Tree of Life

Not that I need to take advantage of a Snow Day to mess about on the internet, but since the UK has ground to a halt because of the weather, I've been surfing.

From the Bad Science forums I found a link to an excellent video of the Tree of Life. This is taken from a BBC show about Charles Darwin broadcast to celebrate his 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species and was produced in association with The Wellcome Trust.

The video of the tree of life is available in YouTube version, but you can also download a copy for your own use. It's licensed under a Creative Commons licence so you can use it in your schools as long as you attribute the source and don't use it commercially.

There is also an interactive Tree of Life which allows you to trace the ancestry of many different creatures and also makes it easy to find the common ancestors between pairs of animals. So if you want to find the common ancestor between Man and Penguin, then you can (something called Amniota, in case you were wondering).

This is a beta version and so will develop over time. Again you can download a standalone version if you want to use it in schools.

Science/Biology teachers who are looking for a resource to use when teaching evolution or diversity of life should definitely check it out. And the creative commons licence means you could even get the students to put it into movie maker (or similar) and record their own narration over the top.

Tooble Video Downloader

I'm indebted to Tom Barrett for making me aware of a fantastic little application called Tooble. Tooble may very wel be the ultimate YouTube video downloader.

Tooble runs on your computer and lets you search YouTube for keywords (or you can give it the direct URL to the video you want). All you need to do is check the box next to the videos you want to download, and Tooble gets to work downloading them onto your computer.

I gave it a test run with one of my favourite clips from Brainiac; the Walking on Custard clip. Tooble quickly downloaded it as an MPEG file with little fuss. By default it puts it into your Music folder and even imports it into your iTunes library but you can change these settings if you wish. You can change the file quality to best suit playing on an iPod too!

This could be the ultimate tool for any teacher who cannot get YouTube in their school because of filtering, or who wants to snag a clip to make sure they don't lose it if it's removed or net access is not working when they give their lesson.

Go download Tooble now!

Simple Science Videos

Here's a great site for using songs to help the teaching of Science in the classroom. Simple Science has videos for many KS2 topics with songs, and also explanations of some of the concepts; http://www.simplescience.net/

Videos are hosted on Vimeo, which means they are higher quality than YouTube, and also means they are accessible in schools that have blocked YouTube.

The videos are free on the website, but if you like them, you might want to buy a DVD of the high quality versions.


4F Electricity Song from Simple Science on Vimeo.

You Tube Downloaders Again

Following on from a training day in Birmingham yesterday, I promised the delegates I'd try and produce a summary post on some of the various ways to download videos from You Tube to use offline.

I have written about this before, and a list of all the posts on this blog that mention video can be found here.

The method I tend to use the most is this script which basically gives you a piece of code which you drag to your toolbar in Firefox as a button. When you click the button it puts a "download as mp4" link on the YouTube page. Follow the instructions on the page. You will need to use the Firefox browser, which you can easily download for free here.

A different method is to use the ConvertTube website. You simply paste the URL (the web address) of the YouTube video you want to download, and it does the rest.

Similar sites are You Tube catcher, You Convert It and also Zamzar.com

There's also a site called Kiss You Tube. If you find a YouTube video you want to download, simply edit the www.youtube.com/blah blah address and stick a "kiss" before the youtube bit. ie www.kissyoutube.com/blah blah. The instructions are on the Kiss You Tube site. Just add a kiss ;)

Sites such as You Tube use flash video (flv) format. This can be played directly on the page in Smart Notebook, as far as I know not yet in Promethean. You can download third party players that will play these files. If you have the choice of video format it is probably worth using a different format such as mp4 which can probably be played on something you already have on your computer without having to download anything else. You can then hyperlink to these files from your whiteboard software - they will then open up and play.

If you want to know how to insert a flv file into Smart Notebook, Jim Hollis has produced a great little guide here.

I've made a list of sites tagged with YouTube on Delicious. Some of the sites are downloaders, others are useful sites that may be of interest.

On the subject of sites for video resources - don't forget to check out both Teachers TV and the BBC Learning Zone. Both of which have some very good teacher resources

Making Video Screen Shots

I've written about this before, but it's something that gets asked a lot when I am doing IWB training, so I thought it was worth flagging up again.

If you want to make screen grabs from some Windows Media videos, you may find you get a black box rather than the screen shot you were expecting. To make the computer render the video so that you can actually capture images from it, you need to make a quick change to the video player settings. Once done, you shouldn't need to change it again (hopefully).

I've produced a short worksheet which I have uploaded to Scribd, hope it's useful.

Changing Video Settings to Take Screen Shots

Get your own at Scribd or explore others: Education Course Material iwb video iaw whiteb

You could also watch the video demonstration of this here.

Primary Science Lesson Starts

Just wanted to point you in the direction of a very nice video that's available on the Teacher's TV Website

It's aimed at Primary Science teachers, and gives 7 different lesson starters to use on your Interactive Whiteboard.

All the starters are in one file, so I would suggest making a note of the time that each clip starts (or download the timings file from the downloads page) so when you use it with your class you can jump to the required clip using the video player slider.

You can view the video here: http://www.teachers.tv/video/28260

There are also some associated documents to go with the video in the Downloads page.

There is also a similar video for Primary Maths, which you can find here: http://www.teachers.tv/video/25557 as well as some Primary Literacy Story Starts here: http://www.teachers.tv/video/23316

How to embed a YouTube Video into PowerPoint

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.

How to Link a YouTube Video Into Power Point - Upload a Document to Scribd

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.

Smartboard Tutorial - Themes

Here's another video about a new feature of Smart Notebook 10 - Themes.

With themes, it is possible to set up page templates - with the font size and style that you want, along with any colour schemes, images and watermarks.

Themes could be useful for title pages, Lesson objectives and suchlike.


Whiteboard Tutorial - Themes from Danny Nicholson on Vimeo.

It is worthwhile also thinking about what pages you use a lot - and adding those pages to the My Content area of the gallery. I have done this with graph axes, experimental results grids, lesson objectives. To do this, from the page sorter, select a page and click on the little grey box with the arrow in it - and choose Add page to gallery. You can do a similar thing with Promethean software too.

Whiteboard Challenge 1

Jess McCulloch asked me to develop some whiteboard challenges for project she is working on. The whole challenge site will be launching on August 11th - so if you want to take part visit the Whiteboard Challenge Wiki and see what you need to do.

This is the first of my Whiteboard Challenges. The infinite cloner is a Smartboard feature, but you can clone objects in Promethean software, or stack a pile of shapes over each other. You can read more about the challenge on its wiki page.


Whiteboard Challenge - Cloning from Danny Nicholson on Vimeo.

The challenge is to investigate how you could use cloning in a lesson resource, and then try it out with a class

How can you use this? Try some of these out.

• dragging symbols onto weather maps / regular maps
• Shapes and tessellations - have a square and a triangle - how many different shapes can you make?
• Dragging labels onto diagrams
• Fridge Magnet Poetry - clone an array of connecting words
• counters on board games

There are other uses too, see if you can think of any

Smartboard Video - Lesson Toolkit

Yesterday was my last day of training for the Summer. I'm off until September 1st. I'll still be doing stuff for the blog and suchlike through much of August.

The last thing I needed to do this term was to film a session with myself and a Smartboard for my Smart Notebook 10 accreditation. A local school let me set up my camcorder and a colleague and myself filmed the necessary footage for Smart.

While I was there, I filmed some extra stuff for this blog, and also for a whiteboard challenge Jess McCulloch is developing (more on that in the future I hope). I'll upload some of these videos over the next few days.

The first video is just a quick demonstration of the Lesson Activity Toolkit which is new to Smart Notebook 10.


IWB Tutorial - Lesson Activity Toolkit from Danny Nicholson on Vimeo.

A few of my favourite things

Just jotting down my ideas for the mirandamod conference tonight. I plan on showing a few of my favourite tools, and probably the Flip video and USB tuner.

I don't think I'll fit it all into five minutes, but I'm going to list the sites I'd like to show below. One so I can find them later, and two for the benefit of anyone who's reading this after the conference. I have also tagged them as Mirandanet on my delicious stream.

Twitter

Qik - streaming video

Classtools.net

ToonDoo

Animoto

Timetube

Tag Galaxy

Zattoo

Compfight

Possibly Seesmic too!

Not sure how long this will work, but you can see the conference online here.

Coke and Mentos

Following on from this post; I have two videos to share with you. Today we tried the Diet Coke and Mentos experiments.

The first was streamed direct onto the internet using Qik.com



The second was put together in Windows Movie Maker using clips from my camcorder


Diet coke and mentos from Danny Nicholson on Vimeo.

Smart 10 and Tables

Smart Notebook 10 now comes with a tool that a lot of Smartboard users have been wanting for a long time - the ability to make tables. It was always such a pain messing about with lines to draw a table, and it never lined up as easily. The new tables tool makes this so much easier!

The "Insert Table" icon is on the toolbar, next to the Select arrow. Click on it and choose the size of table you wish to add. It's no different to adding a table into Word.

What's nice about the tables is that you can drag images into cells - and the images will automatically resize to fit the cell.

You can merge cells by dragging to select them, then clicking the right mouse button and choosing "Merge Cells". You can also right click in a cell and choose Split - to split one cell into more.

Another interesting tool is the Cell Shade. Right click on a cell and choose "Add Cell Shade". This will add a mini version of the screen shade that just covers one cell. Click on the shade to remove it. This would be good for hiding answers or additional help. You can see the cell shade on a few cells in the image below:



I have produced a quick video about the Smart 10 tables tool. You can view the video here.

Animoto Education Program

I've talked about Animoto before in the last few months(here and here), and I think it's a great way of producing professional-looking slideshows.

Even better now is the announcement of an Animoto Education Program. This is great news and means that educators can use Animoto with their classes for free!

Contact Rebecca at Animoto via the address on this page to find out more.

In Plain English

Here are some great videos to watch because a) they use plain English and b) I love the clean presentation style. They cover some of the new Web 2.0 tools that have really enhanced the way people use the internet in the last few years.

Social Bookmarking in Plain English



Podcasting in Plain English



RSS in Plain English


You can find all their videos, covering Twitter, Social Networking, Photo Sharing and, erm.. Zombies on YouTube here. Or go to the CommonCraft site to download high res versions to use elsewhere.

YAYTD

or.. Yet Another You Tube Downloader

ConvertTube is yet another website that will let you download YouTube videos and save them as different file formats to use offline. Again, handy for teachers that can't get YouTube at school.

http://www.converttube.com/

Thanks to Lisa Thumann for the link.

Download YouTube Video

I've given a few links before to sites that allow you to download YouTube videos.

Well now I have another one to add to the list. This Script can be added to the toolbar of the Firefox web browser. When you see a video you want to save, click the button and then the page changes to allow you to save the file as an .mp4 video file.

All the instructions are on the page and it seems relatively straightforward. The thing to remember is to change the filename from .htm to .mp4 when you save it.

Obviously it goes without saying that you need to be aware that you may be infringing copyright by storing these clips - but this does provide a good workaround for those teachers who want to show a YouTube clip in a lesson where the school have blocked YouTube access.

Video Screenshots

One of the really useful features of most IWB software is the ability to be able to take screenshots from videos and use them in your presentations. Both Smart Notebook and ActivStudio have a camera tool that allows quick screenshots to be made.

This can also be done using the Print Screen button on any computer and then pasting the resulting image into Word or Powerpoint.

One issue I often come across when demonstrating this to teachers is that instead of a picture from the video they get a black box instead. This mainly happens with avi or mpg files that open in Windows Media Player. Quicktime videos seem to work OK all the time.

There is a setting in Windows Media Player that you need to change to be able to take screen grabs. It's pretty straightforward, and once done should not need to be done again.

Firstly - open up a video file and right click on the icon in the bottom left corner of the window (It may look like a small thumbnail of the video):

From the menu that appears, choose Tools > Options

From the tabs at the top of the window, click on Performance and then the Advanced button.

From the window that appears, find the option for Use Video Mixing Renderer and click in the box next to Use Overlays to remove the tick.

Then click on OK a few times. When it asks you if you want to continue with the change click on Yes.

The video should now be able to be captured using either the Camera tool in the IWB software you are using, or with the Print Screen button (and then paste into whatever application you are using)

I have also created a Video Tutorial to show you how to do this. Apologies if the sound is a little quiet.



Hope this helps!

Rub and Reveal

Here's a quick idea for using an interactive whiteboard. It could be a lesson starter, or form part of a plenary or could just be used throughout the lesson as a quick check on what the students have learnt so far.

This is something that always goes down well when I demonstrate it in training sessions as it is so quick and easy to do, but can be used in a range of different ways.

Watch the video here.

How do you do this?

1. Use the text tool to type some text on the notebook page
2. Use the pen tool to draw over the top of the text to hide it (you may want to make the pen thick and match the colour to the background)
3. When you are ready to reveal the writing, click on the Eraser tool and rub out the pen to reveal the text hiding behind it.

Another way of hiding the text could be using shapes to hide the text which can then be moved away or deleted when you want to reveal the word.

How might you use this?

This could be used as the example in the video for hiding labels on a diagram, getting the students to label it, and then revealing the correct answer.

It could also be used to hide the answers to questions given to the students on the screen.

A photograph could be completely covered in black pen, and then the eraser used to gradually reveal parts of the photograph, asking the students at different stages what they can see and what they can infer from what they see.

This is also a quick way of producing missing words activities - type or copy/paste in a block of text and instead of having to go through and delete the missing words and add spaces, just cover each word you want to take out with white pen. It's also easier to reveal the correct answer too.

if you want the Smart Notebook file with the above example of labelling David Beckham in French, then click here to download it.

(Footnote: apologies to any readers from across the sea if I keep calling it the rubber tool on the video. I try to call it the eraser, but over here we call it the rubber. I do know that word has different connotations over where, but just put it down to English eccentricity and go with it!)

Animoto

Thanks to Ewan at EduBlogs for linking to a great little resource called AniMoto. It creates professional-looking video slideshows from your photos. I am too tight to stump up for the full version yet, but I have been playing with the free version that lets you make short 15 second clips.

Here's my first video. It's taken some of my photos from my Flickr stream showing my ski holiday last year. It took about 5 mins to set up and about 5 mins for the whole thing to render. I like the finished result though.

It then gives you the code to embed it in your blog. I'm hoping this works and that below you can see the video.

Whiteboards on Teachers TV

If you haven't already been there, you can access videos from Teachers TV via the magic of the Internet. I must admit it is somewhere I keep forgetting to access but it has a wealth of ideas for teachers.

If you do a search for Whiteboards you will get a whole host of programmes that have been produced to show good practice for using Interactive Whiteboards in the classroom for a range of subjects.

For example here is a 15 minute video that gives you some Top Tips for using an interactive whiteboard.

Not all of the videos on Teachers TV are available to visitors outside the UK due to copyright issues, but hopefully there is still enough there for overseas visitors to see how we are using IWB's over here.

Fast Video Downloader

Save embedded video files from video-hosting servers such as YouTube. This is very useful for those schools that block access to YouTube and prevent you showing some of the great video clips for use in education.

You can download the video downloader here:

Videos are saved in the .flv Flash Video format and can be dragged straight onto the page in Smart Notebook for viewing.