Math and Tech: Wed

Water heater went this morning so I missed some goodstuff.  Sorry!

Wed Morning

Presentation Design - Maria Anderson
Looks like they discussed topic generation, organizing potential slides and ideas with stickies, and the importance of visuals to go with presentation.  Literally a visual for every point.



Some resources:

• Maria's blogpost on designing digital presentations.
• Presentation Zen:  11 ways to use images poorly
• Garr Reynolds' Organization and Presentation Tips
• Slideology Blog and Book
• Sample Prezi on Levers of Change in Higher Education

Modes of presentation:

• Prezi - groovy visual organizer for slides with very flexible positioning and sizing.  Video imbeddable from youtube, or you can upload .flv. 
• Animoto - turns a slide show into a video with some slick animation and a soundtrack.  Easy to imbed, upload and share.  Big trick: in Powerpoint, save as jpegs, then they will upload directly.  Spotlight images you want for emphasis.  Easiest to add text in PowerPoint.  Can include video.  Sadly, free accounts can only do 30 sec video, but with the educator account, you can give students access to your account.
• Mindomo ,  Mindmeister - mindmaps.  (I might have to use Mindmeister just because of the Music Meister.  Who is the Music Meister?)  Mindomo is flash so no iPad or iPhone.  Mindmeister is HTML5, but has slightly fewer features.
• What mode to choose?  Consider: venue, audience, time, digital or not, and presentation style
• Venue: tech available? 1 computer per participant? Room setup? In a computer lab, go for interactivity; for example, mind maps.
• Content: lots of screenshots, consider just powerpoint.  Full frame easy to see images.
• Completely digital: not very long, just want to get across a clear single point (eg. function notation)
• Impact: prezi to make a big impact.  Levers of Change was for futurists, and a big wow was wanted.

 From Dilbert.  Obviously.

Wednesday Afternoon

Camtasia Editing - Conan Heiselt

Camtasia is better than Jing for long format screencast videos, can record from screen and webcam, and has a fairly robust editor.

Editing tips

• Export formats: Quicktime (.mov) for most purposes.  Html creates a webpage with a player and a .swf file, but you need to be able to upload folders to make that work online.
• Control the speed of actions by  their duration.  Actions are transitions from one set of properties to another set.  About a second as a rule of thumb, effects for a second.  Adjust to make your point.
• Visual effects have meaning, whether you intend them to, or not.  Fade is the most gentle.  Say instead of a shift of seconds you want a shift of hours.  Use a different effect to make your point.
• Types of effects are transitions, filters and actions.
• Smartfocus effect is an action that allows the camera to focus in on where your mouse travels.  Smartfocus only works on Camtasia recordings, as they use extra data that was collected by the program.
• Filters apply in order.  Sometimes this matters but often it doesn't.  Example:  color adjustment, then colorize is more effective.  On the timeline, you can right-click, copy filters to new objects.
• Properties gearbox allows access to important information and control.  But most things you can do through other tools.  Exception:  rotations of the input video.
• Custom video action does nothing by itself, but you can learn to use it to do all the transitions.
• To change aspect ratio hold down shift while resizing.  Default is to preserve aspect ratio because it's video.
• Choose canvas size, add effects, organize... but do cuts last.  They are the "most destructive" and the hardest to undo.

Creating or "Look, Ma, I'm a director!"

• Scripts are helpful.  Ummm... minimize hesitations and... um.... keep you on flow.
• Storyboards: not for everyone, but can be very helpful.
• Instead of cutting a clip to get rid of verbal miscues, you can separate the audio and video, and just cut out the offending audio.  You can also do that to keep audio you want without video.  Cut out a corresponding bit of audio later, and realign the clips.
• Beware of video-noise.  Use zooms and smartfocus (or the custom action to get that effect).  Arrows to direct attention.  (Turn arrows in the property box rather than rotate them parallel to the clip to make the gradient look right.)  Window Spotlight blurs everything outside of a region set apart by contrast.
• Camtasia uses "tweening" with actions.  Accelerates them in and decelerates them out, as opposed to having them happen with a constant speed.  Can create some strange effects
  by layering actions.

Sharing

• Youtube: Choose Youtube or Youtube HD.  Understand it is going to be shrunken down.  Advantages - well known, great indexing for search, better for attracting followers.
• Screencast:  can embed from screencast.com (TechSmith's videohosting site.) Advantages - doesn't reencode, so clearer, and more control.  You can password protect it, make collections, only allow access to a single movie, etc.  Screencast is where Jing stores video.
• Blackboard: might be better to use another sharing option then link.
• iPhone and iPad: export to .mp4

Good Examples

• Math Train
• Khan Academy
• Camtasia Learning Center

Should I put up my sample or not?