For the Assessment is about Growth seminar with the off-campus folks on Monday, I sent off balloons and a short note. The postal clerk told me that it may take 7-10 days for them to receive the wee packages - 10 days to travel within state????? I hope that she was just giving me the worst-case-scenario and that the interns will receive them by Monday.I am looking forward to the time when we can easily do video chat with the interns who are off campus. Seeing faces makes such a difference when you are talking with people. I wonder if we can now with those interns who are capable....can Elluminate handle that?
This week I have also been working with Skip to create a video stream of a book I annually
share with my ED411 interns: Thank you, Mr. Falker by Patricia Polacco. I didn't think the impact of the book, the author's autobiographical telling of her own struggle to learn to read and the teacher that stepped in to help her finally in 5th grade, would be as strong if I read to the students over an audio conference. I discovered that Patricia Polacco created a video sharing her book and thought that would be perfect to share with the off-campus folks. It would be my favorite ED411 book read by the author - perfect!!! Well, it turned out to be much more involved than I thought. After going back and forth with the publisher to obtain permission to share with the interns over the internet, I spent the afternoon down at the OUP computer lab with Skip inputing the video to the computer to create a digital copy. Then, that file needed to be broken into segments - 19 episodes in all - to make the video file manageable for folks to view. The original LARGE file would just take toooo long to download in one piece. Once split into the 19 episodes, Skip transferred it to the ED server and I put up the links on Blackboard. It works well at UAF....I can't get the video to play at home though. I'm concerned that my students will also have trouble at their far-flung locales....the saga continues....
1 comment:
People's expectations of Internet video are typically more than what is possible in real terms. The problem often lies in the bandwidth (or lack of it) between the presenter and the viewer or the incompatibility of some types of video with some types of browsers. One of the best ways to distribute videos that (virtually) everyone can see regardless of platform or bandwidth is to upload a video to a Blogger blog. Blogger will translate the video to Flash video (viewable in just about any web browser) and let you view it through the blog itself. An example may be found on my ED 237 Podcasts blog. These are instructional videos that began life as QuickTime movies that were uploaded to a Blogger page.
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