Mobile Media
You would have to work pretty hard to have avoided seeing all the press last week about the new Apple iPod with video. While most of the chatter was over being able to download television shows, what has me most intrigued is how easy it is to convert virtually any video for playback on the device. I’ve been looking at PowerMediaPlus from Clearvue, which is an educational video company that has made the crossover to digital media. When you license their video and image files (thousands and thousands), you can use them any way you want, including letting students use the materials and edit them into new media projects.
And, as it turns out, the file format is compatible with iPods, so you could also download educational videos for viewing anywhere in the classroom.
What makes it really look appealing to me is the accompanying iTunes 6 software. It will now handle videos, and it’s a great video organizer. You can not only organize imported videos into separate playlists, you can also add comments or key terms to each video, and then (once you modify the view of the playlist in the preferences) search by word or phrase to find the videos you want. You can also set the preferences so that any video you play automatically plays back fullscreen, with no annoying windows or controls. I’ll be using the software as my video viewer on both my Mac and Windows laptops.
Combine these techologies with some of the great software out there for creating studio-like video reports (see Visual Communicator and Vlog It from Serious Magic Software for Windows, or Videocue from Vara Software for the Mac), and you have a pretty amazing video environment that was unimaginable just a couple of years ago. Pretty soon some our students will be bringing professional-looking video reports from home. It would be really great if we could give them that option at school, too.