Month: June 2011

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Edutalk fist

Last night I went along to Teachmeet Strathclyde at Jordanhill college, I had signed up a couple of days before and stuck my name down to talk about edutalk.info.

I noticed there were nearly 70 folk signed up and quite a crowd was gathered eating cupcakes when I arrived. This was the first TeachMeet I’d attended when I had not really though much about it or had any involvement with before hand. The participants were mostly students which gave the meet a slightly different energy, slightly more formal and organised than some TeachMeets, the crowd was quietly energetic and motivated.

A couple of the usual suspects were in attendance but I didn’t know the vast majority of attendees.

As usual for teachmeets the presentations were all interesting, with lots of things I either nodded to or was completely surprised by. The compare Paul Campbell kept everything running smoothly.

I was nice to have a round table break in the middle, I went to a Games Based learning table organised by Morven Skinnder, Jen Deyenberg was in the group and has extensive experience in gbl. I suspect learning in Jen’s infant class would be wonderful with or without the high tech additions as I can’t imagine an object or situation she could not animate with learning.

I’ll not go into details of the different presentations or the round table as I am currently chopping up the audio recording I took and posting to Edutalk I had my two minutes talking about Edutalk, should have done 7 as I expect that most folk went huh; without the chance to listen, or see a demo. I am quite pleased with the slide though.

Edutalk is fairly pushing out the episodes at the moment, with the purpos/ed crew adding one a day for their #purposedfutured campaign and the audio from TMLothians11 – TeachMeet Lothians & Borders 2011 which I am (with permission) reposting on Edutalk.

There is still plenty of room for move voices on Edutalk, see the How to EDUtalk to find out how easy it is to join in.

My photos from Teachmeet Strathclyde on my John’s posterous site and there is a Teachmeet strathclyde Edition – Stuff from the strathclyde Teachmeet posterous waiting to be filled up.

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Rain

One of the things I’ve been trying to keep up with (and failing) in my RSS reader is Digital Storytelling | We jam econo

Digital Storytelling (also affectionately known as ds106) is an open, online course that will begin on January 10th, 2011. This course is free to anyone who wants to take it…

About ds106 | Digital Storytelling

I’ve been following mostly through bavatuesdays the blog of Jim Groom.

As an aside I first blogged about Jim a few years ago, pointing to the marvellous Welcome to the People’s Republic of Non-Programistan which seems to have vanished and The Party Line which is still there.

One of the things that the ds106 folk have been doing is creating animated gifs from very short sections of movies. I am still not sure if I see the whole point of this, but it becomes a very addictive process. Recently Jim posted: Creating Animated GIFs with MPEG Streamclip and GIMP and pointed to another tutorial Better Animated GIF Tutorial for PS CS4 « Bionic Teaching. This got me playing and thinking a wee bit on a rainy weekend.

I’ve not got Photoshop and have seldom opened GIMP, but was creating animated gifs just last week for a blog post. I used Gifsicle which is a command line application to create animated gifs and works very well indeed on OSX (and is available for lots of other platforms) Gifsicle is © Eddie Kohler.

I am only using a very few of the many gifsicle options here, you can see all of its features on the Gifsicle Man Page

I wanted to speed up my workflow playflow for messing about in this way and though of SuperCard, my favourite mac application. I’ve used SuperCard to create a simple application (mac only) that will, load a Quicktime compatible movie, grab a short selection of frames, and create an animated gif with a few mouse clicks. The SuperCard bit grabs the frames and then used the gifsicle app (which it contains) to create animated gifs.

I’ve tested the application only briefly on a few different macs (10.4, 10.5 & 10.6 or tiger, Leopard and mostly Snow Leopard) and it seem to work. On the old G4 10.4 machine there is a wee bit of lag grabbing the frames, but it works out ok.

Here is a screencast:

You can download Movie2Gif from my dropbox, it is a rainy afternoon project miles away from a polished bit of software but might be useful/fun for someone.

If you Movie2Gif and give it a try, let me know how you get on, if it gets any positive feedback I’ll do a bit to improve it. Please send any suggestions, bugs etc to me.

Hump Catch

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the Internet gives you access to a world of bloggers, tweeters, speakers, photographers, videographers, and colleagues who will teach you anything you want for nothing more than the price of your time and attention

via downes.ca

Great snippet from Ted Curran quoted by Stephen Downes. I always think PLN is a bit of a mouthful compared to friends, pals or folk I know but this really nails why teachers and learners should be online.