Posts Tagged ‘resources’

Sometime yesterday Protopage had an upgrade.  Here is what the site looked like before the upgrade.

Below is the same page after the upgrade.  Notice how everything is shifted down about half an inch so that the options tab can be seen at the top. 

The options tab is not new.  Before this upgrade, the tab was at the bottom.  That was nice considering that I use the options tab only a few times each year.  I have posted a “downgrade” request on the Protopage blog.  While I wait for a response, I’ll spend a little more time scrolling on my startpage.

Here is a handy tool for anyone interested in finding a podcast about a specific topic.  Everyzing is a service that scans through an assortment of podcasts and converts all that speech into text that is searchable.  You can search for generic topics like “educational technology” or broad topics like “politics.”   Search results can be sorted by date or relevance.  By clicking on a hit, you can listen to the audio in the built-in player.

A link to your specific search term is also available so you can jump right to the part of the podcast talking about your topic.  In this way, you can quickly hear a phrase in the context it was recorded.

The site also searches online video clips and other multimedia.  The goal is to make all digital content searchable.  Imagine being able to find a video clip of someone giving a speech by searching for a few key terms from the speech.  You wouldn’t even have to know the speaker’s name.

EveryZing also sells a product that will convert multimedia content to printed pages.  This has potential for hearing impaired students.

I can even find someone I know in a podcast.  Here’s John… fifty times.

I haven’t posted very much about my iPod Touch.  I can assure you it has become one of my most used pieces of technology.  Today I added something to it that is mind boggling.

I installed wikipedia on my iPod Touch.  By this, I don’t mean that I enabled my iPod Touch to go over the Internet and access wikipedia.  Instead, I have the whole searchable database installed on my iPod Touch. 

This is a two step process.  First the application is installed and then a dump of the official wikipedia site is transferred to the iPod Touch.  Since the data dump involves a file that is two gigabytes, it took about 90 minutes to complete the second step.

I basically used 1/8 of my Touch’s memory to install this application.  That’s OK.  I had only managed to fill half of the 16 GB in the last six months.  I still have plenty of free space.

The data set is from October of 2007.  I’m certain an updated dump will happen periodically.  It does take considerable massaging to get the database into the proper format for the iPhone/Touch.  Also, all the pictures are removed.  Otherwise the data set would be too large for the device.  The dump I have is in English.  There are German and Portuguese dumps available.

To search the database begin by typing a few letters of the name or term.  As letters are typed, possible matches are listed.  As soon as the target term is listed, clicking it directs the browser to the listing in the database.  From here on out, it works just like the online version without the option to edit entries.

Now I can look up everything from the atomic weight of aluminum to the history of ZZ Top… and all that is in between, stored on a device the size of a cell phone.

Google Docs is another one of those applications that everyone is clammering about as a Word replacement.  It is a free web-based word processor that has incredible “sharing” features.  Without installing software, you can create a document and then share that document with one or more people.  Anyone in the group can edit the document and everyone can see all the edits.

You can’t do that in Word.

Unfortunately, this is where the Word/Google Docs comparison ends.  Although Google Docs does wonderful things for free, with nothing more than a browser, it hardly has the basic requirements of a modern word processor.

I tried to complete a simple project using Google Docs and here is what I found.

1 – You can type and format text in basic ways.  After selecting some text, the font, color and size can be changed.  You’re ok as long as 8, 10, 12, 14, 18, 24 or 36 point fonts are all you want.  There is also no way to format paragraphs or line spacing.  It’s all single spacing with no adjustments between paragraphs.

2 – There is no Find command, but you can use your browser’s built-in find utility.  The Find and Replace has no undo.  Be careful with that.

3 – Forget about page numbers.  If you print something, you can format your browser so that print job add page numbers.  There is no way to tell how many pages you’ll print ahead of time because Google Docs doesn’t tell you more than the word count.

4 – You can insert a picture from a file.  After that, the picture tools fall apart.  You can’t crop a picture.  If you resize a graphic, there is no way to control the aspect ratio.  There are no tools that permit fine adjustments.  If you need a picture to be three inches wide, you’ll need to print it, measure it on the paper using a ruler and adjust accordingly.

5 – A header is something that appears at the top of the first page and a footer is something that appears at the bottom of the last page.  In between no pages have either.

6 – There is no style control.

7 – There is no tab control.  I think a tab is half an inch, but the lack of a ruler leaves me guessing.

8 – There is no margin control.

9 – Ctrl-B, Ctrl-U, Ctrl-I… that’s the end of the keyboard shortcuts that aren’t built into the browser.

10 – There is no way to fully justify a paragraph (margins straight on both sides of the pages).

11 – There is no “reveal codes” that can show formatting marks.  It goes without saying that formatting cannot be adjusted in bulk using Find and Replace.

12 – The only way to get multiple columns is to insert a table and paste your text into it.  I crashed my browser trying to get a long document into two columns.

If you want a full featured word processor for free, get Open Office.  Although the sharing features of Google Doc can be incredibly powerful, it’s not much of a word processor.

If you watched the video I posted yesterday, you may have asked yourself how the movie was created.  Let me explain a couple of things.

1 – I recorded my voice during the eTech Ohio 2008 conference using a digital voice recorder (Panasonic RR-US395).  When I got home, I dumped the recording to a WAVE file using the Panasonic software.

2 – I recorded a “screen cast” of my presentation at home using Windows Media Encoder and saved that as a movie file with no sound.

3 – I used MovieMaker to combine the WAVE file with the screen captured video of my PowerPoint.  The final movie was exported as a WMV and uploaded to TeacherTube.

To keep the file size to a minimum and reduce the effect of compression anomalies, I did the screen capture in PowerPoint at the approximate resolution of a TeachTube video (320 x 240).  The graphic at the top of this post is a screen shot of the presentation (close to actual size).  I used Windows Media Encoder to create a movie of that small window instead of the normal full screen PowerPoint.  You can adjust PowerPoint to play in a small window in the Show Setup (screen below).

I selected the “Browsed by an individual” for the Show Type.

To create the movie, I had to listen to my recorded audio and advance the slides in the PowerPoint so my recorded voice matched the screen captured movie.  There were a lot of ways that I could have done this, but a real-time replay was the easiest and probably quickest.

Once I had the movie, I dropped it into MovieMaker and dragged the WAVE audio file in as the audio track.  I had to slide the audio back and forth a little to get it synchronized perfectly with the video.  That was it.

I could have placed my slides into a service like SlideShare.  I know they support audio now, but I’m not sure I could have used my recorded audio.  I would have lost all the transitions if I had used a service like SlideShare.  That alone was enough to deter me from that particular service.

I had a hard time getting to TeacherTube several times today.  I’m sure it was a bandwidth issue.  They definitely do not have the bandwidth of major non-educational streaming sites (YouTube, MetaCafe, Blip.tv), but TeacherTube is one of the few streaming sites that is not blocked by most K-12 school districts.