Just 10 minutes on the five number summary. I’ve not produced a screencast for some time, and this topic presented itself as potentially useful to a range of students but not ‘mainstream’ on any of their courses.

I used the NCH screencam software. This YouTube is a ‘single take’ without script walking through the PowerPoint I usually use for this topic. You may notice that I ‘loose’ it in the middle slightly.

6 minutes and 43 seconds on how to cancel down a fraction to its lowest terms. I’d rather describe that as ‘remove all the common factors from a fraction’. Produced using the NCH Debut video capture software, and edited in Windows Movie Maker. Notes on how to do all this coming soon.

2 minutes and 28 seconds on multiplying fractions. Recorded as a quick reminder for students on a return to study course.

Produced on my College issue laptop using the free version of the NCH Debut screen and Webcam capture software, and using the cheapo USB microphone (Logitech and Belkin sell the same oem device). Attempts to use the built in microphone on the laptop failed despite the placement of the microphone high up on the screen near the Web cam.

Slideshare from an OpenOffice Impress presentation on the basics of fractions. Based on an idea from Malcolm C. It worked for his students so I’ll try it out with my Level 1 Adult Numeracy students.

A couple of worksheets coming as well…. You can download a PDF of the Introduction to Fractions presentation [ 160Kb ]. If you load this into Acrobat Reader you should be able to view it in full screen/presentation mode. I’ve seen a couple of people have problems with cross platform transfer of presentations this week, so I’m developing a ‘lowest common denominator’ style (if you will pardon the mathematical pun). The ‘builds’ in this presentation are actually separate copies of the final slide in the sequence with bits removed to form earlier slides. There is no custom animation, and so less to go wrong!

24th April: Download a sheet with 10 questions about forming fractions from everyday situations. I’ll put the answers in later on!

OpenOffice 3.01 on Ubuntu Jaunty Beta is proving to be a bit crashy, I might switch off some of the bling I’ve got running.

Record My Desktop is a program available in the Ubuntu repositories that, well, makes an OGG video of your desktop. YouTube can handle OGG theora format video files, so the YouTube above shows me taking the walrus in vain. Just a test, expect more once I have cracked sound and how to get Ubuntu to recognise my usb microphone so I can ‘screencast’ Impress presentations.

I’ll evaluate this one in a couple of days, and I’ll upload the final PowerPoint then. It took a bit of time to draw the 100% ruler for the page…

A summary of Garr Reynold’s chapter about design principles. The chapter is available as a PDF download, which is jolly decent for a book that is still very much in print.

The pale yellow background and large text are to suit a student with a specific requirement in one of my groups. I might try a ‘slide cast’ in SlideShare, but you have to fiddle with timings for each slide transition so I might talk through the slides in my YouTube format.

The Ratio and Proportion PowerPoint is available for download [ 600Kb ]. The cous-cous packet simply happened to be on the table when I was thinking of problems… Onto percentages…

The screen cam above uses iShowU with commentary recorded directly using the built in microphone on the iBook. I use the 640 by 480 screen setting and set the iShowU preferences to scale the video to 50%. Sound was recorded in default 44.1KHz sampling. The resulting QuickTime movie is around 6Mb in size. I’m just waiting for YouTube to complete processing the video to see if the ‘lag’ between sound and images is still there as it was last time I used the iBook to produce a QuickTime from a Keynote presentation. It isn’t, so I shall stick to iShowU for future screen casts.

The script was a series of actions…

1. Start PowerPoint with a blank slide
2. Add a basic shape and add a text label to the shape
3. Copy the shape, then click on the slide to unselect the shape, and then paste the button and reposition. Alter the label on the second button.
4. Add an information slide about sheep
5. Copy and paste the slide and alter the text to suit the goats
6. Switch back to first slide and right click over button. Select Action Settings and make link to slide 2
7. Repeat operation on the Goats button for slide 3, pointing out that it is the Action Settings and not the Hyperlink menu item, although we are hyperlinking slides…
8. Switch to the second Sheep slide and add an Action Button to provide a link home. Note how action buttons bring up the Action Settings menu automatically. Accept the default of ‘link to first slide’
9. Copy the Home button to the second information slide (Goats)
10. Recap: now we have links to and back from two information slides
11. Add a fourth slide for a glossary: Add some text to the slide. Add a ‘Back’ action button, and set the Action Setting to ‘last viewed slide’
12. Switch to the second slide, and highlight a piece of text. Right click over the text and select Action Settings when the menu appears. Select Hyperlink To… and slide 4
13. Repeat for the third slide
14. Save changes
15. Switch off mouse and spacebar by selecting Set Up Show from the Slide Show menu and select Kiosk as the format of the show
16. Right Click over a blank section of a slide and select Transition Settings. Untick the ‘On Mouse Click’ and Apply to All
17. Save changes and test out the links in presentation mode

Five minutes on the how and why of using a class blog. There is an annoying loss of synch between the slides and the audio on the YouTube version that was not apparent on the Quicktime export from KeyNote. This must have happened during the processing on YouTube.

I’m using tumblr.com as an example of a blog publishing system as I like the category based layout. Alas, the audio and video upload uses flashplayer 9 and often does not work on MS Internet Explorer.