Vodcasts

Today has been another banner day in the technologies for learning arena. I have painstakingly learned how to create a vodcast AND download it to my iPod. I am now trying to figure out how to do the RSS feed without feeding my whole blog. I just want to know how to syndicate specific files. If any of you have suggestions, I am open to trying them.

To create my first vodcast, I started with a PowerPoint that had each term and formula from chapter one of CPCU540: Finance for Risk Management and Insurance Professionals. I used Audacity to record myself reading the terms as I advanced the PPT slides and saved the voice as a separate file, which I originally added to the PPT file.

Through trial and error, I discovered that if I saved all slides as jpeg images, I could import them into Windows Movie Maker, then add the audio there. I also finessed my timings there, then created the movie, which saved it in a .wmv format. From there I used my Cucusoft converter, which I bought last year to convert my purchased CDs and DVDs to iPod files. This automatically created an mp4 file, which I then went to iTunes and imported. It's not in the iTunes store, so I'm the only one that can access it.

I'm really glad we had the discussion on the last weekend about copyright. This is something that I have always been very conscientious about, but there were some good reminders and great information. Because of that session, it occurred to me that I couldn't just use this content to make my own podcasts and distribute them without permission because the definitions are the words of someone other than myself. That could have been embarrassing, at a minimum.

This was the thing I was most excited to learn about when I signed up for this class, and I finally got it. I am checking into getting these distributed, so I don't know where these vodcasts will live in the future. Even if nothing comes of it, I will have had a great learning experience and I will be able to study for my CPCU540 test in a new and exciting way. Stop laughing, it's true.

It's all coming together

I have had several successes this week in the eLearning Technology arena. To set the stage, my employer has hosted a Trainers' Institute for at least six years as a live, face-to-face event. However, budget cuts eliminated that this year. In an effort to keep the momentum and learning of that event, my team decided to put on a virtual event. For 4-5 hours each day this week, we are offering 60-90 minute sessions via WebEx by Fugent. We have a broad range of topics and have made full use of WebEx's meeting manager capabilities.
Since we don't have Training Center on WebEx (not yet, anyway, but we are working on it), for one of the sessions we had breakouts where we divided participants into four groups and gave three of them different phone numbers to call. One group stayed with me, we all stayed in the online session so we could communicate via chat, and each team had their own group of white boards. It was really awesome to see it all come together.
Anyway, I offered a 60-minute session on eLearning Trends, which I recorded. It was very well received, and I am going to see if I can use it for my final project for this class. I had planned on something else, but I have copyright issues and may not have them resolved in time. A side benefit of the class today is that at least one person wants to take this class because I talked about it in my session.
I am still doing the other project for myself, but may not be able to make it available on my web site. That is actually one of my other aha's, which occurred just moments ago. I figured out that instead of recording sound directly into PowerPoint, which will probably make a huge file size, I made the sound recording separately, as an mp3, and added it as a sound object to the PowerPoint. Now all I have to do is time each slide to see how long it takes to read it, then set the animation to advance the slide automatically after that many seconds. It is time consuming, but I believe it will be worth it.
Even though our class is coming to a close, I feel like my learning journey is just beginning. When I think about how far I have come in the weeks since we started, I am filled with anticipation that I can't explain. I have to wonder if it's not a little like an explorer feels when confronted with the reality of his journey and the vastness of what he has yet to learn. As Jean-Luc Picard of the starship Enterprise would say, "Make it so."

Links

As my fellow classmates know, I had a bad experience at a local computer store. One of the many consequences of this experience is that I lost all of my favorite web sites. To hopefully prevent that in the future AND share them with you, I am starting to add them to my blog. I will probably need to organize them differently as I get more links, but this will get me started. The TechRepublic and Kim Komando links both provide tech help; I have found TechRepublic invaluable. I hope you are able to make use of them, too.

Duh!

I didn't realize how much I had been crowding my head with new information until today. Have you ever had one of those "Duh!" moments? In the spirit of self-disclosure and a good laugh for my classmates, I will tell you about it. I struggled so much with getting the mp3 capabilities before we talked about it in class that I think I had blinders on. I posted on Robin's class blog that I couldn't make LAME work. That's because I was being lame. I wasn't pointing it to the right file in the computer, but it looked like I was. When I tried again today, after several days away, I was actually embarrassed. Luckily there was no one here to see me, but you will feel my shame into eternity, since I am blogging it here. Luckily I have an audience of 17, so it will be short-lived, I hope.

Anyway, I managed to get a couple posts out there on my web site, so enjoy it and know that persistence pays off.

Audio files

I finally received my Microsoft LifeChat 3000 (that sounds like a product name straight out of the sixties...from what I've heard), and it sounds beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that it creates lovely files that are too big for this free web tool to accept. I have been working on my own web page through my internet provider, Mediacom. I think I will try it there, and if it works, I will create a link here.