information.
I hate not being able to attend some of the talks in Tapped In or LT but most of them clash with school now. Anyway, this of having the transcripts is great, even better than attending traditional seminars.
As for these week's comments I felt deeply moved by Hala's message. She clearly expressed what we all feel about these workshops coming to an end. Who in the webheads, weblogging or webpresence group could not feel a bit sad? On the other hand this experience has been so rewarding and I have no doubt we all feel so reassured by the moderators and the rest of our colleagues in the groups that I have no doubt we can all count on one another to continue working on projects, asking questions when we can't get things to work in cyberspace or just meeting for some F.U.N at Tapped In.
I would not like to finish this post without mentioning that whoever reads this - whether a webhead or a webhead in the make- can count on me for any project or any discussion or whatever help I can offer. I think this is what basically makes this community of practice so strong, the fact that we all want to share and help and learn together.

Sunday, February 13, 2005

Mac users again

I have just found this information in a videoblogging group. Not sure it would solve the problem but have decided to post it just in case:

Mac OS 10.3 users can also download this freeware to watch videoblogs:
http://AntNotTv.org.
This application lets you subscribe to your favorite video feeds and
downloads new video to your computer automatically. It comes with some
great default feeds.

Mac users

Mac users seem to be having trouble watching the video. I will try to find out if there are any instructions that I can post here for these cases. I suppose they would also be useful for the whole group.

Think I got it right this time

Click to watch the video.

Videoblogging in the end?

Well, I think I finally got to the last stage ... my video is in some server and if I am doing things properly I should be able to insert a link to the video here. I would prefer to have a screenshot or some picture that showed there was a video but that would probably be my next step. For the time being I want to see if the video can be accessed by clicking oh this link.

Videoblogging

If anybody is interested in videoblogging I suggest they try this tutorial .
A series of screenshots that lead you through the whole process of uploading the video to a free server and getting your blog to point at the corresponding URL. Thanks, Michael Verdi for creating this tutorial.

Saturday, February 12, 2005

More about digital storytelling

Well, Mark asks me to give more information about Photostory 3. I am doing both the Weblogging and the Becoming a Webhead course so maybe it was in the BAW one that I first heard about it. Teresa D'Almeida and her husband Joao and Dafne Gonzalez posted short videos to the BAW list which they had made with Photostory 3. The site explains that you can add soundtracks and voice narration to the photo story you create with your digital photos. The program can be downloaded for free and I have already created several video clips with music. They look great. The programme has automatic panning and zooming effects but you can also customize these. I am pleased with the results. I just need to upload them and haven't been successful yet.

Friday, February 11, 2005

Videoblogging

A couple of days ago I downloaded PhotoStory 3. I loved Tere's video on Piodao and I thought I could do something similar with some holiday photos- I am also thinking of getting my students to use these tools to create a short video of our school and add it to our Sixth grade blog.

It all ran smoothly at first. I managed to create the video, added music to it, showed it to my husband and he liked it as well. However, when I tried to upload it to Geocities I kept receiving an error message "the document contains no data". I tried several times, even created a new webpage with Tripod - same error. I was going to wait until the chat with Michael Coghlan later today and see if I could find out what was wrong.But this afternoon, while chatting to Bettina, she directed me to a link in her blog which contains to a nice tutorial on videoblogging by Michael Verdi. I have followed the steps suggested there of opening an account with Internet Archive , downloading ccPublisher tool, etc. This time I managed to upload the video. I just have to wait until tomorrow till the Internet archive curator aproves it and then it will be available to download and hopefully to edit my blog pointing to it. Thank you Bettina, thank you M. Verdi for taking the time to create such tutorials, thank you Bee for helping me get the audio right.

Thursday, February 10, 2005

Comments

This time ... one of the features I don't like about Blogger.I have received a comment from "Marco Polo" I get an email but I can't reply to Marco P because the address is a no-reply address. I come to my blog and I go to the comments area to see if I can send Marco Polo a comment from this part of my blog but I find Marco Polo's profile is not public ... doesn't seem fair ... So then, Marco Polo I can't answer your question I am afraid

Tuesday, February 08, 2005

Adding a slider ... sound again

If this works properly you should see a slider this time to play the recorded message...

Adding a sound file to the blog

Mmm not sure what I am doing will lead me to what I am aiming at. Quite frankly I am doing all this very intuitively ...

Listen to me ... a recording with Handybits

Sunday, February 06, 2005

Doing activities for week 4

The following post corresponds to Week 4 Task #3 . We have to use Flickr to post a photo to our blog. I have already posted photos using Hello, but it seems Flickr has some advantages. I especially liked the feature that allows one to chose the right size.

As for the photo I chose for this activity, it is one we took during our holidays in Bariloche, the first week in Jan. If this works properly you should be able to see a picture of a bird ...the lake is Nahuel Huapi in, Patagonia


bird in bariloche

Thursday, February 03, 2005

A sense of community

I didn't want to go to sleep without mentioning how I managed to post a picture in my profile thanks to Chrissan's help. Chrissan, I have already posted my message in YG but I want to mention it here as well, thanks for your prompt and detailed reply.

I am still on holiday, but one of the schools where I work opened the day before yesterday. This morning I decided to go and pay a visit to our director to tell her a bit about these courses I am doing (BAW, Weblogging and Webpresence). I was telling her today that what I still cannot understand is how we have all managed to create this sense of community - 200 people spread all over the world- when sometimes we don't manage to create the same kind of bonds between the 20 teachers that work in a school.

Apart from the tons I am learning from these groups in relation to pedagogy and technology what I will never forget is this feeling of belonging to a community that allows us to grow professionally because we are all willing to help one another as colleagues but, basically as human beings. There's always someone there to reply to our messages and I also have this feeling that I cannot move to another activity without posting a message on somebody's blog or replying to a query if I think I can help. I am sure this won't end in three weeks' time when we finish the workshops.

I have no words to express my praise and gratitude to the moderators of each of the groups that have managed to lead us way beyond what could be expressed in any syllabus.

Wednesday, February 02, 2005

Today's talks

I attended both talks today at Alado and Learning Times. They were both useful; however, I believe that the technical quality of Learning Times and the Elluminate software they use is much better than the platform offered by Alado - or maybe it is the settings of my computer or my kind of Internet connection that gets on well with Learning Times?

From the pedagogical point of view, both Buth and Mary gave excellent presentations that focused on the educational applications of RSS and creating a webpage. The moderators' work and both Andrew's and Jonathan's technical support were impeccable as usual. I am sure we all feel proud of having joined such a cooperative group of educators. If only we managed to get educators in our countries to work as professionally as these people!

Yesterday I created my first webpage at geocities. It looks nice and I really found it easy following the step-by-step instructions. Of course, like with everything else I have created I still have to see how to apply it to the classes I have this year. I also want to see what other sites have to offer ...like Tripod and Bravenet. Flickr also sounded like a choice worth exploring. I am quite lucky I still have a month before we start classes. I will be able to experiment quite a bit before I put all this into practice ...

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