Elf Yourself.....and your family & friends

I made one of these cute little videos a couple of years ago, inserting all the cousins' faces onto the elf bodies and cracking up as they danced a little elf song.  Well, I just came across this site again this year and will be doing it again.  The kids are a bit older, so not sure if it will hold the same cute-factor or not, but I am willing to give it the old college try.

So, have some fun and elf yourself! 

Visit:  http://host-d.oddcast.com/elfyourself2012/home.php

They even have an APP!

Happy almost New Year

Well, it is that time of year, when we take a moment or two to reflect on the year.  I finished my teaching certification and am almost done with my library media certification and am working in my first teaching job (well, where they actually pay me as a teacher) and my family is healthy, doing well in school and all together for the Christmas break.  A ton has happened in the last year and there is so much more to come.  I am thankful.

T ogether we can make a difference
H elp and support from and for my fellow teachers
A wesome family and friends in my life
N etworking to continue my own professional development
K indle books, Nook books, print books, audio book, oh my!
F earless dedication to move forward and make things better
U seful web 2.0 tools to make my job easier and more fun
L ots of love and joy in 2013

Cheers to 2012!

Glogster

I am finishing my library media certification and am doing field work in a high school library.  Not only do I get a chance to see how the 'big' kids do things, I'm learning about new ways to do things and about some old/new tools.  While reviewing how the library is using LibGuides, I ran across a familiar name: Glogster.  My children used this in middle school, and I always meant to play around with it, but never found the time.  Until now!  I signed up for a FREE education account and love, love, love it!  This is a great tool to bring all your resources together in a single place:  audio, video, images, text.  Then, use your imagination to make it visually appealing for students.

Here is my first attempt at creating a Glogster to use to recap our Polar Friends unit with my kindergarten and first grade library students.  I can't wait to use this tomorrow!

Video Editing [by fire]

Well, I have been thrown in without warning to being a video editor!  The naive me thought that I would just record the kids at school singing their Chanukah songs using my ipad, send it to the computer and ta-da it would just work beautifully on the PC to show to parents!  Needless to say, it did NOT work that way at all!

First off, the MOV file extension is the Apple version, which words great in Apple's Quicktime Player, but will not load to Windows Movie Maker for editing.  Therefore, I had to find and download a converter program (I found an article on eHow that directed me to the FormatFactory tool) that would convert MOV to MPG, which again did not load to Movie Maker, even though it is an acceptable format (not sure why this did not work).  So, I reconverted all the videos from MOV to AVI and some of them loaded to Movie Maker, but not all.  Again, I am at a loss as to what was wrong.  But onward I must move!

Then, of course, I had to figure out how to edit the video clips in Movie Maker to cut some parts out, as well as to concatonate all the good footage together.  The goal is to rip the final product to a DVD, so that the teachers can play these videos on an endless loop in their classrooms during our Chanukah Around the World evening.

So, lots more work to do, but I really hope that the final product looks and sounds good for the parents.  The kids worked really hard on their songs!  Now, I just have to hope the teacher's computers will have the needed video player and bandwidth to play the videos!!!!