Movie Maker Live, No Voiceover?

Oh Microsoft, you made such significant leaps forward with the new MovieMaker Live, but one glaring problem exists. In the classroom, I’m not always going to be importing full-on video clips. Often, my students just need a great way to add photos to a movie and record their voiceover as a narrative of the visual story.  Or, perhaps I have the video, but I want to easily speak over a clip that has poor audio. You took away the easy voiceover tool in earlier versions of MovieMaker.  So let’s share a work around.

Adding A Voiceover To Movie Maker Live Projects
It’s actually pretty easy, as far as work arounds go. Record your narration in your local audio recorder, export the audio and import it into Movie Maker as a music file.  From that point, you can clip and adjust the length of still photos to match the new audio, or clip and place the audio track so that it matches the video segment that goes with it.

Audacity is my preferred audio recording tool on the pc. It’s a simple and free install. The only trick is that you need to install separately the LAME encoders so that it will export your audio as an mp3.  But even that is pretty easy.

Once installed, open Audacity and hit the little red button to record. Stop when done and go to File – Export as MP3 to get your audio Movie Make-ready.  Movie Maker will import that MP3 after you click the big ‘Add Music’ button at the top of the window.  Drag the new skinny green audio track to wherever you want the audio to be in your movie.

Tips
Movie Maker doesn’t allow multiple audio tracks. There is any audio you have with the video track and the Add Music track.  If you want to have your voice over  with a music background and the occasional frog croaking in the background, you can do all of that audio in Audacity and export it as one single audio track for Movie Maker. Audacity can have many tracks in the project, but exporting will flatten it into one.
Another thing to remember is that when adding audio to Movie Maker, you can edit the audio just like a video clip. Select the audio and then you can split the audio clip in an effort to put space between spoken sentences or such.

Innovate?
So, how do you use movies in your classroom?  One middle school teacher is having the students pull or capture still images that compliment their written stories and record it all as a movie.  Another teacher had students create short movies where students demonstrated what they learned during anti-bully lessons.  An easy scaffolding lesson would be to give small groups the same 3 minute video clip of a class Science demonstration. Have each group compete for the best video using text and voiceovers to show understanding. How would YOU use video in your classroom?

photo: microphone

Reducing File Sizes of PDF Files

So, you have a .pdf file that needs to be shared with people at a different location. Sometimes, those graphically-intensive file can be substantially large files.  Sure, we could put the file on a server, share as a Google Docs upload, or upload to a wiki so others can download it.  Emailing, however, just isn’t a good alternative for large pdf files or any large file for that matter.

One possibly helpful tool is a web-based pdf file compressor.  Neevia.com has a very easy to use website that lets anyone upload a file and receive it right back with the file size reduced. http://convert.neevia.com/pdfcompress/

Trying this out several times with 5M pdf files gave different results. One particular 1-page document was reduced 92% shaving almost 4M off the file size.  Another attempt only shaved 14% off of a 32 page pdf at the maximum compression setting.

The nice thing about this site is that it lets you try different compression settings before actually downloading the file.

There are various other downloadable apps that one can install and use to compress pdf file sizes.  (http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/4-ways-reduce-size-pdf-file/) Using a web-based alternative works well regardless of the computer platform or browser you are using.  Just try to use a fast network if your original pdf is a very large file.

Making FireFox Work Better For You

This link came across my Twitter account today and it has some pretty good tips for new and seasoned users of the Firefox web browser.  On Austin ISD computers, the user has the ability to change Firefox settings, so these tips can be done by the teacher without any special permissions.

Ten Killer Firefox Tips, Tricks, and Shortcuts! posted on Mashable.com .

In that article, there are some nice basic tips that all users should learn. What I wanted to bring out today was the three that teachers may not know and that could play a role during instructional time with the web browser.

Tip #5: Changing the email default.  Wouldn't it be nice if you could click on an email address in the browser and NOT have to open up Outlook, MacMail, or Lotus Notes? Well, you have control over that. You can set it to even open your Gmail account online if you wanted. This tip can remove the annoying delay in waiting for an app to open, just so you can close it to get it out of the way.

Tip #9: Setting Up Multiple Homepages. No, you don't have to view the AISD Main Webpage every time your browser opens. Have it automatically open up your classroom webpage, or your online classroom bookmark collection, or the 'Today In History' page you use each week.  BETTER YET, have Firefox open them all if you wanted.

Tip #10: Clear a Single Site From the History. We often may visit a mistyped a website address, which is really no big deal. But when you type a similar address in the future, Firefox puts that mistyped address in your history of sites it thinks you may want.  Well, if you typed the .com or .org instead of .gov Whitehouse website, you may not want the results to pop up when you type 'whitehouse'. So, Tip #10 shows how to go into your history and delete a particularly annoying website that may appear in your list.

Firefox can be incredibly customized with many plugins that offer advanced features. Knowing how to use the tool better makes it a better tool for the classroom.

--Instructional?--

How do you use Firefox options or add-ons to improve your classroom delivery?  I have helped teachers setup their laptop and projector combination so that the projector acts as a second display and does not just mirror the laptop's screen. To save me time in the morning, perhaps I would have Firefox automatically open Gradespeed, Slideshare.net (where I saved my morning agenda online), and countdown timer site. I could slide the agenda and timer over to the projector's screen while I leave Gradespeed on my laptop for attendance.

What sites would you setup as your multiple Homepages?