DV for Teachers

Another overwhelming list from Mashable: 50+ Tools For The WordPress Admin. If you have a blog running on WordPress, review this list and see what your blog can do for you.

Thanks to the venerable and venerated online Maczine TidBITS for pointing to My First Mac – Help Buying and Getting Started with Your New Mac. At first look it has a lots of information specifically for the new and Windows-familiar user. I plan to check it out regularly.

Thanks to Ellen, I found Mashable’s post listing 400+ Tools for Photographers, Videobloggers, Podcasters & Musicians under the post title Online Media God. I linked to their 150 Online Video tool Sites a couple of weeks ago, and that 150 is part of the 400+. Go ahead, take all day.

I’m back from vacation. Will got his well-deserved black belt in Taido (pictures here) and we spend most of a week in Destin. And now, we return to our irregularly scheduled blogging with these 18 Exceptionally Useful Photoshop Shortcuts. I learned many of them at Photoshopworld in April and I’m glad to have this nice reference from Digital Photography School as a reminder.

Peter Krug, a new member of our Mac SIG here, told me at today’s meeting about this page explaining how to do a video chat between iChat and a PC. Apparently iChat will communicate with AOL Instant Messenger (pay strict attention to the version number, it says) on the PC. The open source client Trillian is an option as well, though with a hit on video quality and a $25 shareware fee….

Untested by me, for now. YMMV.

The del.icio.us list at Popurls pointed to this nice list of Favorite 10 Free Stock Photo Download Sites at a blog named DazzlinDonna. Donna’s got some good links there, but this is a great one. Stock photos are good for presentations, videos, and more. Use them to emphasize a point, as a background for your slides (increase the brightness and decrease the contrast, and them move the image behind the text boxes on your presentation slides), embellish your web site, and more. And remember that free is good.

AAFT means the Advanced Academy for Future Teachers – it’s a program here at the College of Education at Georgia State that recruits high school students to the profession of teaching. It’s been successful, and we want the program to continue.

Yow. A huge resource listing of video websites: sharing, editing, mashing, converting:

Video Toolbox: 150+ Online Video Tools and Resources

Online video is a huge trend – so huge that’s it’s proving hard to keep track. From video sharing sites to video mixers, mashups and converters, we’ve brought together more than 150 of our favorite sites in this category. Enjoy.

This feels difficult. I went to two different conferences in the last three weeks, and came away with more specific information for following up than ever. I heard about wonderful ideas, teaching practices, classroom strategies, new uses of technologies… new to me, anyway, but that’s why we go to these conferences.

So what’s difficult? Part of the difficulty is knowing I’ve been at this job for 10 years now, as of the 7th of July. It’s been a great ten years – I really like what we’ve created here in the ITC. I’ve seen what could be, though – some wonderful innovations that we could emulate at Emory’s Cox Hall, the FCIT at University of South Florida, and the University of Texas at Austin. Now I’m ready to try some of these new things, to plan and share these ideas and this energy, but the students and faculty are either involved in the end of summer semester or on vacation, and as I said, I’ve got other commitments to keep.

So, back to the work I left behind to go to the conferences… valuable work I mostly enjoy for people I like and respect for a purpose I support, but it’s not the exciting stuff I saw at these conferences! While I’m tempted by the new new things, I’ll dig in, and work to keep the energy from these fresh ideas while I do the not so new things. As Dave Winer always says, still diggin’.

Switch is a free audio format converter for Mac or Windows. Working on podcasts? Can’t get your Windows Media Audio files to work? Change to MP3 or other formats with this tool. Here’s a complete list of formats for importing or exporting. It even converts batches – so have your students submit their files to you and convert them all at once to the format you need for distribution.