Some uploading trials for our podcasts and movies

Now, that students have finished their podcasts and are completing their digital stories, I have to experiment with the best ways of uploading their final product. Most podcasts have been converted to mp4 format but two of the wmv movies refused to convert into mp4, or if they did the sound was lost. So I have left them as wmv and still placed them on podomatic.

Students in year 8 who are working on sharing digital videos with Las Vegas students, are completing their work and it has been decided to upload them and host them at www.teachertube.com, paste the code (the edublogs code is the one to select for globalstudent and globalteacher) and paste the code into the text box  on the presentation section of the blog site. Goto presentation>widgets and ensure there is a text box in widgets. Paste the code into this text box.

Now that I am gaining confidence and Jess (technolote) has helped me, I am experimenting with presentation. So yesterday, it was decided add my delicious links and I will gradually add more as I go.

Download Video: Posted by murch at TeacherTube.com.

The Hawkesdale Hotel

 Hawkesdale township in Western Victoria, Australia, has a beautiful old bluestone building built in 1855. This enhanced podcast has been produced by a year 10 student where you can learn a little of its history. Two of our senior residents are also interviewed during this podcast.
Download Video: Posted by murch at TeacherTube.com.

Are We There Yet

Well, yes, we are nearly there. One of the boys in the grade 6 class said he had never worked so hard in one lesson before and then promptly had difficulty retrieving his file of hard labour which he thought he had saved. Not to be undone, he has spent another two lessons putting all the media back into Vegas Movie Studio. Please note that when students save, they must goto save as, each time and check the box that states “copy all media with file”, otherwise they have to go back on to the same computer. Even then, there are no guarantees that work will all be there. Anyway, he has been a patient lad!

Another two students finished their podcasts today and the the other four groups are nearly complete. My IT lesson tomorrow should see them in their finished stages. I sat down with Jess (Technolote) today and she helped me improve the presentation of our student blog at www.backyard.globalstudent.org.au. We added a clustr map widget into the RHS column and I inserted a panoramic shot of Apex Park in Hawkesdale as our header. The students are fascinated to see where the red dots or viewers are appearing from around Australia and in fact, the world.

iTunes has finally caught our podcast and a nice link to our podcasts takes people to the podomatic page. We have uploaded the mp3 and the mp4 files for the different audiences but I may yet delete the mp3 files. This morning I also tried to upload to podcast alley but it said that some of the coding was wrong so again. Being extremely conservative I avoided completing the setup. Might try again now.

A successful day with podcasting

At last, we are starting to complete the podcasts and get closer to a finished product. In response to my plea for advise  in converting our email size mpg files from Vegas Movie Studio into a format that iTunes would accept, Jenny a teacher in Victoria had the correct answer for us.

She suggested using a converter called jodix at www.jodix.com that would make our mpg into mp4 files and it has worked. This is a free download. We also tried an online converter program suggested by Jess (Technolote) but that was not as good and only gave us free hosting for 21 days. We also found that when we converted the files to email format in Vegas, we had to increase the kps to 256 from 100 as many transitions were extremely slow and the audio file kept jumping. However, another student who did not have as many sound effects or transitions, found that the 100kps was good enough.

Tomorrow we will try and put our files through iTunes and then into Podomatic. The same two girls also needed to skype one of the volunteers at the Volcano Discovery Centre. They are producing a further podcast on the volunteers, their duties etc.  We had to download powergramo from www.powergrammo.com onto the desktop connected to the smart board in the library  to record the interview, but despite the download, our microphone setup was incorrect and it would not record. However, it worked through my laptop so the girls spent 30 mins or so skyping Mylee using video conferencing. However, Mylee’s voice was a little soft so we may have to do it again and lend her a microphone to improve the sound quality.

Once the recording had been made, we just exported the recording as a wav file and will convert to mp3 through Acid. I did not have the lame codec on my laptop. Teaching Sagitarian from NZ was a great help all day as usual, so thanks Chrissy, if you ever read this blog. I love the power of web 2.0 where people from other countries are always ready and able to help immediatley.