Holiday PD.....

I have been on some great subject PD over the holidays. It was a 2 day PD for DVC
( Design and Visual Communication ), and we covered rendering on the first day and technical drawings on the second day.
I got a lot out of the rendering day, as I have never used the proper marker pens to produce work before, so I have been busy putting the new rendering skills I picked up this week into practice on the Level 1 project that they are just onto. The project they are on with is designing a mobile phone, and we have previously used coloured pencils to render the final designs to look like plastic and glass. This was then photographed and put into Photoshop to create a presentation sheet.

This year, I want my level 1 students to use the skills that I have just learned. The person in charge of the course this week says that using these skills well will get the students up into the merit / excellence range, which is really good news.

So how do I intent to use Google for this?

I have produced a sample for the students to see, and photographed each stage. These photographs have been put into a Google presentation and put onto the Graphics Google site for the students to access. I have always demonstrated how to produce drawings in front of the class so they see the process from the start. It is good to be able to put the steps online for the students to use out of the class room for practice.

It would be good, once the students get to grips with this technique, is if they made their own "how to" presentations for next year's students.

Paul, who ran the course, was also using a great bit of kit. An over head camera on a drawing board, connected to the projector. This projected everything he was drawing onto the board.
Do I want one of those???... oh yes...

Learning Lots on our YouTube Session

It is the weekly help session again and this time we covered a few You Tube tips

For people who don't have a YouTube channel yet, it was easier to start from Gmail, as everyone can find that, click on more then YouTube is the third choice down.

When you then click on your log in on the top right, a selection drops down where you choose Video Manager. This is where you would view all your uploads of you have any but on a new account it prompts you to make a channel.

At the top of the screen is a nice big, friendly "upload" button, so we all had a go at uploading a small video onto the newly created channel.

Then we moved on over to having a quick look at the YouTube video editor.

It lists all your uploaded videos which you can then edit together with the simple to use tools that it gives you. It also lets you have access to some creative commons videos, which are good for having a practice.

This is a good place to start for people with no editing experience as it is pretty user friendly and doesn't include too many bells and whistles to confuse the beginner. You can include music, titles and add some simple transitions.

What really got people interested this week was when we looked at playlists.

You can add your own videos to playlists or any that you find on YouTube made by others.

You can access your playlists from the video manager, down the side, underneath the uploads option.

It shows all your playlists and how many videos you have in them. 

When you find a good video while browsing, and wish to add it to a playlist, it is very easy to do.

Underneath the name of the video, there is an "add to" selection. When you click on this, it lists all of your playlists or gives you the option to make a new one.

Embedding a playlist.

When we were experimenting with embedding a YouTube playlist, we discovered that the HTML that you get from the playlist will not work on a Google site, either giving you a "this video does not exist" message or only playing one video from the playlist, depending on where, of the two choices,  you got the code from.

This same HMTL code worked perfectly on a blog. A player is embedded which plays one of the videos with a skip button so you can skip to another in the playlist. you can see the skip button on this screen shot of a test blog.

We have no idea why it would work on the blog but not the site and this was quite frustrating, but people went away happy with playlists on the whole, as they are useful tools to collect like videos together and play them all without having to play lots individually.