Category:

These are very small touch screen devices — smaller than a tablet but not a cell phone!
(These devices have the capability to install a variety of apps. There are many other devices that support audio and video playback, but not other interactive uses.)

Manufacturers and models:
These devices used to be more plentiful with Palm and Windows mobile handhelds, but now there are just a few.

• Apple (iPod touch)
• Samsung (Galaxy Player)

Pricing:

$200+

Strengths:

• Ultra mobile
• Low cost

Weaknesses:

• Limited uses
• No built-in keyboard
• Consumption-oriented

Killer applications:

• Multimedia viewing
• Ebooks

Things to consider and some opinions:

• Think about your curriculum goals before deciding on any devices.
• While these devices are no substitute for a laptop, there is still a lot you can do with them. (Remember all the great things teachers and students did with Palm handhelds?) Having a few of these low cost, highly mobile devices can be a boon for differentiation.
• These devices come with different operating systems (Android, iOS) and have different applications available. If you start by thinking about what you want to accomplish with the devices and then look for a device that has applications that support that purpose, you’ll be ahead of the game.

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I felt this way about Windows Movie Maker — an easy to use, flexible, and free movie editing program that used to come preinstalled on Windows machines. With Vista and Windows 7 though, Microsoft is pushing Windows Live Movie Maker. In my experience, it doesn’t have some of the features of the old Movie Maker. Maybe there are advantages as well, but I haven’t found them.

Anyway, I just found out though that you can easily install the old v 2.6 Windows Movie Maker on a Windows 7 machine. (Don’t know why I didn’t try to do this before.:) Here’s the link. Enjoy.

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This is a nice workaround for a way to embed videos to a web site without having to put it up on YouTube, TeacherTube, or some other sharing site.

The advantages of embedded content are streaming (faster loading), greater compatibility, and preserving context (not sending your user/student off somewhere else).

The post Using Google Docs to embed videos appeared first on K12 Handhelds.

Sal Kahn has built a tremendous collection of over 1800 open-licensed videos offering instruction in math and science. They cover topics in arithmetic, algebra, geometry, statistics calculus, and more. These videos are licensed under CC BY SA which means you can use them free of charge and even host them on your own web site, as long as you agree to share (use a CC BY SA license) on any derivative products you build.

Up until now, the videos have only been available on YouTube, which has posed problems for educators. Now, however, the Khan videos are available elsewhere! Curriki has them available as both embeddable and downloadable files. They have also created a group to “organize, extended and build a community of practice around this content.” This is a great opportunity to collaboratively remix this content and add to it. (I have some ideas myself to to remix some of this into a series of middle school math courses in Moodle.)

Another site has collected the Khan videos for download onto a USB drive or server.

There are sure to be more creative uses of this great collection of content to come.

The post Great video math content for mobiles appeared first on K12 Handhelds.

Ancient Egypt

Ancient China

In addition, I’ve been working on some shareable media sets — collections of open-licensed photos, diagrams, maps, audio, video, etc. that can be used by teachers or students in word-processed documents or presentations or used to create web sites or other multimedia presentations.

The following shareable media sets are now available:

Social studies

• Ancient Egypt
• Ancient China
• Africa
• Civil War

Science

• Forces and motion (coming very soon)
• Diversity of life
• Genes
• Properties of matter
• The planets
• Weather
• Cells

For each media element in the set, just right-click the file to find the credit, license, and source link.

I hope to do more of these over time. Let me know if you have ideas or requests.

The post New free resources appeared first on K12 Handhelds.

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.

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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!

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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 post Flipshare conversion to WMV appeared first on K12 Handhelds.

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.

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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.

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