DV for Teachers

A very handy hint from Ken Stone , to make copy or so-called ‘image’ of your completed DVD for thorough testing before burning to DVD media.

In DVD Studio Pro and iDVD we can preview or simulate our DVD… as there is the opportunity to catch errors early on, but just because the DVD seems to work properly in simulation, you can still burn coasters. This is where the disc image comes in, as a disc image is the finished product, and can be tested in the Apple DVD Player. This is a real world test of your finished DVD and is much more accurate way to test.

This deal from dealmac.com expires next month, but it amazes me: 4GB of storage in a tiny little card for only $60. I’m not plugging this particular device – just pointing at an indicator of where things are going, and thinking about what it might mean. High-capacity storage will only get smaller with more capacity, and the amount of data we can and will carry will increase accordingly, and social expectations with it. iPods now hold up to 60 GB – that’s hours of video and audio and thousands of images and pages of text. When (I believe it’s not an “if”) students will carry their entire data archive – their assigned text, video, and audio files for a class or semester, plus their homework – on a card like this, or an iPod or similar device, they’ll have to have it backed up somewhere, on the network at school or home or both. They’ll need to know how to do that, as will their teachers – and how will their teachers handle their own data? How will they model proper use of this, from a teaching and a security/privacy standpoint?

This is all great – the teachable moments are there to seize. One of my concerns, though, is what about emergencies? Blackouts, hurricanes, earthquakes, attacks – what if they can’t get some needed data because there’s no power? We all need to keep the most important information in “analog” form for circumstances like these.

There’s much more to be said about issues like this, of course. Just thinking out loud here.

Bowling Green’s online newspaper posts about iPods on campus across the US:

Stroll onto any college campus and you’ll see iPods galore. But while many of the students are no doubt cranking Arctic Monkeys, just as many are listening to podcasts of lectures or specially designed video “vodcasts” of supplemental classroom material.

They’re coming, folks. Students who expect this sort of supplement to their classroom instruction, and who face a world in which much of their work and social interaction will take place on the screen of a phone, computer, or iPod-like device. We have to get with the program here.

Cliff Atkinson, in an article in the LA Times, preaches the real news about using, not abusing, PowerPoint:

Research has shown, for example, that an audience learns better when it is not being exposed to duplicated information. Atkinson pet peeve No. 1: that whole reading from a slide thing — bad idea.

He helped prepare a 253-slide presentation for the plaintiff’s opening argument – 2 1/2 hours long – in a winning effort in the $253 million Texas Vioxx trial. What’s his secret? He uses PowerPoint to tell stories. It doesn’t have to stun your audience into grieving silence – it can actually enthrall them, if you know what you’re doing.

I meant to include this link in the previous post about the standalone QT installer, but after a moment’s thought this needs its own post. If you use Windows already, or if you’re a Mac user who might soon get an Intel Mac to run Windows, you’ll have to be up on the minimum of security arrangements demanded by the vulnerabilities of the world’s most popular operating system.

Windows Tips and Tricks for Mac Users

It has been possible to run Windows in virtual machines on Macs for many years. However, with the recent switch to Intel chips and the beta releases of Apple’s Boot Camp and Parallels Workstation for Mac OS X, interest among Mac users in running Windows has expanded significantly. This article is intended to help new – and perhaps even long-time – users of Windows with a few tips I’ve learned over the years of suffering at the help desk of a Windows-using corporation.

I didn’t realize that the standard QuickTime for Windows now included iTunes – I need to look at the Windows side of things much more often. Via the Mac newsletter TidBits, here’s a link to the QuickTime-only standalone installers for Mac and Windows.

If you’re on the Mac and want to play Windows Media in your QuickTime player, download the plug-in here.

I don’t cover the browser wars much, but the soon-to-be released Internet Explorer 7 from Microsoft (in beta now) will pose challenges for the media-savvy teacher who wants her site to be readable by most people. Kevin Schmitt has posted the second of two articles about putting so-called ‘conditionals’ in your HTML so things work correctly in different browsers. (Here’s the first.) Though most basic web pages and blogs should work fine without conditionals, I suggest bookmarking these tutorials for the time when something isn’t working correctly on your pages and you need to figure it out. If nothing else, these provide good lessons on cascading style sheets.

This way, you’re keeping the body of your HTML document relatively clean and free of extraneous code while keeping your CSS organized in multiple external documents. It’s still not optimal, but it will have to do. And for all the IE-bashing, there are some nuggets of great news. For one, you’ll likely find that IE 7 will, in many day-to-day rendering chores, come really close to displaying pages the same way that standards-compliant browsers do, and to that, I say it’s about time. You’ll still need to tweak pages for display in IE 5, 5.5, or 6, but with IE conditionals, you can move that code out of the realm of non-validating hacks and into cleaner, more standards-compliant code.

I posted last month about Kevin Schmitt’s piece on IE 7-compliant video-embedding HTML last month.

The version of the Microsoft Front Page web page editor that we have in our PC labs – V. 2002 SP3 – is very confusing and difficult to use. I do not recommend it. That is all.

From the Photoshop workshop I took at FETC:

Diana Holden is our instructor, and she opened the workshop with links to her lengthy list of Photoshop-related links at Designing Spirit.

Technical writing for a step-by-step tutorial is tedious. Miss a step and it can really confuse someone trying to follow along. It’s unfortunate, but Diana’s instructions for the first lesson alone left out three steps. We were able to catch up, however, and the best thing I learned was the Clone Stamp Tool, which makes it easy to copy one area of an image to another, but also lets you just whip out collages.

CameraBright! Review

the CameraBright! is a small auxiliary light that attaches to the tripod mount on the bottom of just about any camera or camcorder (digital or not).

Inexpensive, and might be useful for picking up highlights on people’s faces when doing a school news show, interviews, and so on. A nice little on-camera LED light is a great idea.