DV for Teachers

calibre plus Sigil equals formatting for epub, which works in iBooks for iPad and iPhone, and maybe for books for your students and your school!

Via Macintouch.

I gave a talk three weeks ago (omg time has flown) to the Atlanta chapter of MCA-I about social networking, and use of the web for building and maintaining connections with colleagues, peers, and clients. Below the jump are many many links to the sites we visited during the lively discussion.

Before I get to the mechanics of everything in this post, I want to say a bit about why to do all this, and it’s much more than “branding” yourself. I had not long before found a post on 3 Quarks Daily, a group blog on current affairs, about thinking and working in this new economy and this new century. It was a link to an interview and podcast with Seth Godin, an unconventional marketing consultant and author. In this service economy, most of us have to provide something unique—there are videographers and editors all over. To be successful, Godin asserts that we have do our work as an artist would, to add ourselves in essential ways to what we do. After listening to this podcast a few times, and starting to read his blog, I’ve tried to consciously bring more of that attitude to what I do, and I encourage you to do that as well, and tell the story of it through social media. Now, to the links:

We procrastinate when we’ve forgotten who we are.

Helping a student burn a DVD on a laptop that for some reason wouldn’t accept the blank DVD. I hooked the MacBook up to an iMac in the lab with a firewire cable, booted the laptop while holding down the T key, and voila! The MacBook’s drive mounted on the iMac’s desktop, and I could access the DVD project and start burning. The latest MacBooks don’t have firewire any more :( but the Pro series and desktops do. Useful.

This is hugely exciting—video professionals using digital SLR cameras to shoot very high quality hi-def video on a surprisingly affordable budget. Not cheap, but still startling quality for the price. Please read this article and consider the possibilities. Make sure to watch the first linked video, and remember that was recorded with available light. Very very impressive.

HDSLRs for Video: Beyond the Hype – Creative COW.

This morning I am acting as emcee for WolrdQuest, a social-studies quiz competition for high schoolers. Winner of the Atlanta competition hosted here at GSU wins tickets on AirTran to the national finals in April.

50 Best Blogs for Education Leaders | Online Universities.

An exhaustive list, nicely categorized, of blogs with valuable resources for policy makers, teachers, professors, grad students, educational technologists and anyone with a serious interest in where education is going.

Whether you want to be a teacher, principal or even an educational policy-maker, learning all you can about the field and how to be a more powerful leader while you’re still in college is essential. These blogs will fill you in on the latest news, provide inspiration, and ensure that you are up-to-date with the latest educational technologies so you can be the best education leader you can be.

RainyMood.com is a nice noise-generator for helping concentration. It helped me concentrate on this post!

I’m cheating twice here; bear with me. First cheat, I didn’t link to Part 1. It, and the point of this post, Part 2, have been floating in open tabs in my browser for too many weeks. It’s embarrassing, really. I should have posted these things a long time ago, but “I’ll do it later” is a constant refrain in my head and my life. (Ask my wife, or several of the people I work with.)

!

(On second thought, please don’t!)

The point, again, of this post: a series on Peachpit about Equipment for Video Podcasting, which covers an extensive amount of information, with pics and links, provides a very good one-stop reference about video podcasting (well, two, really, unless you think of the series as a single thing with separate parts).

And my second cheat? Those links point to the print-ready versions of the articles, because the originals are split into seven or eight shorter chunks requiring reloading the pages and that’s kind of cheating. At least I think it isn’t, so I’m counter-cheating.

Enjoy the articles.

I don’t think I’m an idiot, and I don’t think you’re one either. If you put anything from your school up on the web, though, you likely need to meet accessibility requirements, and here’s An Idiot’s Guide To Accessible Website Design from Web Design Ledger.