Adventures in Teaching and Learning

Well, I suppose I asked for it … I just wanted the image to show up a bit bigger! But I suppose that it’s too long if it sticks out from under the other columns! Still, I’ll leave it there. The top image was embedded with the code from Flickr, the second was a URL that I pasted into the SWF box. Width 1024, Height 140. Just in case you were wondering!

Anyway, I think I may have the panorama bug! We’re off to the zoo tomorrow, hopefully, to celebrate our 6th anniversary, so I think I may try some panoramas there!

Not sure what this will do, so here goes:

London panorama

Originally uploaded by skambalu.

I hope you can see this! I still couldn’t open it on my husband’s desktop, but managed to upload it to Flickr from there, so I hope it shows up on the blog okay! It’s quite long, so I expect it will be quite small, but for a first attempt I’m very pleased with it!

I have just used Photoshop Elements to make a panoramic photo of London, taken from the top of the Monument! Quite excited by it. It didn’t take long to do! Now I just need to work out how to add it to my blog. Would it be easier to add via Flickr? Hmm. I’ve just tried to transfer it (as a jpeg) from my laptop to my husband’s, which is the one connected to the internet (yes, I’ve still got that problem – I still can’t connect my laptop to the internet), and it says that there’s something missing – perhaps my Photoshop Elements is newer than my husband’s, but I had saved it as a jpeg so didn’t expect any difficulties! Maybe I should copy it as the Photoshop file then transfer it … Watch this space!

IMG_1166

Originally uploaded by skambalu.

Here is the recycling van in all its glory.

IMG_1162

Originally uploaded by skambalu.

Here is a shot taken yesterday morning from my house of the tip behind us. I was surprised to see a green recycling van dropping off green recycling bags. I had heard that not all recycled material gets recycled, but to see that in my own back yard … well, I had to take a photo. Or six.

Well, I’ve added some music now! Hope you like it. Wonder if I can find some more kwassa kwassa that can be downloaded. Or good belly dancing music. Either way, for now I thought I’d have music to dance to rather than music to meditate to. Perhaps I’ll add some of the latter on my school blogs!

Very excited and interested to read about Tessa’s A Level Blogs on her blog. Since not much is going on at school at the moment, I thought I’d share someone else’s great work with you!

I have found there to be two main ways. I don’t have Mediator open at the moment, so this is from memory.

If you are exporting an OpenMind document, then you can attach the video to the OpenMind document first, then when you export into Mediator, you get a very nice video package transferred across, complete with play/stop buttons.

However, if you are starting from a blank page, then choose the video button from the top right hand corner, then click and drag the video to the size that you want. A list will appear which you can browse to choose the video that you want to insert. You might then want to resize the video to its original size. After that you need to choose the buttons for the bottom of your video. In the panel which has the buttons, there is one section which has choices of “player” buttons – I can’t remember what that is called at this point. Once you have chosen your player, you need to add an appropriate event to each button – eg click on the play button, and the event is that the video will play, and so forth.

I didn’t have any problems with the sizes of videos – however, before I packaged it onto a disk, I clicked on the button that made all the images, videos etc a smaller size … emm, I can’t remember what that’s called at the moment either! Hopefully someone else will add helpful comments, or I’ll try and remember to add the corrections later!

Anyway, good luck everyone with your Mediator projects! (I’m finding it slow going, but it is still going, so that’s good!)

Now, I haven’t done too much research into this yet, but it’s been very frustrating, so it would be interesting to know if people have faced similar issues.

My pupils were on retreat this weekend at the Bright Lights Festival in London Colney. I lent them my camera so they could take pictures. Unfortunately, the total number of pictures that they could take was 41!!! No, not 141, not 40 and one very long video – 41 still images. I’m not very impressed, a bit worried, and very disappointed for them, and myself. There were loads of photo taking opportunities – I would have loved visual evidence that I managed to clamber over a ten foot high tyre wall, but you will all just have to believe me instead!

Now, I wonder if the reason for this is that on a couple of occasions I have chosen to tick the box “delete when uploaded” on iPhotos or on the Adobe equivalent. And I noticed on one occasion when I was uploading photos, that I seemed to have uploaded a whole load of photos that I had previously deleted. Which makes me suspect that the images or videos may still be somewhere on my memory card, but I cannot access them to delete them.

I haven’t managed to have a look at the card via the computer yet, but on first reading, does anyone have any suggestions? Help!!! Thanks.