Blip.tv rocks. Last week, in the post “Lecturecasting on a Shoestring with a Macbook, Ustream, CamTwist, MPEG Streamclip and Blip.tv,” I described how I was using the site to provide lecturecasts of my “Technology 4 Teachers” class sessions this term. Today in week 2 of our class, we focused on social bookmarking. It took about thirty minutes this afternoon to edit, compress, and upload my primary lecture today as well as the subsequent Q & A session with students. Both videos were added to my T4T channel on Blip, which is iPhone / iPod Touch accessible as well as browser ready. I think it is SO COOL Blip automatically formats the site depending on whether a mobile browser (like Safari for iPhone) is used or a standard desktop web browser! This is how the site formats on the iPhone. Episodes stream and play directly from the site, without any iTunes synchronization required.
My wireless lapel microphone worked fine today since I used new batteries, so I had my choice of either publishing our class sessions from the 9-11 or the 11-1 class. Since I published the 9 am lecture last week, I published the class recordings from the 11 am class today. This is the mic setup I used again with Camtwist, sans a webcam. All the video shared today was from my desktop.
The first video is 62 minutes and 45 seconds long, and took 7 1/2 minutes to encode to MP4 iPod format using MPEGstreamclip. I used the same settings as last week. The unedited FLV file I downloaded from Ustream was 244.6 MB in size, slightly edited (with copyrighted music by Brad Paisley and our EduTopia video clip removed) the exported MP4 file weighed in at 134.8 MB. It took about ten minutes for this file to upload to blip.tv over my home cable connection.
The second video file, which included our Q&A, took just under 4 minutes to encode with MPEGstreamclip. The Ustream-downloaded FLV was 109 MB, the exported MP4 was 75.4 MB. Play time on this video is 36 min, 16 sec.
Last week I configured my T4T Blip “Pro” account (remember that’s an amazing bargain at $8 per month – and no, I don’t have any affiliations with or kickbacks from Blip to give them this plug) to auto-post new episodes to our class shared learning blog / scribe post blog. Feeds from that blog as well as other RSS sources for our class auto-feed into our course Facebook page as well as a new Netvibes page I created as an aggregated informational portal of content for our class.
This diagram illustrates the steps in my current lecturecasting process. Note the only phase where intervention is required is in post-production editing of the downloaded Ustream FLV file, as it is converted, meta-tagged and uploaded (with session art created in Seashore) to Blip.tv. After that, Blip auto-posts to Blogger and that RSS feed is automatically grabbed by both our class Facebook page and class Netvibes portal.
As I mentioned in last week’s post, I’m not naive to think many of my students who attended class both last week and this week are going to spend much time using these lecturecasts now. It is fantastic to have them, however, because I have one student who is officially going to join our class tomorrow, and next week (week 3) will be her first chance to attend in person. Thanks to these lecturecasts, she will have considerable media support available to help her catch up with her classmates and the content she’s missed so far.
I created a new page in our course curriculum wiki (Course Communication Tools) this week which includes all our course communication tools, and added some icons to it this evening. Some of these are duplicitive (like Netvibes and Facebook) but because these tools present information in different ways, hopefully they will help all the learners in our class (including me!) better access and process the information streams we’re creating and using together.
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aggregator, blip, blog, facebook, lecturecast, mpegstreamclip, publish, ustream, lecturecasting, netvibes, webct, blogger, aggregate
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On this day..
- Remember TEACHERS Make the Biggest Difference, Not Devices – 2012
- Teacher Leader Effectiveness (TLE) and the Tulsa Model #oaesp12 – 2012
- More iPhone Videography Success with ReelDirector – 2011
- Browser Wars and Codecs: WebM, H.264, Flash, Silverlight and the Future of Web Video – 2011
- Watch and Read Citizen Journalist Reports from the Inauguration Tuesday – 2009
- Spam on the rise – 2007
- Southwest digital storytelling contest – 2007
- Thoughts on digital discipline – 2007
- Gifts from Christopher Paolini – 2007