York Minster

I was invited last week to support a creative session at the Sheffield Primary Headteachers’ Conference in York on digital imaging. It was run by Rob Walker from Playing for Success with me tagging along and throwing in my tuppence-worth.

I thought I’d share the results with you.

The aim was to demonstrate what could be achieved with a few simple guidelines on taking decent pics and different technologies. It would have been nice to give the Heads that took part a chance to try out the technology but in the end we only had 1.5 hours, enough for a pleasant, sunny walk round York.

We did a rudimentary Photostory of the best images the delegates took for the evening meal but I spent the following morning negotiating with BT Openzone to create the following (they’re just speedy sketches to get the delegates thinking so don’t expect high production values…

Animoto – an quick and easy way of stitching photos and video together with a bit of text to create something really engaging. See my previous post on Animoto for more.

Click here to see the video…

@Trip – we took along a wee GPS tracker mentioned previously so we could log the photos in Google Maps and upload to the @Trip server.
Click here to view (embedding isn’t really effective).

Photosynth – This was the first time I’d tried it and for a Microsoft product I was pleasantly suprised. But as Andy Bush, a colleague pointed out, what’s the educational benefit? Maybe not much by itself but as part of a larger project it makes for a high impact element. All you have to do is take as many pictures as you can of one location from plenty of different angles, upload them and some fancy algorithm stiches them all together. Frightfully clever! You can view it as a slide show or “walk around the semi-3D environment.

Needs Silverlight to run.

Soundscapes – we didn’t get a chance to do this due to time constraints but consider sending students out with sound recorders instead of cameras. When they get back to base, use Audacity, Garageband or Myna to create an abstract soundscape using loops and effects. The results may be a little “out there” but it’s a great way to shift your perspective on a location by thinking aurally, not visually.

Here’s a soundscape created by some Y9 students a while back in a location in Sheffield. I’ll send a Wispa bar to anyone who can correctly identify the location!

Myna from Aviary

Aviary has recently released a web based audio editor called Myna and it’s well wrth a look regardless of what area of the curriculum you’re from.

Aviary already has an established web presence with its fantastic suite of image and graphics tools (all named after birds – go see!) and this is a welcome diversion from them. It’s getting to the stage where they are seriously challenging the likes of Adobe’s Photoshop Elements and Illustrator for the education market.

Anyway; Myna…

Picture a halfway house between Audacity and Garageband, add in that it’s a web tool and so comes with easy options for sharing and embedding and you have Myna. Here’s the demo video…

The interface is intuitive if you have used loop-based audio editors before and is reasonably straightforward for neophytes as well. It certainly looks more engaging than Audacity which, athough a thoroughly excellent tool, isn’t the friendliest-looking thing.

The Garageband-like functions are interesting. You can create pieces of music quickly and easily without much musical know-how using intro’s, loops and endings. The production values on the original clips are high so the results are highly listenable.

You don’t have as much flexibility to mix instruments as Garageband. Essentially, they’ve chopped up ready-made pieces of music and you just reassemble the chunks in the order you want. For most uses that’s as much flexibility as you need.

I did have problems trying to record audio using a mic because I couldn’t get the server to respond when I tried it. It may be to do with being behind a proxy server at work. I used the feedback tool in Myna to flag it up but haven’t received a reply yet. I’ll update the post when I know more.

At the other end, saving and publishing work is a breeze. You save your work as you go then select Mixdown when you’re ready. It gives you an option to save the MP3 or copy the URL and embed code of the finished audio. A lot more painless than getting a class to export an MP3 using Audacity with it’s Lame encoder complications.

The possibilities are huge with this. It’s easy for a class to create podcasts in the classroom or at home, flex their creative muscles and then share what they’ve done. If you have class blog or use a VLE then htis could make homework very interesting indeed.

There’s no cost to set up an Aviary account but a pro subscription is available for $25 a year and there’s education pricing too which isn’t clarified on the website.

See Danny Nicholson’s earlier blog post for another review…

“We have some disabled (because buggy and limited) development code that permitted upload of already exported files to a FTP server. This was last available in 1.3.3 Beta:

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/audacity/audacity-win-1.3.3.zip

We have longer term aims to improve this and allow direct exporting from the Audacity window to a server but this is not a current priority.

Also the FTP implementation has a number of potential security issues to be worked out. 

I don’t personally use SharePoint so I can’t advise you whether a FTP solution would work or something else is needed. Web searches are not all that helpful, but there is an article here about uploading files to Sharepoint:

http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/sharepoint-blog/windows-service-to-upload-documents-into-sharepoint-2007-14358

Audacity projects require the .aup file and the _data folder to be present, so those would have to be put in a zip file. If the project includes imported files, they must be copied into the _data folder if they cannot be accessed locally or on the network:

http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php?title=Sending_your_work_to_others     

If you can advise more about the Open Office feature to export to web folders, we can certainly log it as an Audacity feature request. 

Thanks 

Gale 

Audacity Team“ 

We’re working with one of our partnerships schools on a project with some 11-year olds where they record a desert-island diary entry in Audacity and create an mp3 out of it.

We want to be able to then put the mp3 onto the VLE but have hit a real snag.

Far from making the process of saving and sharing work easier, having the learning platform involved makes it harder.

The issue is that when you log into the VLE (MS Sharepoint in our case) where there is a document folder for saved work in some applications like Open Office and MS Office you can see these folders when you click on “Save Project As…” 

The problem with Audacity is that it can’t see these web-based folders so at the moment we have to go through a lengthy process of saving the work in progress to either a document folder or the local machine and then copying and pasting into the web folder.

This is harder than it sounds when you have a reluctant, stroppy group of Y11′s and understandably the partner teachers are anxious about taking the project on themselves as it seems too complicated.

I have a dual plan of attack on this and I’ll keep you updated on the outcome.

I’m going to BETT this year so will accost the Microsoft stand for their advice but I’ve also emailed the Audacity developer team with the suggestion that they include the ability to sve to web folders in a future release.

It’ll be interesting to see how much value they developers put on finding a solution and whether a pleb like me can influence development of a piece of open-source software.

NOTE: Here’s an update… (10th Dec 2008)