DV for Teachers

My host ran some upgrades on the servers, and my blogs now reload much more quickly. Very happy. That is all.

This MacUpdate Promotion offers Xtralean’s ImageWell for $10, half its regular price. It’s well worth it – it’s great for screen grabs and annotations, allows dragging and dropping of multiple images for quick composites, it has great text tools, and built-in FTP and (for me, the beauty feature) SFTP as well. You can even drag and drop any other kind of file on the “Send” button to quickly upload to one of your stored server locations. Supports PNG format with transparency… an incredible set of features, and I paid full price for it years ago. I have rarely recommended software more highly, and at $10 it’s a real bargain.

Download Squad reports that the open-source video processing app FFmpeg has updated with support for Google’s recently open-sourced VP8 codec and the WebM container. More than 100 video viewing and conversion apps use FFmpeg, so you may have it and not know it. One of the best-known is VLC, the plays-anything media player.

More about FFmpeg on Wikipedia.

I do not like Safari’s keyboard shortcuts to move among browser tabs.

⌘⇧{ or ⌘⇧} Command+Shift+Curly Bracket

^⇧⇥ Control+Shift+Tab

I much prefer the standard in the two other browsers I use most: Firefox and Camino:

⌘⌥⇠ or ⌘⌥⇢ Command+Option+Right or Left Arrow

That is all.

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:

Photo Friday’s Monitor Calibration Tool Makes Easy-on-the-Eyes Monitor Tweaks – calibrate – Lifehacker.

Bryan Williams’s Survival Guide to the IRB

I’m editing this to try a different embed/object set up.

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.

I’m working on resources for a Social Networking Workshop this weekend for Georgia State’s College of Education Alumni Club. I came across a great blog post that covers a lot of detail about LinkedIn, the focus of my talk. Kalinago English is Karenne Sylvester’s blog about teaching English around the world – she’s from the Caribbean and is now based in Stuttgart. Her post about LinkedIn for EFL teachers covers the ground so well for teachers, I’m going to base my talk on it with her permission. In addition, here’s her very good LinkedIn profile, too. Think of her profile and her blog as excellent examples of what social networking is for: an open and generous demonstration of expertise. It’s an invitation to you as well. If you invite the world, they might actually come—and then the sky’s the limit.

Thanks, Karenne!

Other great resources after the jump.

Alrighty, back at work at Georgia State, and a first working post. With so many people wigging out about Apple’s purported tablet computer, here’s a savvy weigh-in from yesterday’s Inside Higher Ed:

Before the integration of the iSlate and iTunesU it was never possible to bring all the course and learning materials to one device. Course readings and video delivered through the browser were often difficult to navigate, and the reading experience was relatively poor. But with the iSlate and iTunesU it will be possible to download all the course related materials, hosting them locally for easy viewing and reading. At the same time, the browser experience in the iSlate will keep what is good about a Web based learning system – the ability to interact and communicate. Combining both the reading/viewing experience not browser based, with the collaboration/communication experience browser based will converge these activities into one device.

via Blog U.: iSlate / iTunesU / Higher Ed – Technology and Learning – Inside Higher Ed.