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For educators.

I’m happy to announce that our Teaching and Learning Newsletter is now complete and published.

For Teachers and Educators…

One of the areas I have been working on over the last half-term is co-ordinating teaching and learning at my College.

As part of sharing our practice with other educators I have now set up the CITAL-TAL blog, please be gentle it is currently under construction.

You can read a ’snap-shot’ of our practice and other projects within our teaching and learning newsletter, which will be published half-termly.

Much will not come as a surprise for my online Geography colleagues, in fact, many are credited with ideas.

We are keen to have conversations with other educators across the world, whatever the subject specialism or age range. Please feel free to leave comments.

If you have a teaching and learning co-ordinator at your establishment, I would be grateful if you could pass on the link. This is a new role within our College and I’m keen to discuss it with others.

We now have a Research and Development Group, as a group we are keen to visit schools involved in innovative projects or just to see good practice. Of course, you are welcome to visit us!

Many thanks

Tony

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RadicalGeography is still active, but I’ve decided to slim it down and go for a thematic layout, it was looking a mess and I want it to reflect the new Key Stage 3 changes and Pilot course. My aim is to upload new resources as I teach or create them. All old links are now dead, apologises in advance for the inconvenience. This doesn’t effect uploaded resources on this blog.

I haven’t really thought about uses for this yet, but it strikes me that if a time-lapse can be made from static web-cam images, then collating and merging pieces of live footage has the same benefits to show change over time in an environment. Sadly, the majority of good web-cams tend to be in urban environments. Also this technique would benefit individuals who have networks that ban the use of web-cams, but wanted to show a place ‘live’ at a given time, it would also get around the problem of friction of distance.

If you have a SMART board and associated software you can record any webcam on the board, if you also have a decent sound card, you will also get audio as well. (I’m sure I tried this, but I’ll get back to you….)

If you find a web-cam with embedded Windows Media Player, QuickTime and Real Player, you can record live feed using High Download, one of my favourite tools and cheap at the price. I’m not sure about the legality of recording live streams, but it’s all for education!

Firstly, find the webcam you want to record live feed from. I’m going to use the New York cam again.

Right click on the image and choose properties,

copy the location URL.

Open HiDownload and paste in your URL, press ok and let it do it’s evil work. Remember because the feed is live, you will have to end the recording process. Click on the downloading feed and click stop.

Job complete. Here is a brief amount of feed that I recorded this morning. If using this raw, you need to make sure that your media player and the network has the correct codec to play the asf extension.

If needed Zamar is a useful website to quickly convert your files to a suitable format to edit.

Obviously once recorded and converted, you can use your recorded feed in a number of ways, perhaps editing with Windows Movie Maker.

I had to remove the Google Ads from the site when they starting displaying Ads that I didn’t think were appropriate. One of the issues I have already highlighted. I will have to make my money in another places.

Good news, EarthCam is not blocked by the network, but I have uncovered a problem with live streaming cams, some cause an annoying click when refreshing, about every second. I’ll have to investigate this further, but hey live images!

I intend to set myself the non-challenge of just using some webcams in my teaching, I’m not really going to even think deeply about use, just get them in there. Hugh at Wycombe High School, has already compiled a useful range of webcam sites and locations, classified into topics, on his department website.

Another little issue, some of the live webcams need active controls to be installed. I’m betting nothing that this will cause a problem on the school system. Another issue that keeps coming up is the lack, so far, of quality UK streaming webcams. Any one have any ideas?