Thing # 21 - Podcasts/Vidcasts

This activity was a lot of fun. I made a number of videos trying to figure out what I wanted to show (teach). Since I was travelling in France, I thought maybe a lesson on French culture, or perhaps a "green" lesson since Angelina Jolie has chosen to move her family to the first BIO village in France, or perhaps a "how to" video. So many choices...tsk, tsk, tsk. I settled for something simple based on my friend's beautiful vegetable garden.


The problem came up in uploading the video to a site. There was information for podcasts, but not much, if at all, on vidcast. I looked at the podcasts sites and the storybook. I did some investigating, including reading other bloggers experiences. Then I happened on the comment from Ka-blog. I tried Teacher Tube and Youtube, but kept getting logged off their sites. This was while in France on WiFi. I thought, surely it must be the connection. Couldn't wait to get back to Houston to verify it. But in Houston, I kept having a similar problem timing out. I disabled the screen protector and was able to upload but they uploads took a very long time. This was with DSL. Tried it with cable connection, and it was a lot faster and no timing out.

Now, with the help of my computer screen, a lot of searches from google and my friend Anick's vegetable garden, I created several video pieces on the life cycle of a plant and parts of a flower. My first problem was getting the audio to work (naughty, naughty finger). My second problem was keeping the camera stable. After many tries, I was finally able to more or less control the excess jumping around and the clarity of the picture. I even found a Spanish drawing to go with the English for the flower. I was not able to zoom in as much as I would have liked for the sample part in Anick's garden, but I wanted so much to use the tomato plant as an example.



I also made a video of the tomato plants' flowers in Anick's vegetable garden to show a real life example.




I was unable to upload the video (too large) on the plant life cycle/flower parts on WiFi. Still trying with cable.
www.youtube.com/user/frasianlat/

Like PowerPoint presentations, there is software to add sound and music to the video. It is nice to have this the ability to do so for free.

The possibilities of podcasts and vidcasts and storybook are awesome. Given the time and imagination, they would certainly enhance and give us another option when creating a lesson. I must recognize that there is a lot of thinking and trial and error to see what works and what doesn't. And, of course, can't forget time.

for video-google sources: http://www.norman.k12.ok.us/092/techscope/Image15.gif
http://www.prairiefrontier.com/pages/families/flwrparts.jpg
http://www.juntadeandalucia.es/averroes/concurso2004/ver/09/partes.gif