Karen C. Seddon’s DEN Blog

Today is Super Tuesday in the political world and Fat Tuesday, the final day of Mardi Gras. Now how can you compete with that? You can’t! So let’s just have a little “tuesdays” fun with creative technology. I am out and about asking teachers to describe how technology has impacted teaching and learning in their classrooms and without a doubt, there is a greater desire to create electronic presentations particularly in video format. Most of us (me, included) are still too overwhelmed by video cameras and file formats, what works with what and so on. This “tuesdays” I’d like to take a look at an amazing website I learned about at FETC from Hall Davidson.

A creative website
As we become more and more digital, it’s becoming more an more complicated to understand file format and what works on what machine. Media-Convert will help you understand the vast file formats that are out there AND the best part is that they will convert the files for you into a format that you want. I had a nice surprise while using Keynote (Mac’s presentation software) because it let me convert it to PowerPoint, Flash, a video and even a pdf. However, not all machines are alike and we want to make our creations accessible to our students and other teachers. Using Media-Convert is the best manner of converting audio files, video presentations, documents, spreadsheets, and all electronic creations in our classrooms. It’s incredibly convenient because you upload your file to their site, they do the converting and then you downloaded it to your machine. Best of all, it’s online. You need no software on your machine and you have access to it anywhere you have access to the Internet. That’s so 21st century! DO NOT use this site with your students. Because it is FREE the ads are obnoxious. For that I am sorry.

An image to share

Huber, Joe. neworleansfloat1.jpg. 2006. Pics4Learning. 5 Feb 2008 <http://pics.tech4learning.com>

A proverb
“You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives.” Clay P. Bedford

An encouragement
What is the last step of the writing process? Publish! Everyone who writes wants to be published. This certainly applies to electronic creations. I want to encourage you to share your presentations, documents and lessons with others. There’s no telling how you may be encouraging someone else. It may be a teacher looking for the perfect lesson. It may be a student who needs to see the same concept from a different angle. Creating our lessons digitally allows us to “publish” our documents and it encourages the students to be more diligent and professional with their assignments when they know they have a wider audience. Students today know the value of communicating online. Let’s give them the skills to be published authors in all electronic formats. Let us know some of your experiences with publishing your works or student works on my blog.

How do you do that?
Here are a few quick steps for converting a file using Media-Convert. Click this link and scroll down to How to convert a file. Click Choose File and upload the file from your computer that you want to convert. It will automatically detect what kind of file it is! (now that’s pretty incredible in itself). Scroll down a little bit more and look for output format. The drop window will give many possibilities to choose from. I went from a PowerPoint to a pdf. The combinations are limitless. Think of all the times you took little videos with your digital camera and they wouldn’t play on someone else computer. Change the format here. Think of your students that don’t have the same programs that you do. Change to pdfs. here. Almost all computers will read a pdf these days. The point is - go digital, find a format that works most universally for your audience and then publish! For those teachers who are already publishing electronic creations in the classroom, please consider joining the conversation in our “tuesdays” Professional Learning Community.

What are teachers saying?

Tales from the Teachers in the Trenches
“Technology affects my students all day, every day, especially with the collaboration that is happening between them. We use BlackBoard to share presentations, websites and even Gaggle.net email. ” Autumn Stiene, Dundee Elementary School, 1st grade

As always, I am
Ubiquitously yours,
K