Unitedstreaming - Thing #9

Used Unitedstreaming to teach about globes and latitude and longitude this past week. I could not find an age appropriate video that was understandable and had the target content. My 8-20 yr old students had to forgo a 4th grader talking down to them. But it made some abstract concepts quite comprehendible, including the concept of hemisphere.

The funniest thing about the video was this 5 year-old always in front of the discussion group. It must have been the director's child. She had such a blank look on her face.

Audio books Thing #20

I was disappointed in this. The links if found lead to a lot of public domain books in text, like the Guttenburg Project, but unless you use a text reader, like Zardvox who sounds like he came from the planet, Zarkon found in 50's science fiction movies.

I was expess interested in listening to The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer because i taught the prologue and found a really good translations. I was hoping to listen to it during commuting. I usually could not tell which were translated and which were in Middle English. If anyone can suggest good sites, i would appreciate it.

How to convert flash .flv files to Mpeg .mp4 format - Thing #21

This falls into one of those technical domains that nobody else reading this blog will be interested in. But i am posting it because the article title will show up in Google and someone else having the same technical question may benefit.

One of our bilingual people wanted to show a YouTube video about Somali culture at our recent parent meeting. YouTube is blocked by the district firewall to reduce traffic volume, which is a frequent problem because there are so many valuable videos on the site. It is possible to go around the firewall with the MPS Roadrunner connection but who knows where that is at, certainly not in the classroom needed.

Most YouTube videos are Adobe Flash Video .flv files, a proprietary format that requires a license to do much with. As a general rule VLC, a freeware media player, will play Anything. And it is supposed to play Flash video files but would only pickup the mp3 soundtrack, no video. I learned from Todd Pierson at a district meeting that there was at least one shareware capture utility for YouTube. I downloaded it a couple of others and compared their ability to convert. YouTube Video Grabber is also a shareware capture utility but like VLC would not convert the video, only sound. Visual Hub, an excellent shareware conversion utility, same story, no video. I expected that i could drop the file on any updated Flash enabled browser, like Safari or Firefox but they acted totally ignorant. I think Adobe tries to keep changing proprietary formats to make them dysfunctional with older software as a sales strategy.

TubeSock was simple and efficient to save the file in .mp4 format, as well as several other formats. Mp4, i think, is a highly compressed format favored by video media players, like video ipods. Not great but serviceable. Our bilingual AE put the video on a big screen and let it play while the Somali families ate.

All of this software is findable at Versiontracker.com, the premeire site to find any software to do anything, if you know the right search terms. I should add that this is all Macintosh software and i am not aware of what is available for Windows.

ELM for research Thing #13

I was sick today, so i actually got some Internet type work.

My daughter is working a major college paper on the Iraqi government so it seemed propitious to explore ELM. I looked at ELM during the workshops but could not find a venue that i thot would work well for ESL students. Altho i havent tried it yet for the higher English proficiency 1st language poetry research project.

It work quite well to turn up hundreds of publications of varying degrees of academic levels. The advanced search interface is quite good. The problem i had often was that i could not see any obvious ways to actually read many of the articles. If there was a PDF download of the article that was obvious and easy. But often i could read the abstract and then see not even tell if the article had to be purchased, was off-site and could be read, or was available on-site but i was too stupid to see the button to click to read it.

I think it will take me a while to get to know it.