DV for Teachers

Lame. A really lame pair of articles, one claiming MM2 bests iMovie and vice versa, each with a few paragraphs per page stretched over five pages loaded with over-animated ad crap. Read them if you must, but they’re worth the bandwidth only to show your students several things: how not to design a web page, how not to write a comparative essay, how not to cite evidence in support of your argument. Just disappointing.——-

Valuable Ed-Tech discussion thread with good links for Royalty free video clips suitable for classroom use.——-

Macworld finds lots to like in the new Roxio Toast:

“While the new release looks similar to its predecessor, it features extensive changes under the hood, including support for the DivX video compression format, the ability to browse iLife content and many other changes.”

Another good list of Windows freeware.

“We have now reached a point where the average Joe never has to buy a single extra piece of software outside of his operating system (and not even that if you don’t want to). Office applications, image editors, desktop search, antivirus – these are all available as completely free downloads that are often better than their commercial counterparts. Here’s a quick list of the best.”

“With a single click PAGEot allows you to add QuickTime movies (interactive videos, sounds, panoramas and objects…) to your HTML pages. It gives to advanced users an immediate access to the complex features of QuickTime plug-ins, and gives you the power to create interactive playlists and presentations. With PAGEot, you can export fully functional HTML pages, or directly copy-paste HTML code in your preferred web page editor.”

Nice tool for quickly checking the look of all your fonts. Very useful.——-

A free browser for Mac that builds extra features on Apple’s Safari browser.

“Shiira is a web browser based on Web Kit and written in Cocoa. The goal of the Shiira Project is to create a browser that is better and more useful than Safari. All source code used in this software is publicly available.”

I just found this, via the online version of Macworld’s September Bonus CD. Looks good – some use PowerPoint or other tools as a prompter, but this has a better price….

Apple’s new portal for their Pro video apps.

The democratization of high-definition production capabilities is significant to everyone involved in the business of the moving image—from filmmakers to camera manufacturers, from LCD and plasma display makers to Hollywood studios.

Those coming to HD for the first time may not know the right questions to ask. If you’re a pro, you likely have resources to help your meet your goals, but you also need to understand the implications of new technologies. This site provides answers for newcomers and pros alike.”

“Now that I’ve switched to a PowerBook at work, I’m trying to figure out what the Mac OS X equivalents are of various things that I was accustomed to in Windows. I wrote down a few things that I’ve found helpful, which hopefully will be helpful to other switchers.”