Upgrading the TV studio

I wrote this original series of articles back in 2010, based on the TV studio I set up in 2008.   Well, the march of progress or time or whatever has begun to catch up with the equipment. The trouble with a TV studio is that everything works with everything else.  I couldn’t just replace

YouTube Royalty-Free Music bank

When adding music to a video, there is always the point when you want to reach for your audio collection, be it iTunes, Amazon or that pile of dusty CDs and import your favourite song and use that. Yeah, that’s called copyright infringement.  It’s so easy to do, but ethically and legally it’s a big NO. The

Converting videos so they can be edited

At Cramlington, we don’t currently have a third-party video service. Instead, having an entirely Windows server environment, we’ve used Windows Media Encoder and WMV files to stream all our videos. Together with Graeme Porter (since moved to be Walbottle Campus’ VLE Coordinator), I put together our own video database system (CramTube – yeah, our naming’s

FIXED: Playing MP3 files in Windows Media Player from IE (instead of Quicktime)

Preamble OK, before I start. I don’t want to hear about Chrome, Firefox, Winamp, iTunes or frankly anything else. It’s taken me an absolute age to find a solution to this on the internet and almost every forum I went on where someone was having this issue, there was someone else suggesting they just change browser

Using Frog to manage digital signage

Like lots of schools, we have a number of televisions placed around the site to pass on information and celebrate the school in a bright colourful way. We use the MagicInfo Pro system, which allows a single user to control the TVs either as if a single display, as individuals or in groups. The system has worked

Educating in the third dimension

One again, it’s been a while since I posted.  Please accept my humble apologies.  To make it up to you all, here are two articles in one: Terry Freedman from ICT in Education.org asked me to write an article for their  Computers in Classrooms newsletter.  It’s a special 3D edition. Here’s a direct link to my article although

Battle of the Handhelds: Redux!

I think the one post I’ve made which has caused the most feedback and continues to draw in audiences is my post about two devices we were considering for school use back in April, namely the iPod Touch and the Archos 43. So much has happened since I wrote that blog entry.  First off, we didn’t go

3D or not 3D

Sorry folks, I’ve not posted in a quite a time.   It’s been hectic, plus I’ve been experiementing with a lot of resources that haven’t fully proven themselves. I have spent some time recently looking into 3D and 3D resources.   Before I go any further though I need to clarify something.  3D is a gimmick.   It

Build your own teleprompter

Now then, let’s clarify some straight away.  Autocue is a brand name. Ok, that said, what is a teleprompter?  Well, it’s an autocue 🙂 Basically, if you want your presenters/students to be able to read their script directly into camera without having to memorise it (and trust me, they never will memorise it) then you

Lights

When painting a window-less room dark, matte green, its surprising how dark it is.    Lighting becomes and interesting issue.    You need to provide the camera with even light on your green wall to give it as close as possible, one single shade of green for the computer to be able to remove the colour. You