LearnShifting

Now as a rule, I don't support the idea of downloading video from places like YouTube as it contravenes their terms and conditions. The preference is always to embed the content into a course in our Learning Management System using the embed HTML code that is available for just about all embedded videos nowadays. This ensure that the content lives in the cloud and you are just linking which makes your LMS Moodle sequences more portable.

However... if you are teaching in a very remote location and the live playback of video across the Internet and the intranet is not there yet, and the last ting on your mind is building a portable piece of courseware because you just want the dang video to play... there is an option. It will cost you 39.90 US dollars.

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This entry was posted on May 26, 2011 at 4:53 AM and has received 435 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

 So we held our successful live broadcast the other week with up 78 streams of video simultaneously consumed by locations across the Northern Territory. In my last post I rivus on how good it was and in this post I want to focus on what we could have done better and what we did do well.

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This entry was posted on November 16, 2010 at 11:18 AM and has received 1176 views. There are currently 2 comments. Print this entry.

Rivus TV is an Australian company that has a great video broadcast product relevant for education in a way different to our existing video conferencing solutions. Rivus 421 is a box that is about the same size as a shoe box and has 4 video inputs. You plug it into your network or switch on the 3G Internet modem and after plugging a camera in and choosing that video port, you are broadcasting live to the Internet.

How do people view your video? Well read on...

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This entry was posted on October 20, 2010 at 8:04 AM and has received 1123 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

We have a number of exceptional learning assets from the Australian Children Television Foundation. These are distributed on DVD and are in a variety of formats. The most common formats are Adobe PDF, DVD Movie, executable flash, FLV (Flash Video) and some html documents.

The challenge is to convert where required and upload the content into our network in a way that teachers can access and use within our network, but the resources cannot be copied or reused outside of the scope of our license.

The content of the DVDs should be in a format that a teacher in a remote or urban location can play the video on an electronic whiteboard or projector to the class and if a student misses out because they were absent, they can login from school or home to review the content at their convenience.

How did we do it?

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This entry was posted on January 25, 2010 at 11:54 AM and has received 323 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

How do you take YouTube and improve on it? You livestream it. Livestream TV came to my attention when those folks at Microsoft used it in Australia to launch Windows 7.0.

Now, at work we use Adobe Connect which has a Flash Media Server doing all the hard work streaming live video out to the masses. It made sense that creating an education based TV station with a mixture of live content, locally created content and purchased material would be a way of engaging with all manner of people.

Being a pilot of little aircraft I am quite concerned about safety - especially mine. I was looking for something that could provide a TV station look and feel and didn't require the pockets of James Packer or the skills of Spielberg to produce something useful.

Welcome to livestream. First the bad news. You do need ADSL and that is just the way it is. Also when experimenting from the office the video didn't record (the sound did though). At home it worked a treat so there are still some learning curves and bumps to negotiate.

Basically with a webcam, laptop and microphone you can be delivering content to your virtual class or to the world. If you already use a product like REACT or Adobe Connect don't jump ship, but do have a peek in a spare moment. They have free tools for running your channel and if you have only 50 viewers, your channel is free. You can import your videos from YouTube. I have only imported mine. You can create playlists for when you are not live so now everyone can be a FoxTel or an Austar and have a bunch of repeat shows.

Enough talk... show me the channel...

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This entry was posted on December 2, 2009 at 4:58 AM and has received 507 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.