Colleges embrace MP4 technology for delivering instruction — from eSchoolNews.com by Dennis Carter

University Alliance promotes live chats, streaming lecture video, and message boards through students’ mobile devices

Four universities are giving students the chance to complete certificate and degree programs by downloading class material to mobile devices like iPhones and iPods in a distance-learning initiative that one day could be commonplace in higher education. The University Alliance, one of the country’s largest online education facilitators, announced earlier this month that students enrolled in web-based courses at Villanova University, the University of San Francisco, Tulane University, and the University of Notre Dame will be able to watch course lectures in MP4 video format on their mobile devices.

Sonic Pics

Features:

  • Intuitive user interface.
  • Automatically synchronizes your images to your audio recording.
  • Make .m4v movies of your images and narrations from your iPhone or iPod Touch.
  • Record up to 60 minutes per session!
  • Choose from good, better or best quality levels for audio.
  • Easy image selection and editing.
  • Give images unique names and descriptions that can optionally be shown during recording.
  • Image names become chapter markers in exported recordings.
  • Pause while recording.
  • Build slide shows with photos from photo albums, camera roll or built in camera.
  • Quickly jump to any image during a recording using the pop-up image chooser.
  • Recordings processed right on your phone, no 3rd party service required!
  • Transfer movies to your computer via WiFi web sharing (requires WiFi connection).
  • Upload movies to YouTube.
  • Chose to make your YouTube movies private.
  • Share your movie’s YouTube link via email.

Sample uses

  • Class field trip
  • New baby
  • Lecture recording
  • Creating mini-presentations on the road
  • Out with friends
  • Travel Logs
  • Conference notes
  • Honeymoon
  • Museum tours
  • Create Audio books
  • Lab notes
  • Insurance claims
  • Accident documentation
  • Medical diagnosis / dictation
  • Land surveys
  • Real estate tours
  • Home shopping
  • New town experiences
  • Staff introductions
  • Photo tours
  • Language instruction
  • Helping boyfriend study names/faces before meeting girlfriend’s family.

Original resource from:
Creating Digital Storybooks on the Fly with Sonic Pics — Living in the 4th Screen

Design Boost
Design Boost is a five day bootcamp for prototyping digital learning products.

We’re looking for promising young innovators, to bring learning into the 21st century, to create digital products that excite and engage kids in meaningful learning. In partnership with IDEO, Startl is offering a multi-day immersion for designers and creators, hackers and coders, builders and entrepreneurs.

Boost isn’t about sitting around dreaming up pie-in-the-sky ideas. Its an intense whirlwind of activity, with lots of hands-on, real-world involvement in the design and product development process. You’ll be taking the seed of an idea and seeing whether you can grow it into an effective and marketable learning product. Along the way, you’ll be steeped in how to create user-centered, learning-rich and market-smart designs and learn the tricks that seasoned entrepreneurs use to generate new products quickly and cheaply. But you won’t be doing this on your own. You’ll be surrounded by inspiring peers and collaborating with them to amp up your creativity and rigor.

Skype on TV: Will the videophone finally be reality?

Resource from http://spotlight.macfound.org/blog/entry/toward_ecosystem_learning_reflections_first_digital_media_learning_conferen/

From DSC:
Wow! You talk about the power of creativity, of multimedia, of combining multiple/powerful/engaging technologies! I look forward to seeing how this project grows and what it can produce for today’s students. Check out the scenarios on their site.

It will also be interesting to see how this relates to trends within publishing (iPad, interactive magazines) and the continued convergence of technologies. The learning ecosystem continues to move, morph, grow, connect, engage.

The International Journal of Multimedia & Its Applications (IJMA) is a quarterly open access journal that publishes articles which contribute new results in all areas of the Multimedia & its applications. The journal focuses on all technical and practical aspects of Multimedia and its applications. The goal of this journal is to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to focus on understanding recent developments this arena, and establishing new collaborations in these areas.

Authors are solicited to contribute to the journal by submitting articles that illustrate research results, projects, surveying works and industrial experiences that describe significant advances in the areas of Multimedia & its applications. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following

  • Audio, image, video processing
  • Digital Multimedia Broadcasting
  • Education and Training
  • Multimedia analysis and Internet
  • Multimedia and Artificial Intelligence
  • Multimedia Applications
  • Multimedia Communication and Networking
  • Multimedia Content Understanding
  • Multimedia Databases and File Systems
  • Multimedia human-machine interface and interaction
  • Multimedia Interface and Interaction
  • Multimedia security and content protection
  • Multimedia Signal Processing
  • Multimedia standards and related issues
  • Multimedia Systems and Devices
  • Operating system mechanisms for multimedia
  • Virtual reality and 3-D imaging
  • Wireless, Mobile Computing and Multimedia
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The Digital Journalist’s Handbook is composed of 12 chapters, each covering a different tool in the digital journalist’s arsenal:

THE NEW MEDIA MINDSET

An examination of the current state of journalism and what it means to be a digital journalist.

WRITING FOR THE WEB

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Headlines
• Linking
• Breaking news
• Comments
• Analytics
• Computer-assisted reporting

BLOGGING

• Getting started
• Blog platforms
• Design
• Other types of blogs
• RSS
• Creating a successful blog

PHOTOGRAPHY

• Choosing a camera
• Composing a photo
• Shooting in the field
• Digital photo editing

AUDIO

• Choosing an audio recorder
• Microphones and accessories
• Recording in the field
• Interviewing
• Ambient sound
• Narration
• Audio editing
• Posting and sharing audio
• Podcasting

AUDIO SLIDESHOWS

• Creating the slideshow
• Soundslides

VIDEO

• Choosing a camera
• Camera accessories
• Composing video
• Recording in the field
• Interviewing
• Video editing
• Posting and sharing video

WEB DESIGN

• Content Management Systems (CMS)
• HTML
• CSS
• Journalism and programming

SOCIAL NETWORKING

• Twitter
• Facebook
• MySpace
• Digg
• StumbleUpon
• YouTube
• Flickr
• Delicious
• Making the most of social networks

DATA VISUALIZATION

• Interactive maps
• Databases
• Creating a visualization

FLASH

• The Flash interface
• The capabilities of Flash
• Publishing Flash files
• The disadvantages of Flash

WHAT NOW?

Advice and lessons on what digital journalists should do with the tools they learn

GLOSSARY

The glossary contains more than 130 definitions of everything from ActionScript to zoom. It includes simple definitions for commonly used terms such as convergence, geotagging, flame war and technologies like Drupal, Creative Commons, and Ruby on Rails.

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Why Podcasts Haven’t Revolutionized Education…Yet — from John Hendron

“Yet, why hasn’t podcasting become a revolution in schools? With so many students toting iPods or cell phones around that can play multimedia content, it seems natural that these tools would be loaded up with math curriculum materials, English poetry lessons, and even a lecture on famous artists, if not by a parent’s decree, then by mandate of the student’s school! Come on folks, it’s 2010!”


“I’m not at all disappointed with the lack of adoption of podcasts-as-content in schools because I don’t think podcasts are the medium for our current generation of digital millenials. Podcasts are passive presentations of audio or video that lack the interactivity of another human being or even of downloadable applications.”

Also see:

RSS for educators

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From DSC:
To me, this device has the potential to really move multimedia-based communications forward.  For one thing, “magazines” will never be the same again.

5 Ways To Enhance Instruction with Digital Narratives — from t|h|e by Chris Riedel
Tech vets go toe-to-toe on the latest tools that can improve instruction, boost productivity, or just help make users’ lives a bit more organized

“Over the last decade, advances in technology have made dreams of ubiquitous access to digital media a reality, both on the Web and off. From inexpensive cameras to iPods to cell phones to integrated Webcams, capturing, editing, and sharing digital audio and video has become push-button easy. And that, according to University of Central Florida (UCF) professors Robert Kenny and Glenda Gunter, is good news for K-12 educators.”

Here’s my vision of what a Smart Classroom should look like in the near future (please click on the image  below to see an enlarged image and to get some further details of my thoughts here):

My vision for what a Smart Classroom should look like -- 2009

Click image to see larger image w/ details

My thanks to Mr. Yohan Na for help with this graphic. The vision leverages the same idea as Steelcase’s Media:Scape product line:

"Pucks" on each table to "plug and play" various types of media

iMinds.com

iMinds.com

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Tips & Tricks for Effective Lecturecasting — from ProfHacker.com by Ethan Watrall

Lecturecasting is all the rage these days.  And whether you are lecturecasting specifically for a class (either online, face-to-face, or any combination thereof), or are putting your lectures out to the wider public on a platform such as iTunes U, it takes a lot of work to get your lecturecasts to the point where they are effective vehicles for your content.

© 2024 | Daniel Christian