DV for Teachers

Malaysian blogger Famous Chris posts his Top 40 Most Useful, Free Mac OS X Softwares on his blog, because you value your mind. Good title for a blog, and a good comprehensive list of apps. I use some of these, ImageWell, especially, which I used to make (and upload via secure FTP with one click) the little banner on this post. Please go take a look at these apps. If you don’t know what they do, it’ll be worth your time to study them a bit. In the process, you’ll learn a lot about your Mac and what kind of cool things it’s capable of.

I don’t recall where I saw this linked. Sorry.

I’m at the Collaborative Digital Education Summit and it’s a terrific followup to Tony Vincent’s NECC session, I Didn’t Know You Could Do That With An iPod. Tony points to another attendee’s excellent notes and links.

Dan Schmit gave a lengthy run-through of several multimedia tools to use in the classroom, with several quick demos. This wasn’t a hands-on session (those are coming) but a demonstration of the possible. I’d heard of many of the apps, but not the classroom applications of them. He’s got a wiki of the presentation and I’ve added two of my favorite and oft-blogged freeware apps, Imagewell and Ben Shanfelder’s Audio Recorder.

Barry Adams of Apple is showing the group the range of educational podcasts available in iTunes, and all the formats, and… that’s what we’re here for. I’m pleased to have learned that many folks here are K-12, and several aren’t already iPod mavens. Some minds will change here, some new practices will be propagated, and good things will result. I’m going back to paying full attention for now.

Update: I corrected the spelling of Dan’s last name and added these links to ImageWell and Audio Recorder.

Add timecode to a completed DVD project… with subtitles: Creating DVDs With Burnt-In Timecode… After The Fact. Cool idea, and the tutorial will help avoid differences between your Final Cut Pro timecode and the timecode on the MPEG-2 DVD file.

Whew, lots of posts today.

Georgia College and State University will host A Collaborative Digital Education Summit for K-12 and Higher Education Innovators, and I’m going. Two days of hands-on interactive sessions… with a warning:

WARNING: This will not be a listen and watch experience. All presentations and activities will be interactive. When participants leave, they will have specific ideas for their locations.

I can handle that. After seeing so many options at NECC, and knowing that GCSU has been a leader in using iPods in higher education for more than five years, I’m ready to learn from them. This will be good.

A good piece briefly discussing how universities and colleges use iPods for instruction”, including Duke, Elmira College in New York, and Middlebury in Vermont. From foreign language and ESL to history of radio and general instructional podcasting, this article is a good overview of an effective new teaching practice.

Eric Faulkner posted his curriculum and resources for video projects suitable for middle-schoolers. Nicely laid out with specific assignments, rubrics, a variety of jobs for each student to rotate through, and more. Recommended.

Edit: via Eric’s posting on the EdTech list.

I just discovered Rands In Repose, a fascinating blog about/by/for tech engineers/managers. Entertaining, yes, but full as well of valuable insights about people, management, software, working on a computer, and living with all of them. The author, Michael Lopp, just published a book, Managing Humans, which intrigues me as well. (That link goes to a slide show about the book and the author; I haven’t read it yet.)

The ideas I’ve found here connect with instructional technology and teaching in the attitude he takes toward managers and projects and on the ways the programmers/employees relate. Lopp digs under the many assumptions, acknowledged and implicit, that govern the relationships, and good teachers can learn from reading his examples and reflecting on them.

Via Daring Fireball.