My Brain Hurts

Many are of the opinion that YouTube is just bunch of adolescents putting up goofy videos of themselves doing stupid things, well it does has that but it has a lot of valuable educational resources as well. One example if social history recorded by ordinary people. Take any newsworthy event that you plan to cover with your class and there will probably be something there, an example of that is the numerous Tsunami videos. Many are poor quality taken with phones but they are graphic portrayals of human reactions to this event, the images and recorded voices give an interesting insight into what it was like to actually be there.

Obviously viewing live in class is the first option but many narrow minded people in power block YouTube from School network use. However all is not lost, there are a few twists along the way but it’s a fairly simple process to download these files so you can use them with your classs. A Google search on “download from YouTube” will produce many options. My favoutites are these two:

Vixy (http://vixy.net) – open the YouTube page with the video you want. Open vixy.net and copy the URL into the required space. Select one of the five target video formats available and away you go.

TechCrunch (http://www.techcrunch.com/get-youtube-movie) – open the YouTube page with the video you want. Open TechCrunch and copy the URL into the required space and away you go. The file is downloaded in the original flv format use by YouTube. You can view the file with a player such as VLC but I prefer to convert it to an mpeg using iSquint (http://www.isquint.org). This process does have an extra step but I think the final result is a better quality file.

It seems to be becoming fairly common for student groups touring another country to include a short home stay with a local family. Last year we hosted a 17 year old lad from Chicago for three days. It was a great experience as we were able to find out much out each other’s country. Our view of Chicago had been tainted by too many gangster movies so it was good to hear what the city is really like. Apparently the title “windy city” is well earned. Google Earth was a great tool to use to add meaning to some of those explanations.

Last week we had the opportunity to host two 16 year old boys from Nara, Japan on a cultural exchange. Nara is a sister city to our own Canberra. The boys were again wonderful ambassadors for their country but a big difference this time was a langauge barrier – they spoke very little English and we spoke zero Japanese. A lot of pointing, hand gestures, showing of pictures, nodding and smiling seemed to work. We avoided speaking louder and slower.

An information sheet we received prior to their arrival stated that they were both allergic to vegetables????? Oh well we could indulge that for a couple of days – the wide eyes and smiles as some fairly large steaks went on the BBQ indicated that they approved of our meal choice. Come dessert time though neither of them liked chocolate . . . vegetables I can understand but chocolate?? All our limited stock of dessert items contained chocolate. However, we managed to feed them some carefully selected ice cream that had only a little chocolate in it – reminding me of the old Monty Python Spam sketch.

Google Earth was again very helpful and despite the languge barrier we managed to pass on a lot of information to each other. So if the opportunity to host some overseas visitors comes your way I encourage you to do it, with the promise that it will be a very rewarding experience.

The lure of blogging has been calling for some time but the abilty to answer it has been a somewhat rocky road. Having had two blogspot blogs go west at blogger and not been able to resolve the problem I decided to up anchor and give edublogs a go. All was well for the first month and I really liked the way the blog can be customised to suit the look you want. However then the same problem I had with Blogger followed me here – suddenly my password and username were not recognised even though they were being entered correctly. Throw in some time off for a holiday and I was off cyber air for about a month. Upon my return, no amount of fiddling seemed to work so it was time to seek some technical assistance.

Unlike my Blogger experience I requested a new password which still didn’t work but it appeared to actually come from a person rather than from an automated response system so I wrote to that person detailing my tail of woe. The next day there was a reply email with new login details that again appeared to be from a real person. OK, things are looking hopeful. Tentatively the new details were entered into the login page and holding my breathe, the magic go button was pressed. Nothing much happened straight away, but then that is a good thing – no error message. Then the page loaded and voila my blog was back.

I am so impressed that a site that now hosts 100 000 blogs was able to give human attention to my problem. Well done edublogs and mant happy returns. I’m looking forward to getting back into the blogging seat.