ADDING MY VIDEOS TO THIS BLOG

I have heard from several people that they would like to see some of the educational videos I have created.  I realize there was a pull down menu at the top of my blog for it, but I never actually organized the content I have created in the past.

In the past 6 months I have had to wipe both my Mac and my Windows machine (long stories), so some of my videos are now “lost’, but luckily YouTube still has a small collection.

I finally got organized today and separated my videos into categories.  If you look along the top of my blog, you will see a category called “Animations/Videos” :

Most of my videos fall in to four categories of  ”How-To” videos, “Educational Teaching Videos”, “Flash Animated Tutorials”, and “Livescribe pencasts”.  I will be adding some Animationish videos after this Fall when I have my students creating some.

I created the “How-To” videos to teach others how to use software or hardware.  Here are the categories I have in that section:

I plan on adding more videos to this section in the near future, so some of the categories do not have any links yet.

The next main category I have been creating videos for is in “Educational Teaching Videos”.  These are short videos I have created for my students to introduce a topic we are studying in the class.

As you can see when you look through the Educational Teaching videos, I was trying out several types of hardware/software to see what worked best.   I used the eInstruction Workspace software for a “whiteboard” in some videos, and recorded and edited with Camtasia studio.  In other videos I used a Lumens HD Ladibug document camera.  I found the document camera to be better for me when I am actually needing to record working with actual objects like base ten blocks and fraction circles.   I will hopefully be making more videos using these this semester. I will try to keep up with posting them here so I don’t lose them again!!

Most of the tutorials/lessons I have created for my students in the past year are Livescribe pencasts, but I find when I need the lesson to be more visual, a video is better.    My livescribe pencasts are organized by topic on THIS PAGE.  I have quite a few pencasts collected there.   When I had to wipe my computers, I lost all the original pencasts, so for now I cannot change any of those pencasts into PDF’s to download.

Lastly, about six years ago I started created Flash animated tutorials to help my students in my Math For Elementary Teachers classes better visualize the math they will be teaching. I strongly believe visualization is key to understanding!

The Flash animated tutorials are housed on a separate area (outside of my blog).   They are organized by arithmetic topic:

For example, clicking on the “1/3″ would take you to the fraction tutorials, and the “2″ will take you to the multidigit whole number operations.  This type of tutorial takes me a lot longer to create, so I do not have many in some areas (like decimals).   Instead, I am starting to create more interactive tutorials using Hyperstudio.  To see a few of those interactive tutorials, CLICK HERE.

These are still a work in progress, but I promise to continue adding here so check back!

 

More this past several months than anytime in the past I have had to sign PDFs that someone emailed me. Now, I love PDFs but I hate that they’re not really editable unless you have the correct software: Acrobat Adobe X. I was able to acquire the software but still had issues. Most of the PDFs I come across are from educational institutions so there’s not real protection, which is great. Now, I need to fill in information like name/address but I also needed to sign the damn things. This is where it gets tricky.

Years ago I used my Wacom tablet to make a signature jpg, which I use to sign electronic letters of rec, etc… Now I want to add this small jpg into a PDF. I cannot insert an image like I would into a text document, nor can I just copy/paste from a jpg viewer. So I googled it and this is what I found.

Instructions

1 Open the PDF document in Adobe Acrobat Professional. Go to “Tools,” select “Comment and Markup,” and choose “Stamps.” Click on “Create Custom Stamp.”

2 Click the “Browse” button to select your image. In the “Show” drop-down menu, make sure to select the format that your image is in. Locate your image on your computer. Click “Select” and then click “OK.”

3 In the “Category” field, enter “My Stamps.” In the “Name” field, enter an easy to remember name for your image. Click “OK.”

4 Go back to “Tools,” then “Comment and Markup,” and select “Stamps.” Navigate to “My Stamps,” the new category you created. Select your image.

5 You should now see your image overlaying your PDF document. Move your mouse to the general area where you want your image and click. Your image is now stamped onto your document.

6 Click once on your image to select it. There should be a light blue border around the image. You can now use your mouse to re-size the image or drag it to a different part of your PDF document.

This information was found here.