Engaging your students in creating standards-based projects is a great way to differentiate instruction.

But what to do when your students want to rip their favorite CDs to include music in their project? If you are posting the work online, this probably doesn’t fall under “fair use,” and it is important to model good copyright adherence with our students.

Creative Commons and open music to the rescue! There is now a wealth of open-licensed music that you and your students can use in your projects.

I love the sites ccMixter (contemporary; note that there is a small amount of music here with “adult language” but this site is not blocked in most schools) and MusOpen (classical) for this, but if you’d like to give students a little more limited selection of music to streamline the time they spend on it, we’ve set up this page with a limited selection of open-licensed music that you can use for free and legally for any student work.

Make sure to have your students attribute the source for any works they use, including music. For these music files, just right-click the mp3 file and view properties to see the source and license details.

Enjoy! And if there are any particular types of music you’d like to see added, let us know.

I have been asked many times how you can do “green screen” in Windows Movie Maker. (This technique, also known as chroma key, lets you import a background image, for example, the Taj Mahal, and then composite in video of a person over it. The video is shot with a solid green or sometimes blue background, which is then electronically brought in as the background image.)

My standard answer has always been that Windows Movie Maker doesn’t do that. You need a more sophisticated video program. But it turns out that is wrong.

I also assumed that iMovie would do this. Then I was at a school the other day working with 2nd grade students on weather reports that were planned to be chroma key’d in to pictures the kids had colored. I tried to do this on iMovie, but was surprised to find that the version they had didn’t support this.

So I did a little digging on chroma key and Windows Movie Maker and found this: a very easy to install and use add-on to WMM that makes chroma key a simple transition effect!

In a matter of minutes, we had some very cute videos!

I’ve reported here earlier about an easy way to convert Flip camera movies to WMV files so that you can import them into Windows Movie Maker.

Imagine my surprise last week when several folks in a workshop I was facilitating agreed to a Flip upgrade, only to find that after the upgrade to Flipshare v5, converting to WMV no longer worked.

While I am still waiting for an answer about whether this is a “feature” or a “bug,”* I did find a way to un-upgrade and return the conversion functionality. Here it is:

(I suggest you back up any video files on the camera before proceeding.)

Connect to your computer and open the Flip icon. Delete all files except for the DCIM folder.

Empty your recycle bin.

Disconnect the camcorder.

A. Uninstall FlipShare
1. Go to Control Panel>Programs and Features and remove Flip Share.

B. Reinstall FlipShare 4.5
1. Reboot your computer
2. Ensure that your camcorder is not connected to the computer
3. Click on this link and follow the on-screen instructions: http://download.theflip.com/update.theflip.com/app/fvsw/451/update/Setup_FlipShare.exe
4. Reboot again and launch FlipShare

(And obviously, if you want to keep this functionality, say no to future Flip upgrades.)

* Note to anyone from Cisco who might be reading this, eliminating this functionality would be tragic to many who use Windows Movie Maker as an editing platform. Using third-party conversion tools for this (as your tech support responses suggest) is not an option to many. Please bring back the conversion utility!

The new Flip Ultra camera (120 min. version), as well as the HD models, use an MP4 format. This doesn’t import directly into WIndows Movie Maker like the AVIs do, but the conversion process to WMV files is very easy using the built in Flip software.

To do this, you’ll first need to install the FlipShare software, which you can do directly from the camera. Then:

• Plug in your camera and run FlipShare.
• Select the videos you want to convert.
• Click Online under Share at the bottom of the screen.
• Select Other Web sites. Click Next.
• Click the radio button next to Other. Click Next.
• Click Go and wait until you get a message that the conversion is done. (There’s a status box in the lower left corner. Depending on the number of length of clips you’re converting, it can take a while.)
• The converted clips will be put in a folder on your desktop.

Other notes of interest….

- This process reduces the resolution of HD movies. Depending on your application, this may or may not be important.

- Make sure you do this BEFORE you take movies off your camera. Also, don’t rename the movies on your camera, or FlipShare won’t recognize them. (You can rename them after you do the conversion.)

- For Mac users, the MP4 files will import directly into iMovie.

Pure Digital Technologies just announced a new video camera, the Mino HD. The resolution is 1280 x 720, and the price is just $229.

Based on the performance of the other Flip cameras, this one should be great. (I’m making my holiday gift list.:)

By the way, I’m facilitating the workshop “Become a Mini-Movie Producer ** CAMERA INCLUDED” (which includes the Flip Ultra) at NCETC in Greensboro, NC on Dec. 1 and at NCCE in Portland, OR on Feb. 17 and 18. I’d love to see you at either of these conferences or at your school or district.

Well, the workshop on “Using Mobile Technology to Differentiate Instruction” that I wrote about earlier is pretty well finished. I’m really happy with the content in it and think this is a great resource for schools using mobile tech and looking for resources.

I’ve structured this in a wiki, and it is intended to be used for either a face-to-face workshop or as an online self-guided learning experience.

This is licensed under a CC BY SA license, so you are free to use it for your own purposes as well.

This is my first attempt at using a wiki to facilitate both a F2F workshop and a self-guided experience. If you go through it, let me know what you think.

As a part of the fun I’m having contributing to Wikijunior (part of Wikibooks, offering free, open content textbooks), I’ve taken an animal alphabet book there and made video and ebook versions of it.

They’re available for viewing and download here.

There are versions for the desktop, various handhelds, iPods, and even a Mobipocket ebook version. (One of the not-fun things about creating video is all the format issues. I think we’ve put about everything up here, but let me know if anything’s been missed.)

If you haven’t ventured into the world of contributing to wikis, Wikijunior is a great place to start. (Try the Human Body book or Ancient Civilizations.) The more people who contribute to these free “copyleft” resources, the better they will be. If you’re not sure how to start, try something small like fixing an error or just adding a couple sentences. It’s a lot of fun!

I love the recent explosion of user-created video content that’s going on in the world. It’s creative, thought-provoking, and empowering. I’ve also written previously about the great potential of video to help differentiate instruction and enrich student learning.

However [rant coming]…the wide variety of video formats, codecs, etc. is driving me crazy! The more time I spend with video, the more time I spend with conversion tools and help pages about what device and software use what format and what codec, and the more time I spend mumbling about why this *%#%&*(# video won’t play right.

One tool I’ve found really useful for this though is Zamzar. This is a free online converter that works not only with video, but also with images, docs, and audio. One really useful thing this tool does very well is to convert videos from YouTube and TeacherTube, so that you can view them on a variety of devices such as iPods and handhelds. You just upload the video (or a link) and select the format you want. Then they email you a link for the converted file. (They do seem to have some DNS problems with their email system, but I’ve found it works well with gmail accounts, so if you have problems getting an email, try that.)

As with all web-based content, make sure to watch for copyright and attribution issues. And with all Web 2.0 services, you should read the Terms of Service.

And for those who are curious, the name is a take-off on Gregor Samsa, intended to connote transformation.

With all the iPods that are out there and the power of mobile devices to differentiate instruction, I’ve been looking at various ways to incorporate more interactivity into iPod content.

I started with Quizzler, a program that I really love for handhelds. A big benefit of this is that if you already have a bunch of Quizzler quizzes created, it’s an easy port. However, the features of this are pretty basic and include no multimedia support.

Next I got the quiz program PodQuiz Maker. It’s basically a front end to the Notes program. Good idea, but not the greatest implementation. It does have a way to link to sound and video files, but it’s very awkward.

Then Apple announced the new iQuiz program as an iPod game. (Tony Vincent has written a review of it here.) It has a beautiful interface, but no way to link to sound or video files. For my envisioned application in education, this misses the whole point. (We want to be able to provide information and then have a way to interact with it.)

Next, I found Mogopop. This is getting closer. They have a nice web-based interface for content creation. You can link to sound, video, and images. There’s no built-in way to do quizzes, but you can do this through hyperlinks. The program is very new and seems a bit buggy in places, but it has definite potential.

Here’s a sample project I made:

(You’ll need to download the Mogopop Manager program to download this to your iPod.) Once you get it to your iPod, it will be in Extras.

The next thing to build into this is recordkeeping. That’s a big project though.

Does anyone know anything else out there for creating interactive content for the iPod? I’m not sure whether to wait until Apple realizes that closing their device to developers is unwise (probably a very long wait), hope some developers come out with better tools, or start working on something myself.