Tinkering magic

Update:
Another video used to demonstrate uploading a video to Youtube and onto Blogger.

I took this video of the display stand St. Matthew's Makerspace had at LACOE's Digital Educator Day 2015 workshop. It was really cool to see in person. I can't wait until our makerspace is getting on a roll.

Hello kitty chatterpix

Something to say

UPDATE:
 This is another demonstration video of how to upload. However, it's also a great example of the app Chatter Pix! Chatter Pix is so much fun. Take any photo, use your finger to cut a line, record the voice, and add stickers. Then, save/export to camera roll and you now have a fun little animation!

This would be great for kids and creating stories. You can create one of these, import it into Explain Everything, create a tutorial with this or edit them all together in iMovie as some of our Physics kids did! Super great!

My cat coco

This is a test

UPDATE:
This is one of the first videos I used for my demo in uploading videos to Youtube to then later uploaded to Blogger. Although I didn't actually show the video to my kids, they certainly asked! I also created this using a photo of myself and my cat, pulled it into Chatter Pix and modified. I cannot stress how much fun this app can be. I saw a school present on this app a couple months ago; they had their students talk out the geometry concept using a cube shape character. The possibilities are endless.

Posting a video from your iPad to Blogger...

The trials and tribulations or shall I say, limitation, of working on Blogger and Drive is that you cannot upload a video from your Drive account, which is crazy since Blogger is a Google App... Can we get that fixed please? Thank you.

Yes, you can upload from a computer. Yes, you can embed from Youtube. But you can't upload a video from your iPad or Google Drive.

This is a problem for my CBL blogging kids. One work around we are looking at is emailing it as a comment. This posting is a test of that... so let's see. [There were several tries before anything happened here... and a hard furrowed brow]

[UPDATE: I tried using the Mobile settings to email the post to oneself from camera roll and iMovie and I kept finding that the files were rejected for exceeding the file size. Tried it from the Mail app, GMail app, emailing straight from iMovie with a file size of Medium (360MB), emailing from camera roll... NOTHING. I finally downloaded the video file to computer's hard drive and uploaded it from there and yet, it was still not working smoothly. It uploaded but was caught in the loading/buffering for what seemed like an eternity.

I know you're probably thinking, "Why not just upload it to Youtube?" Well, there were some issues that we encountered last year that resulted in students having their videos/accounts removed or suspended, respectively. We were hoping to avoid that this year and our Ed Tech Specialist saw what she thought would be the solution at a conference over the summer. But alas, it seems as though Youtube is the way to go.

I will now recede in defeat.... Blogger... please fix this. It is such a headache for those of us with iPads.

Have you figured out a better way of doing this? How do you get your kids to upload videos to Blogger?

Gawd, I love the internet

There have been two times in the last two days where I found myself thinking (and saying out loud), "Gawd, I love the internet". The first was when I was introduced to Instructables.com and the second when I was researching a feature a student wished to incorporate in his Weebly page. With a simple search of "linking slideshow photos to store", I was brought to the press release for the feature, a step by step guide, and much, much more.

Being the first point of reference for my students' questions and needs, I have encountered many issues. Everything from lost Notability notes to disabled Google accounts, to disabled iPads to frenetically flashing iPad screens, you name it.. I've probably seen it. But every once in awhile a student brings something to me that I'm not entirely sure of and today was that.

I have taken on the task of teaching my students, all 500 of them, troubleshooting methods. Some of them ask, "How did you get so good at computers and technology", and I never really know how to respond. It is really just exposure, a willingness to fail, and like everything else, knowing where to look: Google. Over the last week I have encountered a few problems where I didn't know the answer or couldn't figure it out on the spot, so I just told the students I would get back to them. Once they left the office, the furious Google Searching began and before you knew it, I found exactly how to do what they needed to do.

Along with Googling for troubleshooting, I also put together How To directions for our students and faculty members. If I can't find a clear "how to" somewhere on the web, I will walk myself through the process taking screen shots, upload photos to Drive, pull them into Drawing, and annotate them. Then pull them into a Google Doc with step by step directions and inserting the photos as reference.
Here is a snippet of the directions I made for our air printing system and downloading iTunes U courses:



Have you figured out a better way of transferring the knowledge of troubleshooting?