Dr. Luanne Fose - The Tweed Geek

Karrin Allyson

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 17:20:11 -0700

Don’t you love it when someone knows you so well, they know exactly what kind of entertainment you would love when you visit them? My cousin, Darrell, did it again! While visiting him in Indianapolis last week, he took me to see the Ball State Jazz Ensemble play and their special guest artist was Karrin Allyson. Ball State’s Jazz Band was pretty good (although they need some jazz improv lessons from the masters at I.U. - David Baker and Dominic Spera) but Karrin was absolutely fabulous! She was nominated for 2 Grammy awards. Somehow I had missed her. How could that be? I love Brasilan jazz and she just came out with a Brasilan jazz CD - “Imagina - Songs of Brasil.” The album includes lots of Jobim songs with her own special touches. Karrin has the voice of a young Rosemary Clooney (as it was in the movie “White Christmas” before it changed from all the cigarette smoking, I suppose - although I liked Rosemary’s vocal sound with that lower voice that she had in later life as well!). She also is a great scatter! Scat is a dying art these days - so few of the jazz artists really do it well. She performs scat effortlessly and with true style.

For more info on Karrin and to check out her tour dates, go to:
http://www.karrin.com/

Farafina Kan

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 16:46:45 -0700

Last weekend I was visiting my cousin in Indianapolis and he took me to see Farafina Kan. Farafina Kan is a professional West African Percussion Orchestra that is dedicated to keeping the history and tradition of traditional African music alive. All I can say is “WOW!” These musicians can rock the house. The drummers were playing some of the most complicated rhythms (2 against 3, 5 against 7, etc.) as if it were nothing. They probably could have brushed their teeth and played those rhythms at the same time and still have kept the beat perfectly! It was amazing! I can’t imagine what your arms feel like after almost 2 hours of straight drumming like that. The women dancers were also awesome with their extreme athletic dancing and I loved the African chant and the wonderful costumes. If you ever have the opportunity to see and hear this group, don’t miss it! They’ll knock your socks off - literally!

Ibanez SR500 Electric Bass

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 09:02:19 -0700

Of course, this bass is capable of all sorts of sounds with the equalizer and depending on the amp you use it can make sounds from twangy country (those of you who know me know I would never use that sound but it’s possible if I somehow ever get converted to play country) to rock to pop to heavy metal to jazz - it can do everything! All the possibilities are there! The fingerboard is very fast and I love the thin neck. Bravo, Ibanez! Here’s another picture of it from the Guitar Center website. Mine looks darker in color like the picture above.

Melodyne Direct Note Access Plug-in

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 08:34:39 -0800

Today someone sent me a link about this cool new music plug-in that in my opinion will change audio recording significantly. The plug-in, called “Direct Note Access” allows one to do edits beyond MIDI but within real audio recording situations instead. With Direct Note Access you can manipulate not only monophonic input but polyphonic input as well - a dream come true for all recording engineers, composers, and arrangers! This is so exciting!

Here’s a quote from the celemony web site explaining more about it:

“Like Melodyne itself, Direct Note Access is a development that will change forever the way we handle audio. In the field of images, it has long been possible with the right software not only to correct the tiniest blemishes but also literally to create new realities: pictures that are utterly believable but show us something that in fact never existed. Direct Note Access will give Melodyne users comparable freedom in the field of audio. With Direct Note Access, Melodyne will allow forms of access to audio material that were unthinkable before – ranging from subtle correction to recomposition.”

Check out the web site for more information at:

http://www.celemony.com/cms/index.php?id=dna

I guess we’ll never have to hear recording goofs again or have 3 million “takes” of a difficult riff that the performer can’t get just right for the recording. This tool would even allow you to correct bad tuning. Just think how different “California Dreamin’” by the Mamas and Papas would have been without that badly out-of-tune flute solo (that drives me crazy everytime I hear it on the radio)! We’ll be able to play with the samples of the greatest musicians and even make new music from the old stuff. Sign me up now! Whoo-hoo!

Access By Design Video

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 23:00:11 -0800

The video, Access by Design: Faculty Awareness Training, is finally ready for primetime! This video will soon be required viewing by all Cal Poly faculty to educate them on the issues of creating accessible course materials in order to comply with state and federal mandates. A link to the video also currently resides on the Chancellor’s accessibility resource web page that the entire CSU will be able to utilize as a training resource for faculty.

My role was extensive in this project. I spent a lot of overtime getting this one done, let me tell you. The purpose of the video was to increase faculty awareness on the issues of ADA compliance and to demonstrate the necessary processes in order to create accessible course materials through proper universal design techniques.

The following lists the “different hats” I wore and my role for the completion of this project:  
Performed as the acting lead in managing the team to bring the project to completion 
Assisted in editing the script and storyboarding the project 
Recorded and edited all the sound and video that was captured for the project 
Composed and mixed the original musical score for the project 
Created open synchronized captions to meet state- and federally-mandated accessibility requirements 
Managed the CTL student assistants’ workload for assisting in the video production 
Produced the final version of the video with proper compression and output formatting 
Properly processed the video with hints for streaming to the QuickTime streaming server 
Created a downloadable version of the video for web site distribution 
Created a DVD of the finished video for distribution, including DVD labeling and case presentation graphics 
Assisted in creating the Blackboard course shells for distribution to university constituents 
Collaborated with other CSU staff to insure that the video worked properly on the Chancellor’s accessibility web site 
A big “thank you” goes out to Jeannie Wells and her team for allowing us to extract clips from the From Where I Sit video series that was developed a few months ago. I believe that the video serves as a excellent example of Cal Poly’s cutting-edge role in encouraging accessibility endeavors to properly train faculty within the California State University (CSU) system.

Note: The video is approximately 16 minutes in length and there are two versions provided here – the first link is for faster-speed internet connections and the second link is for slower-speed internet connections.

You may view the streamed video at either of the links listed below:

http://www.mediaserver.calpoly.edu/ITS/ada/faculty_ada_awareness_384stream.mov 
http://www.mediaserver.calpoly.edu/ITS/ada/faculty_ada_awareness_56stream.mov  

Blabberize

Wed, 9 Jan 2008 14:22:43 -0800

Well, it’s been a long time since a new entry has appeared in my blog. Sorry about that for you faithful viewers! I have been so busy at Cal Poly lately as well as in my personal life that I haven’t taken the time to make blog entries.

Well, what have I been doing you might ask? First off, I’ve been involved in a time-consuming video project for ADA Faculty Awareness for Cal Poly. There for a while in December before Christmas I was working 50 to 60-hour work weeks. When it can be released to the public, I will post the link in my blog for all of you to take a look at. The current plan is to have Cal Poly faculty view the video to understand the relevant aspects of ADA and universal design that they should be concerned about as they create instructional materials. This is all part of the master plan as the campus establishes its policies for compliance by Fall 2008. Boy, we have a lot of work to do to get there by September!

Things have been crazy in the Center for Teaching and Learning this year as we have not only tried to implement the plan for faculty ADA compliance but we have also taken huge steps to implement the Provost’s plan to encourage faculty to integrate technology more into their day-to-day curriculum. It’s kind of amusing that this is necessary (and it is) at a “polytechnic” university, but oh well... WDWWMD (we do what we must do!)

Secondly, I’ve been working on updating my personal eportfolio using iWeb instead of Dreamweaver and that conversion has taken a VERY long time. It will be worth it in the end (I’m not done yet) but the revamp is rather painful as I have to upload and explain all the compositions I have written, etc. In the end, I’ll know it will be a better representation of what I have to offer and can be burned to a DVD for distribution to possible new employers, etc.

Thirdly, I also did a TOTAL redo of the church website that I am webmaster for using iWeb instead of Dreamweaver. I like the Google map features (Click on the “Location” link on the site to check it out) and the cool new features for creating photo galleries. I’ve also included videos and PowerPoint presentations, which weren’t available on our old website, and I’ve used the blog format to post the pastor’s sermons. Podcasts might be forthcoming if we can get a digital recorder at church. Everyone seems to like the changes. Check it out: http://www.atascaderoucc.org/

Ok. Enough with the excuses of why I haven’t been blogging. I’ve been busy, even too busy to surf the waves in Morro Bay much (those of you who know me now know with that comment that I’ve been too busy when I’m not even getting in the water on weekends!)

What I really wanted to talk about today is another great “time-wasting tool” called Blabberize. I’m home sick from work today with this awful thing that has been going around the office for the past couple of weeks. It finally caught up with me no matter how much Airborne I tried to consume, drats! However, I need to plan for teaching a workshop next week so I have been laying in bed with my laptop searching and experimenting with various multimedia tools to introduce to faculty. Haven’t found any real winners yet but I did find this fun tool. I’m not sure of its use for more effective teaching and learning (unless you’re teaching K-12) but it would be a fun way to send an email party invitation or maybe an announcement to your students about a dreaded homework assignment. Use your imagination!

Basically, this is how it works: you make an account, login and upload a photo (less than 500k), set the mouth area with the tool provided, and then you record what you want the picture to say. Blabberize will record your message with the mouth moving. Play it to yourself and then save it. Blabberize embeds it in a web page and gives you a link that you can use later to share with your friends or you can click on “Share.” Check out the silly one I made with my dog, Coda’s, picture this morning:

http://blabberize.com/creation/playBlabber/11342

Ain’t technology grand?

Access By Design Music

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 22:51:38 -0800

More music. This theme was created for the upcoming “Access By Design” video I have been developing to help faculty become more aware of accessibility issues. This is the theme that plays during the closing credits.

Stay tuned for the upcoming video - it’s almost finished!

Memorial to Mozelle Nutt

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 20:18:17 -0800

After a long struggle with Alzheimer’s, my mother passed away on Tuesday, November 27, 2007. This page is dedicated to her and to all she meant to those who had the privilege of knowing her in this lifetime.

Spy Theme Music

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 22:26:40 -0800

Here’s another composition created with Garage Band for a Cal Poly project. This one was designed for a Business 346 online course (taught by Professor Brian Tietje in Marketing) that had a spy theme for the entire course. It’s a combination of using Garage Band loops along with my own composition with a synthesizer. Notice the opening that is played on synthesizer imitating a James Bond type of theme, then the “Mod Squad” sort of cop theme in the middle reminiscent of the early 70’s and the sounds of speed boats, helicopters, and police sirens interspesed throughout taken from GarageBand sound effects. This one was a lot of fun!

Also, check out Brian’s Opening Class video that we created for the project:

http://www.mediaserver.calpoly.edu/Orfalea_College_of_Business/Marketing/btietje/Agent_Briefing_320.mov

Or, how about some bad acting? Stephen Hughes and I created these short videos (10 of them) to provide students with tips before they took the online quizzes in the Blackboard course. The students seemed to get a kick out of them as strange as they were since they added a little pizazz to the course. How weird am I anyway? (If you only knew...) We had to film them in a janitor’s closet. The administrative assistants were starting to wonder what was going on in there, ha. Here’s the first one (yes, that’s me popping in and out of the trees on the Cal Poly campus near the Business building):

http://www.mediaserver.calpoly.edu/Orfalea_College_of_Business/Marketing/btietje/Mole_Instructions_320.mov

Italian Fairy Tales

Tue, 2 Oct 2007 11:20:36 -0700

A few years ago I assisted one of our Italian instructors, Claudia Cremasco, in creating some multimedia for her third-quarter Italian students. This example illustrates the use of Flash to create a lovely visually-rich audio storybook for the students to listen to in order to increase their aural comprehension.

This example is a small portion of the original version to demonstrate how it worked. The original was a Flash .swf file that the students could control but this demo is simply a QuickTime movie and the Scene Control button cannot be used to advance or go back. The storybook was old (something she had owned since childhood) and out of copyright (how lucky for us!)

Although Section 508 now mandates that such media must be captioned when placed online, this media was not captioned because captioning would take away from the learning objective - aural instead of visual comprehension. Comprehension is generally improved with beginning language learners when they can view the text of what is being said and we wanted them to have the aural experience. In order to adhere to the Section 508 mandates, if we were to still use it today we could provide a second captioned version in Italian and follow that with a post assessment to evaluate the students’ improvement when they can view the text of what is being said versus just the aural version. [There’s always a way to get what you want :-) ]

This assignment lends itself to both collaborative OR individual assessment. Here’s some ideas!

Post a link of the fairy tale in Blackboard for individual listening 
Facilitate a discussion about the fairy tale, either in class or in Blackboard’s discussion board 
After the discussion, provide a text version of the fairy tale with the more difficult vocabulary words linked to definition pop-up boxes. As your mouse rolls over the text, certain phrases have links with translation definitions of what the phrase means. This can be done with standard HTML. 
Post an online assessment in Blackboard with questions on key points

The Radical Rodents (Surfing Mice)

Wed, 20 Jun 2007 09:30:36 -0700

Ok, if you thought the surfing dog was “out there,” well, how about this? Surfing mice! That’s right - I found this video on YouTube quite by accident while looking for other surf videos. If you liked this one, check out the second video on YouTube of their antics with an explanation by Shane Willmott, their “coach and mentor.” This guy has WAY TOO MUCH time on his hands!

My question is: “Do the mice actually enjoy it?” Some of the mice look like they do and others look terrified. Maybe he should consider making them little mice lifevests to eliminate their possible fear of drowning. Shoot, if Barbie and Ken can have a lifevest, why not the radical rodents?

“Nora” - The Piano Playing Cat

Mon, 23 Apr 2007 13:55:09 -0700

Ok, for you cat lover’s - equal time to the kittens. Rachelle sent me this video of “Nora - the Piano Playing Cat” that I thought was quite unusual. Nora seems to take her piano playing very seriously and even appears to caress the keys. Unlike other cats who may attempt to play the piano, she doesn’t just walk across the keys or lay down on them like most cats. She sits with proper posture and only plays with her paws. I wish some of my former piano students had been this diligent and “in love” with the piano like she is. She must have been a pianist in a former life! She does seem a little frustrated that she keeps hitting multiple keys that are dissonant. Darn those wide paws!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ860P4iTaM

For more info on Nora, see: http://www.ravenswingstudio.com/docs/cats.html There is a video of her on that site that is different than the one above. At that site she is shown at the bottom of the page in a video played on the Martha Stewart show where she is playing a duet with a piano student. In that duet she is much more tonal and consonant with the key of the Beethoven “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee” played in an easier key of C major than she was in the YouTube video above. In fact, she even attempted to chime in on the G7 chord with the dyad of “F” and “G” so I guess she already knows fundamental music theory. Her owner says her favorite composer is J.S. Bach (A cat after my own heart)!

“Buddy” - The Surfing Dog

Mon, 23 Apr 2007 13:27:26 -0700

I really have got to work on teaching Emily and Coda to surf this summer. I think Emily will be a candidate since she already “duck dives” under the waves when she is at the ocean and chasing her ball in the water but it may not be “in the cards” for Coda since she doesn’t like to venture out past her waist, ha.

Check out this video of “Buddy” the Surfing Dog. Last August Imperial Beach in San Diego ran the first dog surfing competition so there are surely more dog surf stars to come. Watch out Kelly Slater!

Converting GarageBand Podcasts to MP3 Format For Blackboard

Mon, 23 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0700

Recently, several of you who have taken my GarageBand podcasting course have asked me how to directly post a .m4a podcast file into Blackboard so that it will play without the use of a Macintosh podcasting server as the conduit. This option is a possibility with Blackboard but first you must convert the file into an .mp3 file. You will also need to convert the file if you have students who wish to sync the podcast to MP3 players other than the Apple iPod (e.g., Zunes or Rio Players, which don’t accept the standard Apple AAC files). Blackboard will accept both .mp3 and .wav files but not .m4a or AAC files, which is the Apple GarageBand default. Since .wav files are much larger in size than .mp3 files, we’ll focus on converting our podcast to .mp3 format for optimal ease of download.

The good news is that you can convert the .m4a file with software that you already possess on your computer - iTunes. Here’ how:

1. First, within GarageBand you must save the podcast .band file to the Desktop as a .m4a file by selecting Share > Export Podcast to Disk…

Once you have the .m4a file saved to your Desktop, open iTunes and drag the file into your iTunes Library. After a few moments, iTunes will copy the file to the iTunes Library. Sometimes it might be difficult to find the copied file but keep looking - it’s in there! Usually, it is copied to the Music section of the Library rather than the Podcast section that you would naturally expect. (If all else fails, you can always do a search by the file’s name in the iTunes Search window to locate it.) Once you locate the file, you will then use the Advanced menu to convert it into an MP3 file.

2. If you go to the Advanced menu right now, you might see that the choice Convert Selection To… already says Convert Selection To MP3. If that is indeed the case, then you won’t need to change the Preferences in the next step. However, if it says something else, such as Convert Selection To AAC or Convert Selection To AIFF, you’ll need to change your preferences as described below in Steps #3-8.

3. From the iTunes menu, select Preferences…

4. Click on the Advanced tab.

5. Click on the Importing tab.

6. From the Import Using: pull-down menu, select MP3 Encoder.

7. From the Setting: pull-down menu below it, select the type of quality you want your file to have. (Remember, the better the quality of the MP3, the bigger the file will be and thus, it will be a slower download for your students in Blackboard. Consider a compromise to achieve your goal of a good-sounding audio file with a minimal download.)

8. Click the OK button to close the Advanced Importing preference.

9. Now, select the file you wish to convert to MP3 from the iTunes Library so that it is highlighted.

10. Go to the Advanced menu at the top of the iTunes screen and select Convert Selection to MP3

11. You will see iTunes processing the file in the upper iTunes window. When iTunes is done converting the file, search for the MP3 version of your file in your iTunes Library.

12. To make sure you have located the MP3 version (not the AAC version), you can turn on the View options. To do this, go to View > View Options… and from the list, make sure that Kind is selected.

13. Now when you look at the columns in iTunes, you should see Kind as a column where it lists the type of file for the podcast (e.g., MPEG, AAC, AIFF, WAV, etc.)

14. Drag the MPEG (.mp3) audio file out of iTunes onto your Desktop. This is the file you will post in Blackboard.

15. Login to Blackboard and click on the Control Panel. (Note: You must have Instructor or TA privileges in the Blackboard course to see the Control Panel.)

16. Click on the link to the area where you wish to place the podcast (e.g., Course Documents, Assignments, etc.) OR specifically create an area in your Blackboard course and call it Podcasts as we have done here.

17. Click on +Item to add an item to your selected Content Area.

18. Type in a Name for the podcast and provide a Text description if you wish.

19. In the Content area of this Blackboard page, click on Choose File (some browsers will have a Browse... button instead) to retrieve the file from your Desktop. (Note: Make sure you upload the .mp3 version of your podcast NOT the .m4a version.)

20. Type in either the name of the file or an instruction for your students such as “Click here to listen” in the Name of Link to File textbox.

21. VERY IMPORTANT: Leave the Special Action pull-down menu on the default of Create a link to this file. Logically, you would think that you should select Display Media File in Page here but that will not allow the file to actually play in Blackboard. In some browsers, it may still download the MP3 file to the students’ Desktop. If this should happen, the student should attempt to play the file with another type of player (e.g., drag it into iTunes, play it with QuickTime player, play it with Real Player). Unfortunately, Windows Media Player is currently not able to play MP3 files (But then, who cares? We hate Windows Media Player anyway!)

22. In the Options section of this page, select the options you desire and then click on the Submit button at the bottom of the page.

23. You should receive a Receipt of Success from Blackboard if everything was uploaded properly. Click OK. Now go into the student navigation area of your Blackboard course and check to make sure that the file actually works.

24. When you click on the link to the podcast file in your Blackboard course, you should see a play controller similar to the one shown in the illustration below. Make sure you have headphones or your speakers on so you can actually hear the podcast MP3 file!

You’re done!

The Surftech 8” Cloth Center Fin

Fri, 3 Nov 2006 10:12:52 -0800

For you “real” surfers out there that read my blog (not you “web surfers” -- although I suppose it’s possible to be both like I am), I wanted to tell you about this GREAT longboard fin I got a few months ago. Made by Surftech, this fin is the BOMB! My boss, who’s a surfer, told me about it and what a difference it made in a board. My first thought was, “Yeah, right!” but was I wrong. Wow, I couldn’t believe how much more speed it added to my new epoxy longboard, which was already fabulous anyway (See Mama’s Got a Brand New Board). This Surftech fin just made it that much better! I highly recommend it if you are a single-fin longboarder. $70 and totally worth it! Check it out at the Surftech online store at:

http://shop.surftech.com/Custom_fins_for_your_wood_or_tuflite_board_s/25.htm

Roadside Attractions

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 15:11:17 -0700

I was talking with a co-worker at Cal Poly the other day who likes to ride his motorcycle to out-of-the-way locations and visit odd attractions and museums he encounters along the way. Just my type of person! The conversation reminded me of the wonderful web sites I found a while back on “roadside attractions” in both America and Canada. Oddly enough, I have considered mapping a vacation drive from the West Coast to the East Coast some time and stopping at significantly weird roadside attractions to make the long drive more interesting. What a hoot that would be! It’s on my list of “things to do before I die.”

Here are three great web sites on roadside attraction. I like the first one the best because you can search by state or by name of attraction (site). You can also map out a specific town location and find out what significantly odd attractions are there:

Check out: http://www.roadsideamerica.com/

Another Roadside Attractions Web Site:
http://www.roadsidepeek.com/roadside/

Roadside Attractions in Canada:
http://www.roadsideattractions.ca/index.htm

How about helping them spot all the “Muffler Men” in America?
Check out: http://www.roadsideamerica.com/muffler/index.html

Happy Strange Travels!

A Little Garfield Humor

Fri, 25 Aug 2006 10:25:05 -0700

Museum Podcasts

Thu, 24 Aug 2006 12:14:34 -0700

Well, if I haven’t convinced you that you need an iPod to function properly in your daily life by now, I think I have probably failed as a cutting-edge technologist :-( Albeit, you may not need to spring for the video iPod, although they are definitely the most fun, it seems that iPod use is popping up in every part of our lives these days.

Next time you’re at a museum and you see a guy listening to an iPod, don’t assume that he is just providing himself with some Baroque background music while he browses around the Rembrandt collection (although speaking from a musicologist’s point of view, that could be enlightening!). He may actually be listening to a museum podcast tour! A number of museums are now offering free podcast tours for download, either available from the web or at the museum station itself in order to enhance the educational objectives of their museums. These podcast tours tend to avoid the stuffy “enter here and notice the Monet...” lecture format and instead focus upon artists’ discussions about the paintings or casual conversations between academics or critics.

Participating museums include San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco’s De Young Museum, New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, St. Louis’s Contemporary Art Museum, Santa Barbara’s Museum of Art, and even the Dr. Pepper Museum in Waco, Texas. Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center has iPod docks in the lobby so you can download tours on the spot.

Although I haven’t heard it myself, friends have told me that San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art has a great podcast for their exhibit entitled “1906 Eartquake: A Disaster in Pictures” with narration, music, and sound effects to bring this castrophe to life. (Please don’t go running out of the museum to stand in the door shafts for protection unless a real earthquake is occuring, ha!)

Some museums such as Walker Art Center and the San Jose Museum of Art offer cell-phone tours for patrons that don’t own an iPod (or forgot theirs, heaven forbid!). You can simply dial the phone number listed in the museum handouts or the numbers that are listed on plaques near certain sculptures and paintings in order to listen to curators and artists discuss the works. Right now, these resources are free but, of course, the minutes are on you if you happen to go over your cell phone monthly allotment from your carrier.

A comprehensive list of podcast museum tours is a bit hard to come by but MuseumPods.com and Global Museum are great places to start and of course, you can always search for “museum podcast” at the iTunes Music Store (A recent search returned more than 30 tours).

For more interesting takes on art, check out some of the unauthorized museum podcast tours you can find online, such as Rick Steve’s Museum Podcast Tours of Paris’s Musee d’Orsay, Versailles Palace, and the Louvre or Slate’s Unauthorized Audio Tours, one of which includes Slate’s art critic, Lee Siegel, discussing what he considers the most overated and underated paintings in the Metropolitan Muscian of Art’s Modern Art Gallery. That one is quite entertaining! If you like British humor, you might enjoy Paul Rose’s Take One Museum podcasts, which cover a number of museums throughout the UK.

Finally, if you want to get really funky, you can join an Art Mob at the SF Museum of Modern Art and participate in works that can only be experienced by downloading the podcast and showing up at the SFMoMA when everyone else does. Art Mobs at SFMoMA want you to join their cause by sending them your own MoMA audio guides, which they will add to their podcast feed, taking out the proprietary nature of this new tool and putting it into the hands of some fun-loving art critics.

iSquint Software

Tue, 22 Aug 2006 11:33:44 -0700

Well, the video iPod is pretty cool, I must admit. I didn’t really see the need for one until I got Rachelle one and then I was foaming at the mouth. As I formatted it for her, I saw the coolness of having slideshows from iPhoto library right on your iPod to show friends the pictures of your last vacation and the fun of watching video on it. However, I do have a little beef with Mr. Jobs: Why is the video iPod formatted for a Windows computer when it comes from the Apple factory? Huh? I couldn’t believe I had to take the time to reformat it for my Mac when I first got it out of the box. I’m used to being required to reformat for other third-party peripherals because of Windows huge market hold on the world but not for an Apple product. For an Apple product? I was in shock. Mr. Jobs, are you caving to Windows’ large marketshare? And, why did you replace the wonderful firewire connector of previous generation iPods with USB 2.0 on the video iPod? Again, to make it more adaptable for the Windows crowd? I think Apple should at least allow for both a firewire and a USB cable instead of giving the consumer less than they had before. In my experience on an eMac, USB 2.0 took two to three times longer than firewire in order to move my entire 19 GB library over. It was painful! I had to go to bed and let it format overnight, it took so long.

Ok, enough ranting and raving... back to my discussion on the beauty of the video iPod. Thank you, Mr. Jobs, for such a svelte device! Those of you who are thinking of getting one should be aware that the video iPod requires a special type of video format - you can’t just take any kind of video and throw it on there and have it work. Last January, I had gone to some workshops at the MacWorld Conference in SF and learned how to export video into the video iPod format using QuickTime Pro and/or Sorenson Squeeze 4. However, I had never found a way to easily transfer Windows Media video (that awful Microsoft excuse for video) into iPod format without paying the high dollar amount for Sorenson Squeeze 4 or Autodesk Cleaner software (that is, until now).

Enter a little shareware program called iSquint. Another little gem, this software supports .mov, .mp4, .avi, .dv, .mpg, .vob, .3gp, .asf, .wmv, .flv, and .m4v and converts it to the proper codec for iPod video. Futhermore, QuickTime Pro and DivX codecs are not required and it converts your video to either MPEG-4 or H.264 codecs - Whoo-hoo! Did I mention that it’s FREE?

For non-video savvy people, the good news is that you don’t even have to know what your doing since the default settings are great. However, the developer allows you to change the established settings if you wish, providing you with a number of sliders you can alter if your a pro with compression. I especially love this developer’s sense of humor. When you go to change the default settings for video iPod conversion, a pop-up note occurs saying, “What, you think you know better than me?” You can almost hear Robert Deniro’s voice saying that! It gives you pause for thought before you start monkeying around with the settings, ha.

Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised with the output iSquint provided and I was easily able to take a bunch of small Windows Media videos that Rachelle likes and place them on her video iPod for viewing on-the-go. Go iSquint!

Senuti Software

Mon, 21 Aug 2006 10:15:09 -0700

Shareware is a wonderful thing - donationware is even better! Bless those ingenius souls who create excellent software and put it out there on the web for the world to use! In particular, bless the creator of Senuti. Senuti, in case you haven’t noticed spells “iTunes” backwards and it’s an application that allows you to transfer songs from your iPod to iTunes on your computer. Generally, you can only transfer music one way... from your iTunes application to your iPod. But what if you have a computer crash or somehow mess up your iTunes Library with a recent upgrade and don’t have all your music and playlists backed up to an external drive? (Shame on me for not having done that! It’s funny, I have all my files and applications from my work computer backed up to a La Cie erxternal hard drive to cover myself but not so at home. I need to remedy that!)

So how did this disaster happen, you might wonder? Well, I had configured our home Mac so that Rachelle and I shared only one iTunes Library, which sat in the Shared folder of our computer. iTunes on both our accounts pointed to this shared iTunes Library. It worked out well for several years and saved a lot of room on our hard drive by only having one iTunes Library.

A few weeks ago I decided to buy Rachelle a video iPod as a present and it was then that I realized I needed for us to have two separate iTunes Libraries because: 1) She has more storage space on her iPod than I (she has 30 GB on the video iPod to my 20GB 4th generation iPod) and 2) She was going to want all that nasty country music in her iTunes library for her iPod - a genre of music that is expressly forbidden on mine. (In case you don’t know, I hate country music so much that I once had a bumper sticker on my car that said, “Country is to music what etch-a-sketch is to art!”) Still, that didn’t seem like that big a deal -- I mean just copy over the shared iTunes Library to each of our respective accounts, right? No, no, no! It wasn’t that easy.

iTunes kept saying it couldn’t find songs and asked me to go navigate for each one individually even though I had gone into the iTunes Advanced menu and pointed it to the correct new location of the Library. AUGH! What a nightmare! I have close to 4,000 tunes in my iTunes Library. Trying to format her video iPod in time for our anniversary, even if I were willing to individually hunt for 4,000 tunes, was too much, even for me “the tenacious one!” Then, I really blew it and accidentally threw away some songs that I had purchased from the iTunes Music Store, which I didn’t have backed up anywhere else. Double AUGH!

Figuring there had to be a way out of this nightmare, I started Googling for shareware, donationware, buyware... anything that would get me out of this hole I had dug myself into. Then I found Senuti! Senuti allowed me to rebuild my entire iTunes Library directly from my iPod, including play counts, ratings, and playlists. What a beautiful thing! I felt so indebted to Whitney Young, the developer, that I wanted to contribute (which I did), even though a donation wasn’t required. We need to continue encouraging these geniuses to keep putting out useful open source donationware and shareware software!

The only thing that Senuti couldn’t do is restore my equalizer settings but I found another tool to do that - an iTunes Applescript called Set Genre to Specific EQ. Years ago Apple created a collection of scripts for iTunes 2.0.3 on their website that includes this EQ script, but when I downloaded and opened the .dmg package from the Apple site, it was empty. I tried downloading it several times and finally gave up but later (thank to the marvels of Google) I found the same scripts at the MacScripter website and they worked just fine, even for iTunes 6.0.5. The Applescript allows you to pick a specific genre in your iTunes Library and set that genre at a specific EQ. It takes a little time to reset all your genres but still, this is far better than the alternative -- setting each of the 4,000 tunes EQ manually. Triple AUGH!

The happy ending to this story is that my iTunes Library was restored pristine with Senuti and the EQ Applescript and I was able to provide Rachelle with a working copy of my iTunes Library on her account to begin her collection of music from AND I was also able to present her with the video iPod for our 12th anniversary, all formatted with music, videos, and pictures, right on time. She was a very happy camper and so was I! Thanks, Senuti!

Mama’s Got a Brand New Board

Fri, 18 Aug 2006 08:40:58 -0700

A little post for all you surfers out there (the ocean kind that is)!

Yesterday my new Robert August 9’0” Surftech “What I Ride” veneer finish surfboard came! Whoo-hoo! Can’t you see how jazzed Emily and Coda are in the picture, ha. This was a 12th-year anniversary gift from my partner, Rachelle. Isn’t she swell? I had been saving my Cal Poly pennies up to buy it but I hadn’t been making much progress (since Cal Poly actually pays me in pennies). I had tried out a Robert August “What I Ride” in an 8’4” size when I was on vacation in San Diego in July. I really liked it but I thought a few more inches on the board would make it better for all kinds of surf (both large and smaller days in Morro Bay). The board I tried out was not a veneer finish but I had read an interview of Robert August in which he said if he had one board to ride and take everywhere on earth, he would take this board with a veneer finish in a 9’6”. Here’s the quote:

[Robert] August has designed a variety of boards for Surftech, from 8 to 10 feet long. "There is a 'What I Ride' board, which is basically what I ride, and then there is a Mike Doyle design from my factory and there are also boards from Mike Minchington and the Mark Martinson Wingnut model. I prefer the veneer boards because they are a little heavier, but the TufLite boards are great for high performance surfing."

We know what you're thinking so we asked Robert August for you. If he were doing The Endless Summer again, and could only take one surfboard, which Surftech would it be? "I'd take the 9' 6" All Around board in the veneer. I don't want to be wishy washy but it has a medium rocker and medium thickness and it's good in eight foot surf and in sloppy surf. I could ride that board in eight foot surf and I could ride it in slop. It would go good at Bruce's Beauties, and if I lost it into the rocks, it would come out okay."

Yeah, the veneer finish looks great like the old balsa boards did but it actually has a function too: it really does makes the board a little bit heavier than the normal epoxy board. Well, after I read that Robert August quote I thought, “Hmm... Robert is a bit taller than I am so the 9’0” should be just right.” And I was right! Finally, I hit it on the head! THIS IS THE BOARD I have been searching for since I began surfing. I own 4 other surfboards and have actually had 6 surfboards in my surfing lifetime but I sold one (a little thin pro surfer board that I should have never even attempted at my age in the first place), and I also gave away a Fish board I bought at a garage sale to my nephew. Every new board I have gotten has been slightly better for certain conditions but they never really seemed to be “just right,” as the Three Bears and Goldilocks would have said. Well, this is the one! I couldn’t believe how buoyant it is and I could tell as I paddled out the first time that it was going to be great - it just glided on top of the water. The first wave I took on it was a beauty and I continued to catch good little surf all night (Yes, I stayed out until the sun went down at 8:15 PM and every last person was getting out of the water). If it weren’t for sharks, I would have stayed in longer!

For those of you interested, the dimensions of this board are:

Length: 9’0”
Nose: 18”
Mid: 22.875”
Tail: 15”
Thickness: 3”

With the close-down of Clark Foam -- the largest producer of surfboard blanks in the USA -- there has been a lot of controversy in the industry about using new materials that are more friendly to the environment but hold up performance-wise. Epoxy boards were being made before the Clark Foam debacle but they have made some significant advancements in their performance and I have to tell you, I am sold! This board is awesome! Can you tell I’m stoked?

An Embarrassing Moment

Mon, 19 Jun 2006 13:40:31 -0700

Trust me, I have had my share of embarrassing moments in my life, but I watched someone else this weekend have one of the all-time most embarrasing moments! Yesterday afternoon I drove out to Morro Rock and watched the surfers fighting the heavy gusts of wind and rather large surf. I decided it was a little to rough for my skill level and so I just sat back in my carseat with my binoculars to enjoy the show. As I was sitting there in my car, enjoying the view, another car came up and parked right beside me. I saw a woman, around 35 years of age, get out of the car and start suiting up while her husband (at least, I’m assuming he was her husband - especially by the way he failed to act later, ha!) read the newspaper. Hardly an atypical sight, I sort of ignored them while I continued to watch the surfers get toppled by large waves. However, as she was suiting up into her wetsuit, it was clearly obvious to me that she was a newbie surfer (or what some surfers not so kindly call “a kook”). I don’t know how to explain it, there’s just a way in which newbies suit up that makes it obvious. I was a little worried for her but who am I to tell her she can’t go out? Anyway, maybe she just looks like a newbie and she is going to blow me away when she gets in the water - who knows?

A few minutes later I saw her getting in the water. She clearly didn’t know the routine at the rock of paddling out through the channel. Within minutes she was being pulled by the riptide toward the rocks. Paddling furiously, she was’nt making any headway and it was obvious that she didn’t know how to get herself out of a riptide. Her husband was still oblivious to the whole thing, reading his newspaper. I walked up to the driver’s side of his car and said, “Are you aware that your wife is caught in a riptide? Does she know how to get herself out of that situation?” He looked sort of jostled from his reading and said, “Uh, no, I don’t think she knows how.”

I immedately ran to the edge of the rock and yelled out to her, trying to instruct her to paddle parallel to the shore but she couldn’t hear me. Her husband just stood there but he didn’t seem to have any intent to save her. I got out my binoculars to look toward the lifeguard tower to see if they were watching the situation and I could tell they were so I backed off. One of the lifeguards jumped on a huge longboard and started paddling out to her. He started to talk to her and calm her down. I thought he would be able to lead her back into shore since she wasn’t out among the more dangerous waves yet. But as they continued to talk and paddle, they were both pulled out farther. The lifeguard could have just taken a wave and come in but he had to worry about her. Eventually, he placed her on his board and wrapped the leash to her board around his foot. Then, they paddled out farther trying to get past the breaking waves. Poor guy! All he had on were some red bathing trunks, no wetsuit in 49 degree water... BRRR! Finally, another lifeguard paddled out and put her on his board and the first lifeguard placed her board on top of his and paddled in.

Here’s the embarrasing part: They had called the Coast Guard. And they didn’t come out in their smallest boat, no siree! They brought out the biggest boat they have in the Morro Bay Coast Guard fleet to pick up the lifeguard and her beyond the break. Everyone staring - major embarrassment! And her husband? He was just worried about whether or not they were going to be charged for the rescue. What a guy, huh?

Digital Storytelling

Wed, 24 May 2006 13:04:59 -0700

In my last blog entry I made reference to digital storytelling and the wonderful way in which it can be used for teaching and learning. Recently I stumbled upon the Scott County Schools (Georgetown, Kentucky) Digital Storytelling web site and found some real gems. Since I taught piano in a former life, I especially enjoyed this digital storytelling project created by a teacher, Judy Halasek, which is called “The Gift of the Piano.” For those of you who teach piano to children and wonder if it is really worth it to deal with their lack of practicing, whining, and overall irritable demeanor at piano lessons, this story should give you hope:

http://www.scott.k12.ky.us/technology/digitalstorytelling/piano_t1.mov (QuickTime required)

To view more of these storytelling gems created by the teachers of Scott County, please see:

http://www.scott.k12.ky.us/technology/digitalstorytelling/teacherstories.html

Due to the fact that there are so many great links on how to get started with digital storytelling and plenty of fantastic examples of people’s finished projects, I hesitate to even list any links. However, if you plan on getting into this sort of thing, you might want to check out some of the links below, which I have found to be helpful but which is by no means comprehensive:

The Center for Digital Storytelling (Berkeley, CA)

Carnegie Mellon University’s Digital Storytelling Site

MIT/University of Wisconsin Digital Storytelling Site

BBC Capture Wales Digital Storytelling Site

University of Minnesota School of Journalism Site

Electronic Portfolios.org Digital Storytelling Page

Tech Head Stories - Links to Key Digital Storytelling Sites

Interactive Multimedia Electronic Journal - IMEJ

Born Magazine

Fray Digital Stories

The Digital Storytelling Initiative KQED

Digital Storytelling Festival

Ventriloquist Bloopers

Tue, 23 May 2006 15:43:18 -0700

How many of you are aware that in a past life I was a ventriloquist? Ah... ‘tis true! Performing ventriloquist skits at birthday parties and church gigs with my dummy, Jason, was one way to supplement my pizza money in college. My mother was so attached to him, she sent him birthday cards every year (her only son). Scary, I think he will be 30 years old this year (I got him when I was 16 and waited almost 9 months for him to be constructed at the Maher Figure Factory in Colorado.) Hmmm... I guess you could say that in a way I experienced teenage motherhood, ha.

Ventriloquists are an odd bunch. We spend time with a wooden figure, trying to mimic real life and try to avoid moving our lips. Everyone knows that a ventriloquist is “driving” the dummy and making it come alive but everyone wants to play along and pretend. I guess it’s the Gepetto in us all - wanting Pinocchio to become a “real boy.” Speaking of real boys, one time I had my dummy seated on the floor in Sears department store with his head removed, trying children’s clothes on his body. A lady walking by in a Winnie the Pooh costume literally screamed in horror out loud. It turned out that she couldn’t see real well through the eye holes in her Pooh suit and thought there was a child on the floor without a head - that was a hoot!

I had a friend in college named Tim who was also a ventriloquist, but in my opinion, he was “way over the top.” He took his dummy with him everywhere (even into the college cafeteria). His goal was to become a ventriloquist comedian in the nightclub scene. I wonder if he ever made it? To tell you the truth, I found him a bit creepy. Maybe that is why I backed away from ventriloquism after college when I finally had a real job -- it just seemed too strange.

And, of course, there are those people who have been weirded out by Anthony Hopkins’ portrayl of an out-of control ventriloquist in the movie blockbuster “Magic” or that spooky Twilight Zone episode where the dummy takes over the ventriloquist. (My ex-husband was so freaked out by that movie that he didn’t like me to leave my dummy out of its suitcase in our house!)

Unfortunately, it seems that ventriloquism is a dying art. However, there has been a bit of a revival of ventriloquism with the Adrian Brody movie “Dummy” that was in theaters a couple years ago but even that movie portrayed Brody as a loser who couldn’t get a date. No wonder I gave it up... in the public’s point of view now VENTRILOQUIST = LOSER!

So, I guess you can see why I have kept my ventriloquism interests to myself. Feeling brave last year, I decided to reveal this side of my character to the Cal Poly community (Yes, I’m a glutton for punishment). I decided to teach a faculty workshop on creating a documentary with Apple iMovie software. The workshop taught faculty the entire process of digital storytelling on a selected topic with the end results of creating their own documentary. This is a great idea to promote learning if there is a topic you want to approach in which there is no commerical documentary already out there or if you have a particularly peculiar point of view to express about a topic. I have found that students learn even more when they are asked to create a documentary themselves - you might want to give that a try.

As a demo for the workshop, I created a short documentary on the “History of Ventriloquism” that explained the art from Egyptian times to the present day. At the end of the documentary, I added a short clip of bloopers with my dummy, Jason, to provide a little fun while the credits rolled - finally letting the cat out of the bag. This video clip is an excerpt from the end of that documentary. Hope you enjoy it!

iFlash Conversion to HTML

Mon, 22 May 2006 12:51:59 -0700

Ask and you shall receive! In the last entry in my blog, I talked about the cool flashcard software called iFlash and how wonderful a tool for learning it was but I was bummed it didn’t export out to HTML. Well, I wrote the developer of iFlash, David McGavern, and suggested that in a future version, he consider making an HTML export. He wrote me back within just a few days with the code to implement to do just that! Don’t you just love independent developers?

Once it is converted to HTML with this code, you simply click on the text of the flashcard and the other side of the card (i.e., the answer) is revealed. You can click the text again to return to the first side of the card. For a demonstration, please click on the link below which contains a little flash card file I created of 120 Famous Composers and Their Birth/Death Dates:

LINK: 120_famous_composer_dates.html

Here are the instructions for how to do it. Obviously, you need the iFlash software to construct the flash cards - see last blog entry:

iFlash Flash Cards Conversion to HTML

1. Open your deck of Flash cards in iFlash.

2. From the File menu, select Export...

3. When the dialog box appears, select Export All Cards to Text File

4. Toggle the Advanced arrow (Change text export template)

5. In the top box labeled Template for each individual card, erase what is there and paste the following code:

<table cellpadding='4' border='0'>
<tr onClick='
if(document.getElementById("row%n_1_div").style.display=="block"){
document.getElementById("row%n_1_div").style.display="none"
document.getElementById("row%n_2_div").style.display="block"
}else{
document.getElementById("row%n_1_div").style.display="block"
document.getElementById("row%n_2_div").style.display="none"
}' width='200' height='125'>
<td width='200' height='125' style='border: solid 2px #000000;' valign='top' bgcolor='#F4ECD3'>
<div id='row%n_1_div' style='display: block;'>
<font face='verdana' size='2'>
%1
</font>
</div>
<br>
<div id='row%n_2_div' style='display: none;'>
<font face='verdana' size='2'>
%2
</font>
</div></td></tr>
</table><br><br>

6. In the bottom box labeled Template that goes around all the cards, erase what is there and paste the following code:

<html>
<head>
<title>%total iflash cards!</title>
</head>
<body bgcolor='#FFFFFF'>
<center>
<table width='500' bgcolor='#D3EAF4' border='0'>
<tr><td align='center' style='border: 4px solid #00000;'>
<font face='verdana' size='4'><b>
My iFlash Cards!</b>
</font>
<font face='verdana' size='2' color='#6d6d6d'>
<br>
%comment
</font>
%cards
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</center>
</body>
</html>

7. Click on the Export button and export the file out to the Desktop including an .html extension at the end of the file name.

8. Now you can place it on a web page or in a Learning Management System such as Blackboard. To place the HTML file in Blackboard for student review, enter the Control Panel select a Blackboard Content Area to upload the file within (e.g., Course Materials, Assignments, etc.) Click on the Item button, create a name for the item, use the Browse button to upload the .html file that you created with iFlash. In the Special Action area, select Create a link to this file. Set the Blackboard options you desire in the Options area and click on the Submit button.

9. Voila! Click on flashcard text to view the back side of the flash card where the answer resides.

10. To reverse this process so that you can see the back side of the card first (answer first) and then click on the text to see the front side insert the following code into the top box labeled Template for each individual card instead :

1st box in Export Advanced dialog box should have this code instead:

<table cellpadding='4' border='0'>
<tr onClick='
if(document.getElementById("row%n_1_div").style.display=="block"){
document.getElementById("row%n_1_div").style.display="none"
document.getElementById("row%n_2_div").style.display="block"
}else{
document.getElementById("row%n_1_div").style.display="block"
document.getElementById("row%n_2_div").style.display="none"
}' width='200' height='125'>
<td width='200' height='125' style='border: solid 2px #000000;' valign='top' bgcolor='#F4ECD3'>
<div id='row%n_1_div' style='display: none;'>
<font face='verdana' size='2'>
%1
</font>
</div>
<br>
<div id='row%n_2_div' style='display: block;'>
<font face='verdana' size='2'>
%2
</font>
</div></td></tr>
</table><br><br>

The 2nd box should be pasted in as listed above in Step #6.

Now, isn’t that cool? Have fun!

Flashcard Software - iFlash

Tue, 16 May 2006 12:14:50 -0700

Have you ever seen a piece of software that you wish you would have had access to years ago? Last week I ran upon a virtual flashcard software by Loopware called “iFlash” that I would have loved when I was a college student! How handy it would have been when I was learning all that vocabulary for the 5 languages I studied in graduate school (yes five... Spanish, Italian, German, French, and Latin). I’m a glutton for punishment!

Besides standard flashcard ability, you can also record audio directly into any flashcard (great for foreign language pronunciation and even for music students being tested on “drop-the-needle” exams for musical theme identification) or attach an image to a flashcard. The import/export feature is very handy and you can even save out your flashcards as a .txt to place in the Notes section of your iPod. How cool is that? It allows for both single and double-sided printing, in case you’re old school and still want to print out your flashcards for that tactile effect, ha.

The only addition I would like to see to this software is the ability to save out the flashcards in another format such as HTML or a Flash .swf file that could play within the browser. My thinking here is how great it would be for professors to be able to create flashcards for their students that could be posted and viewed and/or downloaded in a learning mangement system such as Blackboard. That would make the software even more functional!

iFlash features three systems of memorization to choose from: Simple Memorization, Score Memorization, or Interval Memorization. Simple Memorization is just that... it gives each card two states: either memorized or un-memorized. Score Memorization will assign a numerical score to each card and when the score reaches a detemined threshold, the card is considered memorized and ignored in the stack. Interval Memorization uses spaced repetition to assist you in grasping the concept over a longer period of time.

Want to learn something new? Take advantage of other people’s hard work and download decks from the iFlash Deck Library (over 900 as of February) with over 15 different categories ranging from Spanish to Periodic Tables.

Give iFlash a try with a 15 day full-feature trial by downloading it from:
http://www.loopware.com/iflash/ Buy it for $14.95 - cheap!

This is a wonderful piece of software. Where was it in my college days? Heck, I probably could have actually conquered a language if I had an opportunity such as this! Hey, maybe I still will!

Blog Comments Now Available

Tue, 16 May 2006 11:56:25 -0700

Some of you who used to read my blog when it was created with the old Blogwave Studio format mentioned that you missed the ability to comment in my blog. Apple has introduced an update to iWeb (iWeb 1.1) that allows for comments (YAY, Apple!) so now you will notice that there is a link to comment at the bottom of the entries. So feel free to comment away!

Other enhancements (although I didn’t turn it on) is the ability to allow your commenters to add an attachment (up to 5 MB). It’s not that I don’t trust you but I don’t want my .Mac account being totally used up! Actually, the truth is... I DON’T TRUST YOU! <grin>

For more information on additional enhancements, such as the ability to Publish only updated pages to your .Mac account rather than the entire site, visit: http://www.apple.com/ilife/tutorials/iweb/new.html

Puzzles for Verbal-Linguistic Learners

Fri, 5 May 2006 12:01:32 -0700

Most of you are probably familiar with Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences, which he first proposed in his book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences in 1983. The root of much educational debate for the past 20 years, most educators will agree it is difficult to discount the validity of his theory, although many will argue on how the theory should be translated into practice. I, myself, am a proponent of Gardner’s theories. I have seen firsthand the proof of their truth time and time again while dealing with students in the college classroom and I am very aware of my own intelligences and how they continue to develop throughout my lifetime. (If you haven’t guessed already, my primary intelligences are Musical/Rhythmic and Kinesthetic!)

Since I have been thinking about assisting a professor in creating some puzzles for his Spanish class this week, I began reflecting upon the Verbal-Linguistic learner and the technology tools that prove to be the most attractive to this group. You guessed it -- they love puzzles!Puzzles are a great learning tool that is FUN! “Fun?” you say. “Are students supposed to have fun?” I am a firm believer that fun brings on engagement and engagement translates into learning. You can create crossword and word search puzzles for your students in order to address new vocabulary or to introduce them to new topics in your learning modules. This is a great tool for “livening up” rote-type memorization drills, for facilitating foreign language skills, or for assisting English Learners. An excellent starting point for puzzle making can be found at: http://puzzlemaker.school.discovery.com/

Discovery provides free tools to create online puzzles formatted in HTML or PDF format, which can then be saved and uploaded later onto your own web site or into a Learning Management System like Blackboard. If you find that this is something you wish to use in your lesson plans often, you may also want to purchase the CD-ROM to create the puzzles directly on your hard drive.

K-12 teachers will find more appropriate lesson plans and puzzles to incorporate in the classroom for their age-level at the following web site:   http://www.puzzles.com/PuzzlesInEducation/PuzzlesInEducation.htm  

Below are some examples I have created with the puzzlemaker. Download them and check them out! Hey, you might even make learning FUN for your students (Heaven forbid!).

DOWNLOADS

Famous Composers Puzzle.pdf - (Music History Puzzle)

Famous Composers Key.pdf - (Music History Puzzle Solution)

E Penso Te Criss Cross Key.pdf - (Italian Crossword Solution)

E Penso Te Word Search Key.pdf - (Italian Word Search Solution)

PowerPoint Jeopardy Game Template

Thu, 4 May 2006 15:59:10 -0700

Recently, some of you have pointed out to me that the generic PowerPoint Jeopardy template, created by Frank Wartman at the MAHEC Stumpers website, is no longer available for download. I have done quite a thorough web search and can’t find it anywhere either so, for your convenience, I have decided to provide you with links to download the files here within my blog.

First, for your viewing pleasure, a Jeopardy game for Elementary Italian first-year college students that I assisted one of our faculty members in constructing here at Cal Poy. This will give you a better idea of how the template works in its final form. Secondly, I have included the PowerPoint Stumpers template created by Frank Wartman for download - use this to create your own Jeopardy game. Thirdly, I have included Frank’s PDF of instructions, designed for instructors, which explains how to create the Jeopardy game from his own Stumpers template. Finally, I have provided my own instructions for playing Jeopardy that were created as a PDF in order to briefly explain to students how to play the game on their own with PowerPoint or PowerPoint Viewer software.

If anyone knows where Frank’s Stumpers template is now residing on the web, please clue me in!

Downloads:

Italian_Jeopardy.ppt - (An Example of a Finished Version)

Ppt_Stumper_Template.ppt - (For instructors)

Stumpers_PPT_Instructions.pdf - (For instructors)

Jeopardy Play Instructions.pdf - (For students)

A Dual-Bootable Mac!

Thu, 6 Apr 2006 16:06:09 -0700

Well, I bet Mr. Bill Gates is scrambling around his office trying to figure out what to do about this: Apple has announced that in the next major release of Mac OS X, Leopard, that you can install and run the Windows XP operating system as well as the Mac OS X operating system on the new Intel chip Macs - in other words... you can have a dual bootable Macintosh. Ahh.... this is why I love Apple! You go, Steve Jobs! And... as if that wasn’t good enough, you can download a public beta of the technology called “Boot Camp Public Beta” right now at:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/

Apparently, hackers recently had a contest and successfully managed to get an Intel-powered Mac to run Windows XP last month so Apple came up with its own solution pretty quickly. Once loaded, Mac users just hold down the Option key (that’s the ALT key for you Windows users) at startup to choose between the Mac OS X or Windows platform.

One of our techs at Cal Poly has already tried bootcamp and says that it works “like a charm.” Of course, this begs the question, why would I want to make my computer susceptible to all those nasty Windows viruses and spyware? :-)

Apple even makes mention of this on their boot camp web page with this little “Word to the Wise”:

Word to the Wise
Windows running on a Mac is like Windows running on a PC. That means it’ll be subject to the same attacks that plague the Windows world. So be sure to keep it updated with the latest Microsoft Windows security fixes. 

However, the good news is, if the Windows side gets plagued with viruses and/or spyware, you can just go and work on your Mac side of the machine and you won’t experience a lot of “down time” trying to get your computer working again (This is what I have seen most Windows users doing on their PCs anyway rather than having time for creative projects. Case in point, all the men at Fellowship Hour at my church who tell me how their PCs are plagued with viruses or what not. My response... Get a Mac!)
The cool thing about dual booting is that it could be the answer for some of us who are forced to run Virtual PC in order to have access to certain software that is only available on the Windows platform. In addition, maybe it will stifle our employers “encouraging” attempts of suggesting that we give up our Macs “for the company’s benefit.” For the company’s benefit? How does a company benefit if I am less productive and running around worrying about viruses and spyware?
Many companies shy away from purchasing Macs due to their higher cost upfront. Cal Poly Windows techs are always trying to point out to me how much “cheaper” the Windows PCs are compared to the Macs. Well, let’s face it guys, you’re just short-sighted and now I have a way to prove it. Someone recently sent me this interesting article about the costs of PCs vs. Macs:
http://www.networkworld.com/best/2006/022706bestbreaker-schwartau.html

The article includes a TCO spreadsheet download tool to help you determine a company’s cost savings when switching from WinTel to Mac computers. Ahh... just some more “propaganda” to back up my longtime opinion that Macs may be actually cheaper to support in the longrun even though the initial upfront costs are higher.

I’m sure that Bill Gates is meeting with his top-level programmers now trying to figure out how to not let this “dual booting thing” work on Windows next operating system called “Vista.”
And BTW not to digress but how many “cat” names can Apple come up with? Jaguar, Panther, Leopard... Leopard!? Darn, I was really hoping that the next Apple “cat” operating system name was going to be “Ocelot!” I guess I’ll have to wait a few more iterations for that one!

Controversial UCC Video

Tue, 4 Apr 2006 17:08:21 -0700

Well, the United Church of Christ has done it again! Working with a New York marketing firm, as part of its “God is Still Speaking” campaign the UCC has created a television advertisement entitled “The Ejector Pew” that proclaims its willingness to accept all people as worshippers, whether gay, straight, disabled, elderly, young parents, homeless, or people from various ethnicities.

Although multiple cable networks have agreed to air the advertisement, all the major broadcast networks (i.e., CBS, NBC, ABC, WB, and FOX) have rejected it, claiming it to be too controversial. Ahh... could this be a bias of the major networks in favor of the religious right? Check out the video for yourself as it loads here above this commentary.

If this bothers you, that ABC is censoring such an advertisement in favor of the religious right, let your voice be heard by going to http://ga3.org/campaign/network1?qp_source=blog and signing the petition.

Click on the video play button below to check out the other UCC “controversial” “Bouncer” video of the past:

The Importance of Being Bilingual

Wed, 22 Mar 2006 11:36:08 -0800

This video is for my friends, Tina and Dawn, who work diligently away at becoming bilingual. You go, girls! I think the video speaks for itself... Enjoy!

Converting PDFs Back To MS Word

Tue, 21 Mar 2006 10:06:04 -0800

Well... I learn something new everyday -- that's one of the reasons I like working as an instructional designer. This morning a professor called and asked if there was a way to convert PDFs back to Microsoft Word format. I couldn’t think of any off the top of my head besides copy/pasting text so I looked it up on the web. Guess what? It’s possible and it's pretty cool...

Although the article I read talks about converting from PDF to Word with Acrobat Professional 7 on either a Mac or a PC, I also tried it on a Mac with Acrobat Professional 6.04 and it seemed to work just as well... so it’s not a new feature of Acrobat Professional 7. The process actually takes your PDF and converts it back to a .doc Microsoft Word file, retaining most of the formatting and even the comments and images. Cool, eh? The process is a bit slow on larger PDF documents but hey, relax! You don’t have to spend nearly as much time as you would have to if you tried copy/pasting from the PDF to the Word document and then spent the extra time to redo all of the formatting so that it would look the same in Microsoft Word! Granted, on some documents that I experimented with, I had to change a couple of formatting issues that were askew (mostly an extra tab in my bullets), but that sort of editing took minimal effort compared to starting from scratch in Microsoft Word.

HOW DO I CONVERT A PDF BACK TO A MICROSOFT WORD DOCUMENT?
(Remember: You must be using Acrobat Professional NOT Adobe Reader)

Open the PDF document in Acrobat 7 Professional and choose File > Save As. In the Save As dialog box, select Microsoft Word Document from the Format (Mac) or Type (Windows) pop-up menu. Click the Save button to save the document to your desired location and then open the newly-created Word document within Microsoft Word for final editing.
 Note: You can also check or change the settings that Acrobat uses to convert the PDF content back to Word format by clicking on the Settings... button in the Save As dialog box after you have selected Microsoft Word Document format/type in this dialog box. Below is an illustration of the Settings options you are allowed to manipulate on a Mac:

Alternatively, if you don’t want to change the settings in the Save As dialog box location as you’re saving the document, you can just alter the settings in your Preferences in order to affect all future documents. To do this, simply open your Preferences by selecting Acrobat > Preferences (Mac) or Edit > Preferences (Windows) and then select Convert From PDF from the list of Categories on the left side of the dialog box; then select Microsoft Word Document from the Converting From PDF scrollable list. The window that appears to the right will show you how Acrobat will handle the conversion, including whether it will display comments, preserve columns and downsample images. To change these settings in this Preferences dialog box, click the Edit Settings.. button. The same dialog box of Save as DOC Settings will appear as displayed above. Make the settings changes you desire and close out the dialog box by clicking on the OK button.

The success of your conversion from a PDF to a Word document depends largely upon a number of factors (e.g., whether or not you have the original PDF’s document fonts on your system, the complexity of the layout, etc.) but for most simple documents, Acrobat's Save As command does a fairly good job of converting PDFs to Microsoft Word format.

Baby Porcupines

Mon, 20 Mar 2006 11:23:24 -0800

Ok, I know some of you geeks are grumbling because this isn’t an entry about technology, but hey, life isn’t all about technology! Or haven’t you figured that out yet?

I couldn’t pass up posting this picture of baby porcupines that a friend of mine sent me in an email. Look at these little guys! They remind me of sea anemones that you would find on a rock in tidepools at the ocean. They look comfortable in their own little cradle of sorts!

Online Discussion Board Tip

Tue, 14 Mar 2006 13:44:59 -0800

In preparation for a faculty workshop I’ll be teaching next quarter on establishing collaboration and community online, I glanced today at the California Virtual Campus Online Learning Exchange. There are a lot of good tips and ideas posted there but I especially liked this one and thought it would be a good tip to share with those of you who are thinking of doing some sort of “ice breaker” in your online / hybrid course. This idea not only sounds fun but would probably effectively accomplish the course learning objectives:

“Asking students to go beyond the standard intro can be a refreshing start to any online class. As our constituency becomes more versed in online learning they will no doubt be posting the same bio over and over again. My "tip" is simply to throw them a curve ball right from the start by deviating slightly from the conventional bio.

I ask students to pretend for a minute that they are 100 years old and have lived a wonderful and fruitful life. In fact, they have accomplished absolutely everything they had set out to accomplish. I then ask them to share with the class just a few of their "imaginary" accomplishments as well as the high and low point of their 100-year life. This can be very reflective for the students and can lead right into a segment on developing goals and objectives. Another question I sometimes pose is, what is the difference between a goal and a dream? You'll get some interesting responses.”

Posted by Chris Le Baudour
Location: Santa Rosa Community College

Speed Up Your Safari Browser

Fri, 10 Mar 2006 13:28:39 -0800

Lately, I’ve noticed that my Safari browser on my precious Macintosh G5 at work seemed to be especially slow. I thought that maybe there were issues with our internet connection on campus, but it just seemed to be getting more and more sluggish with each passing day.

Today while I was munching on my lunch, I was browsing through my March 2006 issue of MacWorld and looking at the article Mac Tune-up: 34 Software Speedups. The article provides several tips for speeding up performance with certain Macintosh software applications that may start to drag in performance. One of the tips made all the difference in my Safari performance so I’d like to share it with you.

It turns out that favicons, those tiny icons you often see in the address bar to the left of the URL, bog down the browser’s speed as your computer starts accumulating a bunch of them over time. Vendors place these icons to display within the URL as a means of brand identity and to help people identify their particular web site quickly. Even Macworld magazine has a favicon in the shape of a mouse to represent their magazine’s method of rating software and tools as a five-mice rating, a four-mice rating, etc.

If you simply delete these favicons that have accumulated on your Mac, it will run much faster. Here’s how:

1) Quit Safari if you have it open.
2) Locate the icons folder that resides at your user folder > Library > Safari > Icons. Select all the items located in the Icons folder and drag them to the Trash. (The Macworld article says to delete the entire Icon folder but I decided it might be safer just to delete whatever is in it.)
3) Empty your Trash.
4) Now open Safari and see how much faster it runs!

Sorry, PC people, I don’t know how you get rid of favicons on Windows machines, but this stuff must be stored somewhere on the PC as well. You might be able to find them with the PC search tool.

For those of you that were thinking, “Why didn’t she just reset Safari?”, here’s why: Resetting Safari by selecting the Safari menu and then Reset Safari... will delete your cache, history, AutoFill entries, and cookies; however, it won’t delete your favicon icons or your Java cache. The only way to get rid of the favicons is to go in every once in a while and manually delete them as we described. You might want to set yourself a monthly reminder to do it or just wait until your browser seems to be crawling like a snail again.

Here’s to faster browsing! Vroom-vroom!

Text Messaging Tricks for Your Cell Phone

Tue, 7 Mar 2006 15:32:47 -0800

Ok, I know that cell phone text messaging is “in” with the younger crowd for shooting a message to someone else across the room (let’s face it, text messaging has basically replaced the old method of passing notes to your friends in class) but I really haven’t ever found it very useful in my own life... until now.

In the February issue of Arthur Frommer’s Budget Travel magazine, there is a brief article explaining how travelers can now use the text messaging features to access important information. Did you know that Google, Yahoo, and a company called 4INFO are making available all sorts of information to your phone through the text message feature? The way it works is that you send a text message to one of these company’s five-digit “short codes” to request certain information, and then you are provided with the information via a response through text messaging. Yahoo’s short code is 92466 (that’s ”Yahoo” spelled on your cell phone keypad), 4INFO’s short code is 44636 (that’s ”4INFO” spelled on your keypad), and Google’s short code is 46645 (that’s ”Google” spelled on your keypad without the “e”).

Basically, you type into your cell phone keypard, whatever you’re looking for, along with a city or zip code - such as “zoo San Diego” or “seafood 93442” and Yahoo, 4INFO, or Google will do a search and send you the proper contact information in a text message to your cell phone.

Driving Directions:

For example, for driving directions to any location, including mileage, text message Google (46645) in the following format: “morro bay ca to san diego ca” (without the quotes). In only a few moments, you will receive a text message (sometimes several text messages depending upon how long the directions are) with very detailed directions to your destination. The service is free except for the text message fee’s charged by your cell phone provider (e.g., in my case, my provider -- Verizon -- charges 10 cents per text message that have been sent or received.) Directions from Morro Bay to San Diego cost me 40 cents because it took 4 text messages to deliver all the information. However, trust me, 40 cents is well worth it if your lost on the 405 freeway in rush hour traffic and trying to figure out where the 70 Toll Road to San Diego might be so you can shorten your trip!

Weather:

Did you know that you can receive weather information from all three of these companies by using the shorthand “w” which stands for weather? Simply text message a “w” along with the zip code or city and state you desire and either Yahoo, Google, or 4INFO will send you a three-, four-, or five-day forecast, respectively.

Flight Updates:

4INFO allows you to text message an airline and flight number for travel updates, providing you with the most current arrival and departure times. If you don’t know the flight number, you can use the ariline name along with the airport codes or the departure and arrival cities to receive current information. This is a great tool if you’re stuck in traffic on the way to the airport and trying to decide if you need to “press the pedal to the metal,” so to speak, in order to make your flight’s departure time! Hey, if the plane’s departure is delayed by a couple hours, you can relax and even stop for a cafe mocha at Starbucks!

Currency Conversion:

How about this? You’re in a store in Europe and you’re trying to decide if that price on an English tea set is really a good deal or not in US dollars at the current exchange rate. You simply text message Google and type “10 eur in USD” or in plain language “10 british pounds in american money” and Google will report back to you in a text message what the day’s exchange rate currently is.

Translation:

This is my personal favorite - translation! How many times could I have used this on vacations? (Especially that time I couldn’t find the restroom in an elderly Dutch woman’s house in Amsterdam when I was on tour with an orchestra. I was told everyone spoke English in Holland, but not true for the older crowd I guess!) Google has a language feature where “t” stands for translate. For example, if you text message “t how much for a ticket to spanish” you’ll receive back a text message saying “cuanto para un boleto”. You can also ask for a translation of a word or phrase from the opposite direction and type something like “t meine schwester from german” and it will reply “my sister”. This Google translation tool will translate words and simple phrases between English and five other languages, including German, Italian, French, Portuguese, and Spanish. Whoo-hoo - I’ll never be without a restroom again (or a ticket to a bull fight for that matter!)

Yahoo’s Search Local Feature:

One more thing: Yahoo has a feature called Search Local that will let you send info from your computer directly to your cell phone via text messaging. Just go to Yahoo and click on the Local link at the top of the Yahoo main page or go there directly as http://local.yahoo.com/. In the Search For textbox, type in the name of the restaurant you’re trying to locate and in the Location textbox, type in the name of the city and state or the zip code and click on the Search button. When the information for the restaurant appears, click on the Send to Phone link. A dialog box will appear with From and To textboxes. In the From textbox, put your email address and in the To textbox, type your cell phone number. If you have a web-enabled plan on your cell phone, check the box add link to map and driving directions. When you’re done entering the information, click Send. Voilá! The restaurant’s contact information and/or directions will arrive in a text message on your cell phone in just a few minutes and hey, if you think enough ahead before your next trip, you won’t have to lug that laptop around with you!