My Brain Hurts

www.wordle.net

What an interesting little web application. It creates word clouds from a list of text that you paste in. Quite a few options for fonts (interesting font names) and colour pallettes. This is very use for presentation slides and would creat interesting word lists for any school project.

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.

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.

This wonderful little utility is a DVD to mpeg-4 converter. I’m yet to find any DVD it does not work with. Really useful to convert to iPod format. It gets a giant thumbs up and should be an essentail part of your ulility cupboard. Runs on Mac, Linux and Windows.

http://handbrake.m0k.org/

These are really high quality, very motivational and a great teaching tool. There are 12 different categories of podcast that you can subscribe to. They are free and NG permits broader use within educational settings as defined in their conditions of use.

For more information and to subscribe visit:

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/podcasts/