DV for Teachers

Soundtrack Pro Essential Training – Note: this linked page includes an 18.2 MB video clip. Click with caution.

I get Larry Jordan’s Final Cut Pro newsletter every month, and it’s full of good information and training tips. Larry, and his readers, know their stuff. The linked page includes a (hard to save) video sample from Larry’s training tutorial disc published by Lynda.com.

In the following video-based tutorial you will learn:

PC Magazine’s Top 99 Undiscovered Web Sites

The following list is made up of sites that are still flying under the radar, but are useful, funny, or interesting enough to merit entrée into the Web’s public consciousness.

Their annual review. Some useful sites, maybe.

Concise Freeware – Best Freeware, Firefox Extensions, Online Services & Special Sites

They have an immense listing of freeware here.

My Little Business: 10 Unknown Windows Freeware Applications You Should Know About

A list of free Windows apps… when the opportunity arises, I hope to play with some of them.

OS X Applications for System and Network Administrators » Nirlog.com

I don’t do that much admin stuff, but these could be of value. To you too, you know.

Microsoft Word is a tricky beast. We constantly have students struggling with formatting, indention, tables, page numbers, and on and on. I’m presenting a workshop, especially for grad students writing theses and dissertations, to help with some of the issues that come up when trying to conform to APA Style. I am not an APA expert, nor am I a Word know-it-all, but I know something about the formatting tools they provide, and about changing and saving a Style in Word, and hey, I’m here to help.

It’s important to remember that though it seems to be a requirement, you don’t have to use Word. There are free applications that read and save to Word’s .doc format: OpenOffice and AbiWord to name just two. They don’t support all the features of Word, but they’ll all allow you to create document templates so you can write with the correct style.

See “more” below for more information and links I found helpful in preparing the workshop, and sometime next week, to download the handout. I’ll be adding to the links as I continue my research on this.

[Update] These links from Microsoft’s Office Assistance help site have the best straight information I’ve found on formatting margins, indents, and tabs in Word, so I moved them to the front page:

Microsoft Office Online

• Measure up with the horizontal ruler: Set margins, indents, and tabs
• Set tab stops and insert tabs that have leader characters
• Understanding paragraph, character, list, and table styles
• Create a Table of Contents
• Explore Tables of Contents in Word

  More links below. (more…)

This article from ConsumerElectronicsNet.com looks at the patterns emerging as people (especially young people) watch, listen to, and create more media. The focus is on industry impact as electronic storage capacities increase – the amount of room on hard drives and USB keys, cell phones and MP3 players and iPods – get bigger, while the cost of that storage gets lower and lower. The author looks at the impact on producers, whom he calls “Tellywood,” as they justifiably worry about eroding profits.

Students aren’t just wired, they’re going wireless, and they carry a lot of media with them. Not just music, but games, videos, and pictures. MP3s and iPod videos show that they’re less concerned with quality than with accessibility: why watch HD in their room when they can watch it on a laptop or iPod wherever and whenever they want? They want their media their way.

What does this mean, though, for educators? These are the students we’ll be teaching in the coming years. We have to understand how these students view the world, the lenses they looked through as they grew up. We have to be able to understand their tools and teach them how to use them wisely.

We’ve got a lot of work to do.