Quite a Productive Week

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February 23, 2008 by jzcolby

Had winter break this week and had quite a productive week. Finally recovered from the flu by Wednesday and didn’t have to spend most of the day in bed. Having a laptop sure comes in handy when you aren’t feeling well.

I am enrolled in an Immigration course and am reading the book “The Inner World of the Immigrant Child.” It is a very good book and a must read for any teacher dealing with immigrants. An assignment in this class was to watch the movie “In America.” What a great assignment and well worth the time. Had to go to an ethnic restaurant for one of the assignments, so I chose “The Brazilian Grill.” It was an interesting experience and thoroughly enjoyed it. It is nice to take a course that doesn’t always focus on technology.

For my Millennials class, my final project is focusing on professional development in Second Life. I created a PowerPoint as a tutorial on Microsoft PhotoStory, then saved the PP slides as jpgs so I could upload them to the whiteboard in our school’s building in Second Life. So far so good. Then I took one of the student projects that they did in PhotoStory and turned it into a QuickTime movie (through the use of Zamzar). This allowed me to upload it to the media player in Second Life. So, now I had the slides for the professional development and the movie for a sample product. Was hoping to present this at the DEN in Second Life, but they are all booked up for March.

Another project I worked on was the new Google form creator. It was very easy to make the form, fill it out, and view the results. Nice part is that you can share the form results (which are in the spreadsheet) with others if you choose.

For my Universal Design for Learing/Assistive Technology class, I was able to (finally) post a movie on TeacherTube and YouTube. Created a great polygon diagram in PowerPoint. Saved the slides as images and put them, again, into PhotoStory. Put narration to each slide describing the polygons and then turned it into a QuickTime movie using Zamzar. Uploaded to the Internet and it worked great.

So, it was quite a productive week – even got some cleaning, baking, cooking, shopping, bills, income taxes, and movie watching done.

Love having time to do whatever …

Posted in General Technology, Multimedia, ProfDevelopment | 4 Comments

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4 Responses to “Quite a Productive Week”

on 08 Mar 2008 at 10:54 am1 James

I found this amazing website it is a WEB 2.0 that supports all media files conversion it is called http://youconvertit.com, they can do the following:
1- Convert document, images, audio, video and Archived files.
2- Convert any Youtube and other Online Video to popular formats or download the video
3- Send file(s) up to 300 MB to friends or post it on any forum for 7 days
4- Convert any type of units (Acceleration, Area, Torque and others)

what makes them amazing is you can add up to 5 different file formats, i used them to convert a document and couple of audio files.

Try them and give me your feedback http://www.youconvertit.com
on 11 Mar 2008 at 12:54 pm2 Bob Weir

I am such a fan of the Brazilian Grill but the location in E. Falmouth has closed. The owner of that restaurant, Carlos, was so passionate about his food and people.
on 11 Mar 2008 at 9:15 pm3 jzcolby

Thanks for the site James. I will try it next time I need to convert a file. Always up to try new tools. I like the sending of 300MB files.

Thanks for reading my post and sharing your thoughts.

Julia
on 11 Mar 2008 at 9:19 pm4 jzcolby

Bob,

The teacher in my class told me that the owner of the Brazilian Grill has also opened up the same type of restaurant in Plymouth. Don’t know if that is any closer for you.

I find myself thinking about the great tasting steak (and I am not a big red meat person).

Thanks for sharing, Julia