Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Chat with 4th Grader Kiana in Holland

On Wednesday, October 11, 2006, we met via Skype with a 4th grader who's been in Holland with her parents since the start of the school year. She'll not be returning to the States until January, after our Winter Holidays, so we thought it might be a good idea to get together before that. Our first meeting was eventful and lasted nearly an hour, with very little audio drop out and a very good video connection.

I had Skype running on my laptop and the laptop connected to a projector and we ran audio through my Polycom Communicator. There was some skippiness in the audio but generally we heard everything Kiana said from her apartment in Holland and she heard everything we said in our computer lab in Nashville, Tennessee. This is certainly one of the good ways the earth is "flattening."

Click below to launch a brief video in Windows Media Player:


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posted by Scott Merrick @ 7:06 PM 0 comments

Thursday, October 05, 2006

GarageBand3 for Podcasting Class!

I was able to convince friend and colleague Julene Reed--Director of Academic Technology at St. George's Independent Schools in Collierville, Tennessee, Apple Distinguished Educator, and Apple Podcasting teacher for educators worldwide--to come into our Tibbott Center Apple Lab for a class to introduce Matt Haber's Radio and Podcasting class to the wonders of GarageBand3, the newest version of Apple's marvelous multimedia platform that actually has a tab on its welcome screen that says "New Podcast!"

For those of you who might not know what a podcast is, feel free to check out my own version of the story at my Vanderbilt Center for Science Outreach podcasting page.

I put together a brief series of movie clips to celebrate and archive the experience. I want to thank Julene for this completely donated tutorial. She's taking off for a conference in London tomorrow and I hope she gets a peek at my little film (created with still-photo Canon camera in video mode and patched together with Windows Movie Maker. The next time I do one of these it might just be with iLife/GarageBand3!

Here's the "movie":


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posted by Scott Merrick @ 12:29 PM 0 comments