Sunday lunchtime blues...

I am still not blogging regularly enough, but I thought I would throw a few bits into one post.

I wanted to share a really good youtube clip in our last session, but I forgot. One of my year 7 students showed it to me as it had helped them with their multiplication. Its called vedic mathematics. BTW - does anyone know how to embed a youtube clip on the blog page rather than just giving a link?

I went to the ICA in London last week and found it very inspiring. I met the director Mike Leigh and had a good Hot Chocolate. Do visit if you are near Buckingham Palace.

I should at this point plug my brothers website as he has just gone freelance as an animated graphic designer.

As it has been half-term, then I havent done much real work this week, but I do think spotify is genius and could really change the way we listen to music.

Looking forward to tuesday...

Tilt Shift Photography

One of my favourite short tasks that we are looking at with our older students is the use of tilt-shift photograhy editing. If you havent seen it before Tilt Shift minature style photos are pictures of real life scenes that are manipulated to look like model photographs. 

Using Photoshop the students have some interesting results.

Above is a quick example of an original image downloaded from the Internet, and then the same image after tilt shift manipulation.

A very good tutorial to use Photoshop to create this effect can be found here.

Some good examples of tilt-shifted images can be found here

If you want to see the results quickly automated, you can try the 'tilt shift maker' here.

...a few things

I have been playing with Twitter over the last fortnight, inspired by the Hudson River 'Crash landing' story. There has also been a lot in the press this week about its popularity.

A few of the companies that I deal with have started to use Twitter to inform of news updates and it seems to work - it seems to be superseding RSS feeds. I am going to experiment with using twitter to keep in touch with my Year 12's (Double Award A'Level ICT), as they all seem to be quite comfortable with the technology. From my experience of the College VLE, students like quick, short and regular updates. Which goes against my blogging experience so far!

There are two pieces of software that I want to share with people that have been a big help in converting video and music for the students to use in their MovieMaker 'Digital Stories':

Cinemaforge is brilliant for downloading and converting youtube clips, so that they can be imported into MovieMaker (as a WMV) and then edited. DVDvideosoft also make a very simple youtube to MP3 converter, so that audio tracks can imported into MovieMaker.

A lot of the video clips need to be 'indexed' first before importing. The Windows Media File Editor is brilliant for this.

Best of all, all three of these are free. Hope it helps!

My first ever blogging experience!

Whilst working with my Year 10's on their 'Digital Story' video today , an interesting situation occurred. They simply do not 'physically' own music any more! For the project the students need to choose the soundtrack to their short film and have been asked to source the music file for the piece. The problem is that the only place that students seem to have their music stored is on their phone or ipod! It seems that obtaining the music file is now done via youtube (and using a series of converters) or downloading it via a number of sources. When I mentioned importing the CD of the track using media player onto the computer, I was looked at like I was born in the 1800's. 

..and getting the music off the device and onto the PC is never straightforward.