Really making use of the tech that kids bring to school

I got to thinking the other day in my register class as one of the students pulled out his iPhone, other mobile and iPod.
Although this pupil was a bit of an exception to the norm, most kids have a mobile phone on them at least.

I have already had my students using them to help vocab learning via simple audio files, but I wanted to go further and allow them to see either a picture which illustrates the vocab or the word itself.
Here is my solution:

• i recorded the audio in garageband
• i typed the vocab items onto slides in keynote
• i set the garageband file playing whilst recording the keynote slideshow (I could simply have narrated but it wouldn't have had the music)
• Hey presto a narrated vocab slideshow which I then exported to quicktime
  

I now needed to convert this in somehow to an acceptable format for mobile phone (3gp). My first idea was to use youconvertit.com to simply transcode the .mov file. This didn't work as the 3gp option isn't available for this conversion. I then thought I'd try to convert it from an online file, so I uploaded to blip.tv. BUT youconvertit isn't compatible with blip.tv urls. However with blip I was able to download an flv version. Using this I was then able to convert to 3gp...unfortunately this didn't work very well, the file was corrupted somewhere...and it was all getting a bit complicated.

THEN it dawned on me . Ok so it cost me £20, but it will be worth it. It worked like a dream. I just opened the .mov file and then exported it as a 3gp file. The reason why I say it will be worth it is that now I will be able to convert all the vocab guide podcasts ( which I want to redo) to mobile phone files to give out to students.

Result!






And here's the proof...sort of.

In case you are interested the film is below in the previous post.

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Comments

[srdha]

Here is a site that more use full than youconvertit.com download youtube videos on the fly,in any format http://youtubeddl.com dirict download from youtube server

[Chris]

Hey Adam,

great work, mobile slideshows are so effective. As you say, zamzar tends to corrupt the file, the only freebie I've found that works is www.movavi.com

Chris

[Adam]

Thanks for that Iain. I have used Zamzar before, but It didn't do what i wanted to to do in this case.

[Iain Stanger]

Hi Adam have you tried Zamzar its free and you can convert many different file types from one to another check it out at http://www.zamzar.com/
Iain