Archive for the 'video' Category

Google Maps and video

Surely the long awaited moment when video can be embedded in Google Earth placemarks is almost upon us? Click this link and then the placemark balloon to see video of a lightning strike on the Empire State Building.

mapsvideo

Digital Urban demonstrated this new feature of Google My Maps; more information can be found at Google Maps. I’m looking forward to seeing students creating their personal geographies via multimedia Google Maps.

Ed Parsons likes the “2.5D” rendering of buildings in Google Maps, sadly not happening for the UK any time soon!

Webcam wall

A really clever idea from Tony Cassidy who shows how to create a PowerPoint slide with multiple live streaming web cams. This would be stunning on an interactive whiteboard and I look forward to creating my own examples and seeing the effect on the kids as they walk into the room!

webcamwall

Tony includes full instructions and an example on his site. Excellent work Comrade!

Peer assessment between schools

I’m grateful to Melanie Richards and her Year 7 students who took part in a peer assessment of some work on urban models. The interesting dimension to this activity is that I haven’t met Melanie, and I don’t know anything about her school or her students, other than they seem very keen on Geography.

The exercise that we planned, via mutual postings on our respective school blogs, Georgeous Geography and Noel Jenkins @ Court Fields involved the peer assessment of urban models by Year 7 (students are 11/12 years old)

pcmodel

Having set the task for homework, we posted pictures of some of the best examples of the models on our blogs and then got students to peer assess them. This was done by getting students to record their thoughts, and adding the recordings to pictures of the work, using Window Movie Maker. The results can be downloaded from the following links, if the embedded You Tube clips below are filtered by your network!

Download video made by St Ursula’s, Greenwich, London

Download video made by Court Fields Community School, Wellington, Somerset

Neither group of students were guided in what to say, yet the responses were overwhelmingly supportive. Possibly, had we established assessment criteria, the peer assessment would have been more thorough, however this was a first attempt.

I think the experiment worked really well. The students felt their work was valued, and in the case of Court Fields school, they believed that that the St Ursula’s class were in a particularly good position to assess their work, since they live in a large city.

Thanks very much to Ms Richards and the Georgeous Geography blog. I hope we can repeat the assessment next year.

Proper Education / Downloading You Tube videos

Brilliant video from Eric Prydz, sampling Pink Floyd with great sequences of free-running and other street sports. And then there’s the message! Via Tony Cassidy.

Downloading from You Tube
Like most teachers, I have to contend with the filtering of You Tube at work. The solution is fairly simple, just follow the download link at the top of the You Tube page to get the video, and rename the downloaded file with a .flv extension. Next, get the free FLV Player from here and be grateful to Martijn de Visser for this great little application (which you obviously need to install secretly in school!)

Update 6/12/06
The Proper Education video has sadly disappeared from YouTube.
Tony Cassidy offers a video tutorial on Riva Encoder, a free application that allows you to convert You Tube flash video into other formats. The advantage is obvious, as pointed out by Ollie Bray - there’s no need for additional software installation at school.

Update 11/12/06
It’s back again!

link to video if you can’t see it above

Flood in a flume; a web cam movie edited in Jumpcut

The whole movie took 40 minutes to put together, from uploading the video clips, adding transitions and annotation, and final publishing. Well easy!

Hint: Press play, then pause the movie to allow buffering time.

More web cam moments

Another example of the potential of web cams in the classroom. In the video a year 7 student explains how she created her model river. In doing so she reveals her creativity, resourcefulness and geographical understanding.

Jumpcut

Jumpcut is a terrific web-based video editing application, that I discovered after Ollie Bray mentioned it on his blog. You upload movie clips and then edit and remix them. Here for example, is a short film that I created from some BBC Creative Archive footage.

The original clip is here. Why not remix it yourself?

The implications are fairly obvious; students can edit a short film as a homework assignment without requiring video editing software. Teachers can provide suitable source material. Audio clips and various effects can be added and the resulting movies tagged and shared via email, or embedded in websites. The BBC Creative Archive has been withdrawn at the end of its trial period while they consider the implications of the service. Hopefully it will be back soon.

Jumpcut is another sign that the day of a PC with zero applications installed, apart from a web browser, is approaching. Read My Uninstalled Life for more!