Posts made in October, 2008

More halloween links

Posted on Oct 28, 2008 in Interactive Whiteboards, SMARTboards | 0 comments

On the subject of halloween resources – a quick plug for two great posts by Jim Hollis over at Teachers Love Smartboards;

The Halloween Search

Smartboard Halloween Activities

Enjoy!

Halloween update

Posted on Oct 16, 2008 in Interactive Whiteboards, Resources, SMARTboards | 0 comments

As a follow-on from the Halloween post, I got a comment from a chap from TeqSmart promoting their halloween word bucket for Smartboards. It’s a flash game similar to the Lesson Toolkit which if you open it will put itself straight into your My Content area.

Taking a look around the rest of the site, there are some useful resources for Smart Notebook users to download. It’s well worth taking a look at the site; http://community.teqsmart.org/download.php

Oh and nothing to do with whiteboards, although personally I think it’s a nice scary thing for halloween, check out http://www.palinaspresident.us/

How to embed a YouTube Video into PowerPoint

Posted on Oct 15, 2008 in Interactive Whiteboards | 0 comments

I had somebody show me this trick yesterday at a training session I ran.

I’ve played with the control toolbar in Excel and Word, but never had a reason to investigate it in PowerPoint.

This technique does rely on you having YouTube access at the time you do your presentation. It doesn’t physically embed the YouTube video into the file, just makes it part of the presentation. I’d still suggest looking into YouTube downloaders to get the file if access to YouTube in school may be an issue.

As an aside, If your school uses Channel 4 Clipbank to host videos in-school, then you can use a similar technique to link to the videos. This guide shows you how to do that.

Halloween Resources

Posted on Oct 14, 2008 in Interactive Whiteboards, Promethean, SMARTboards | 3 comments

If you are looking for some Halloween resources to use on your Promethean board, then take a look at the Promethean Planet website.

They have a Halloween resource pack that contains spooky backgrounds and images. It also contains some game template pages for adding a halloween theme to some lesson plenary activities such as Pictionary, Hot Seat and Tic Tac Toe.

Smartboard users might like to check out this nice Halloween Ghost Countdown made by Jim over at Teachers Love Smartboards.

It’s at this time of year that I like to promote my Halloween Memory Game that some students may like to play on the IWB. You can find it here.

And not IWB related, but check out this amazing Cylon Jack-o-Lantern Amazing stuff.

Have a good Halloween!

Blogging Presentation

Posted on Oct 6, 2008 in Presentations | 0 comments

Here’s my presentation about Blogging for my forthcoming training day.

If you are in the UK. and do want to attend these courses, I am running three dates for Lighthouse this academic year. Click here for more information.

New Technologies in the Classroom

Posted on Oct 6, 2008 in Presentations | 2 comments

Here’s the powerpoint I’m using as the introduction for my New Technologies in the Classroom training day.

Podcasting with a dictaphone

Posted on Oct 5, 2008 in Tutorials and Guides | 0 comments

I’ve been getting ready to do a podcasting training day in a few weeks and have been looking into different ways to podcast.

A neat little gadget that I picked up this week is the Olympus Digital Voice Recorder. I bought the WS-311M model, but there’s a few different ones out there. I bought mine from Amazon for about £50 but shop around and you might get a better deal.
Basically what you get is a pocket-sized voice recorder that you can take anywhere with you. It runs of a single AAA battery and the 512MB model can record about 8 hours of audio, more if you change the recording quality (up to 130 hours or so).

This would be a very convenient way of getting interviews into a podcast since the students could take this anywhere; they could record “Vox Pops” with people around the school, or even outside the school. The Olympus has an external microphone jack if you wanted to plug a better microphone into it.

The neat bit is getting the files off the device. Basically you slide the battery compartment off, and it reveals a USB stick. Simply plug the Olympus into a USB port (You might need to use the supplied USB extension cable if your port is hard to get to) and then you can just take the files off as you would with any other USB file stick.
To process the files, I had planned on using Audacity, as it seems to be the one that everyone recommends. It’s free, which is always a bonus. But this is where I hit a slight issue. The Olympus records as WMA files, and due to licensing issues Audacity cannot open WMA files.

This problem is not a major one, however. A quick look on Google turned up a nice, free, file converter that will convert WMA files to MP3 files with a single right click. It’s called Switch, and you can get it here: http://nch.com.au/switch/

It was a very simple job to convert the file (or files) from the Olympus into MP3 to play around with in Audacity.

I’ve recorded a sample podcast with the Olympus, which I have then uploaded to Podomatic.com. I guess I could host it directly on this blog, but I wanted to see how Podomatic worked.

The direct link to the podcast on Podomatic is here.

I’m also going to test out the Podomatic embedded player, to see how that works. In theory, this should appear here:

Hope that worked!

If you want to see my presentation about Podcasting, then I’ve uploaded it to Slideshare here.