ET-725 final project

As an ADE, I thought I'd devote the majority of the work for my final project towards the great content available on iTunes U. The following Prezi has some videos and links to great collections.

ET-725 final project on Prezi

Voki - ET-730

Here's my first animation video... I decided to try out Voki for my maiden voyage.

iTunes U

For this Discovery Project, I decided to dabble in iTunes U a bit. I've been doing it some for another project, and I think it has some real potential for schools and entities using iOS devices. It was my plan to show everything in a single video, but as I started, it became a bit long so I decided to break it up a bit. Here is part 1 of a series of 4 or so videos to get started.

iCabMobile Screencast

Here's a screencast of one my favorite apps for the iPad: iCabMobile. This app allows users to download media, from virtually any website, directly to the iPad that can then be used in other programs (Keynote, etc).

For this screencast, I used a program called "Reflection" which allows the iPad to wirelessly project to a desktop (in this case, a Mac) computer. It has a built in recording feature that automatically records the  screen of the iPad. I had to bring this video into another program to do the voiceover. Ironically, as I was completing this project, I had some friends on Twitter share that Display Recorder is now available that will record the screen AND the audio, thus allowing for a seamless screencast. Reflection is a $9.99 app, and the Display Recorder app is also $9.99.

Library of Congress - Teacher Section

I decided for this project to do a screencast of the Teachers page of the project. Cheryl Davis, a fellow ADE & GCT showed this to me a few months back, and I was blow away by the amount of information available.   Here's the screencast, with some spotlighting features present in Camtasia as well as the notes/annotation feature available in YouTube!

Library of Congress... the world (almost) at our fingertips!

Whenever I watch stuff like this, it amazes me that regardless of the amount of technology at our disposal, we still have so far to get "everything" at a state that is accessible by all. The numbers in these two videos were staggering:

• 700 TB of data
• 200 TB available to the public on the web due to copyright issues
• 120 Million Books
• 36,000 feature films
• 100,000 + music sheets and recordings (they also keep a lot of information on Vinyl too!)
• 1% of all the Library of Congress information digitized and made available on the web.

Although they didn't go too far in depth with how they are storing it, yet the capacity and the individual technologies involved for the various "forms" of artifacts were amazing. From simple pictures, to lateral scanning, to the (apparent) painstaking process of the copy process where each picture had to be physical placed on the scanner. The amount of time and effort put into this process seems like a never ending task. But keeping "America's Memory" intact is a big job!

What I found to be the most interesting was the collections from other countries that the LOC stores. I don't think I realized that there was as much information from other countries in our national library. I foolishly expected it to be solely American, but I guess if you're trying to maintain the worlds largest library, you have to get information from all over.

As I explored the LOC's website, I came across the educator section of the site which I found to be quite interesting. With a blog, information on using Primary sources and links to their partners, it's encouraging to see the amount of development that is going into sharing this information with educators from all over. 

Questions that made me go, "hmmm"

As I watched, it made me wonder how long ago the movies were made? I found out they were published to YouTube in 2009. This isn't too shocking actually, I expected them to be older (probably because of them not being HD.

How much more information is being gathered due to the digital age we live in?  With the amount of information we're already behind on (and I don't mean that negatively), at what rate is the capacity of the LOC growing? WIth all of the people working on the old stuff, what type of technology and manpower is being using to capture current and up-to-date information?

How has the storage technology changed since this time? I know most organizations have morphed to a Storage Area Network over the past few years, for power saving and redundancy?  How many backups does the Library of Congress have? 

eBooks

The following is a presentation I did on eBooks for my Masters program. Very interesting numbers and concepts behind what still appears to be a "late-adopter" platform for many.

ET - 725: eBooks on Prezi