Video Lecture Capture - Open Source Project

5 'Time Wasters' or Gap Fillers for Presenters

Sometimes you need, um, how do I put this, a 'pause' between content in a demonstration or presentation. Also, most audiences get bored while waiting for you to set up your audio/visuals and the rest.

Here are 5 things you can do for your audience to fill the gaps between the real stuff, and keep them engaged.

1. Take a Poll with their mobile phones
   
2. Visualize Tweets Live!
   
3. Slide show of Meme's
4. Optical Illusions
5. Logic Puzzles
   

VoiceThread for formative assessment

This has to be one of the best elearning tools I've come across in 2010. VoiceThread is an user driven presentation tool, witih collaborative text or voice notes that can be added to each slide.

As I've heard someone say already, you have to see it to understand how good this can really be. Play with this embeded VoiceThread below, (yes, bonus points for embedability).

Neovet Moodle Moot Prezi

I'll be using Prezi for my Moodle Moot presentation on Embedding New Media, this July in Melbourne. I love how new presentation tools, such as SlideShare, Screenr and Prezi, work both offline and online, giving way to flexible delivery. Prezi is yet to add audio, so the trick for the full blown presentation experience is to combine Prezi with Screenr and simply record audio over your Prezi and then republish as a Screenr object.

Below is my prezi, or here is the full Audion Version of my presentation, part 1 and 2.

Embed with new media on Prezi

Speed is everything to mlearning

Mobile content is about to become that much more engaging and useful for training as users will benefit from the increased speed of 4G, set to be 10 times faster than 3G, that is a real game changer in terms of usability.

At the end of this video you will see that you can stream Video from your mobile device with only a 2second lag, to a variety of online formats.

HTC EVO video

Action! Green Screen in YMIS room

Google Wave & elearning

Well if you feel the hype of Google Wave, then you be feeling it's time to say goodbye to some of your favorite web apps as the Wave seems to be an 'all in one' solution to web communication/collaboration and fun too!.

For learning, it's the real time function, file sharing and embedabillity (new word?), that's got neovet excited. Imagine a mash-up of Skype, Facebook, Twitter, DimDim, iGoogle......you get the picture, prepare to surf the wave late 2009.

YouTube EDU . video training on demand

My colleagues and I where just contemplating the use of YouTube to post-host our training video materials outside our own media portal as a way to market our training courses, when my brother in Melbourne let me know that YouTube EDU is an education specific sub-section of YouTube with channels of mainly US college lectures, promos and students antics.

This idea isn't new, see apples iTunes U for example, but most people are familiar with using , and most ARE using the popular YouTube video portal. This means the EDU initiative will have legs.... if you want to read more about YouTube EDU this story is worth a read.

To become a YouTube Edu partner you need to register at this site, and if you don't fit the criteria of a partner you will get this message as I did.

Thank you for your interest. Based on an automated review of your account it is unlikely that you will qualify for the YouTube Partner Program. Applications are reviewed for a variety of criteria, including but not limited to the size of your audience, country of residence, quality of content, and consistency with our Community Guidelines and Terms of Use.

Read the guidelines for partnership first, but unless you have original content that is view by thousands of viewers, don't bother. Australia is now included in the approved countries, and if you do really well you can monetize your channel. Maybe build your audience first then apply.

I think that if your a partner or not, people will still stumble across your channels in the common section through the global search tool. That said, YouTube EDU is a shot in the arm for flexible delivery and points towards a future of portable learning becoming the norm.

iSpring Convert PP to Flash

i Spring is yet another, open source wonder-tool that I've found, and one that is a welcomed inclusion to the feast of learning tools at neovet. For a couple of years i've been looking for a simple PowerPoint to Flash tool and this one is as easy as click and convert.

You will then have a html page, a flash script (player) and a media folder to embed into your LMS. iSpring will convert all the slides with animations, audio and video to a flash file.

Student Feud

Survey Tool SMS Poll is a great tool for real time polling. We are trialling it this term with a group of about 100 students in a lecture session to gauge the group opinion across a number of areas.

They have free trial for up to 25 votes per poll, and you can pay a little to boost your sample. The speed is incredible, enabling you to capture responses and present a poll graph back to an audience under 60 seconds.

Live polling might be no more than a gimmick to a small audience, but uses well with a larger group, can help create a high level of audience participation and fun!.

Chroma Key Narrator

Want cool backgrounds for your online learning videos?

Check out these video tutorials on Green Blue Screen
Chroma Key can help draw the narrator to the attention of the learner.

I have an idea that video narrator could appear in the body of the text with the same background color as the text background, effectively making them blend in with the content, hiding the player. Note: the user could still control the video device playing the narrator with hover controls.

If this guy could only talk to you now, you'd get what i mean.

Power Tube

You might like to embed video into your powerpoint presentations from the web. This article from the Wired Wiki, gives tips on on or off line embedding for you tube to PowerPoint.

ePresence

Have i just found a quality free video coference tool?