Simon has posted the second part of Ian Jukes presentation over at his blog. Click here to have a listen to the second episode of Edcast. Thanks Simon!
I’ve enjoyed reading all the comments about the previous post of the Ministry of Education’s Microsoft Agreement, or lack thereof, in the case of Mac schools. Keep ‘em coming! You may enjoy listening to this podcast from National Radio recommended by my brother-in-law about the agreement.
I have been wondering about the idea of using Parallels on a Mac and Vista as a way to get around the licensing agreement. Are Mac schools eligible to get Vista for free from the Ministry? If so, would they then be able to get the PC version of Microsoft Office to use at school? Is this just getting too convoluted? Parallels doesn’t cost that much and there are other reasons to run it on a Mac network, such as, using MUSAC. I have Parallels installed on my machine and have been waiting to get Windows up and running (I’m still trying to decide whether to do XP or go Vista). It’ll be good being able to access both platforms.
The podcast mentioned above also covers the use of other types of search engines, including Quintura. Quintura for Kids looks really cool. They describe it as a “visual find engine”. Along those lines there is also Grokker which is worth checking out. Both are good alternatives to using Google and work by presenting the search results in “clouds” or as a “map”. Both also have the option of the listing search results in the standard kind of way.
While Google has become all encompassing, I don’t believe that it serves our younger students well as a search engine because it’s particularly text heavy. In the past I have used Yahooligans quite successfully because it’s visually more interesting to students and the content is more tailored their needs/reading levels. You have to watch out though because it does have the latest “cool” stuff on there e.g. movies, games, and the search tool is somewhat secondary.
And in a last, unrelated thought, webcams are a mixed blessing. It may feel as though winter is upon us but the lovely folks at the Metservice aren’t able to share any beautiful snowy pictures of the ski-fields just yet. Poor Cardrona and Whakapapa look a bit… forlorn. Let’s pray for a cold snap before the school holidays!
June 10th, 2007
I’m not normally one to grumble BUT…
What is with PowerPoint having difficulty with audio files? The help file says it supports all sorts of different audio files:
“Types of sound files that PowerPoint can use
You can insert sounds in the following formats:
• Audio Interchange File Format (AIF, AIFF, AIFC)
• Apple QuickTime Movie Sound (MOV, MOOV)
• Apple System Sound (SFIL)
• Apple System Resource Sound (RSRC, rsrc)
• CCITT A-Law (European Telephony) Audio Format (ALAW)
• CCITT U-Law (US Telephony) Audio Format (AU, SND, ULAW)
• Microsoft Windows Waveform (WAVE, WAV)
• MPEG Layer 3 Audio (MP3)
• Advanced Audio Coding (AAC): MPEG-4 Audio
• Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI, MID, KAR)”
Yeah, right. I’ve made a few presentations in my time and putting audio in just seems to be unreliable.
I opened up my presentation from Learning@School to edit for tomorrow and tweak to suit the new audience, a new group of teachers I haven’t work with before. I changed the Master for my slide design and then clicked through to View Slideshow. When it came time to click on the audio files (which had worked perfectly well at the conference) there was nothing happening i.e. no audible audio! I had the same kind of issue last year when doing a different presentation on podcasting at uLearn06. The technician assigned to my room couldn’t get it to work either. We deleted the file, re-inserted it, made sure it was a compatible file type, checked the sound was not on mute (that would have been embarrassing) and all those sorts of thing, but no luck.
The process I go through to insert audio goes like:
Insert - Movies and Sounds - Sound From File…
I’ve also tried adding the audio files to my Gallery and trying Insert - Movies and Sounds - Sound From Gallery. I’ve tried saving and restarting PowerPoint. Has anyone got any solutions? Have I overlooked something perfectly obvious? Perhaps it’s just time for a therapeutic tea break?
After last year’s experiences Keynote seemed like a good option. Being a Mac fan it made perfect sense. It’s pretty nifty to use but then I couldn’t figure out how to have multiple audio files on one slide. It seemed that you needed a slide for each file and the options for playing said file were more limited than on PowerPoint.
I do have a backup plan. I have made a playlist in iTunes with the audio files in the correct order. It’s not as seamless as having them embedded in your presentation but at least they’re organised and ready to go. iTunes won’t fail me… touch wood.
March 27th, 2007