Keeping On-Air Talent Happy
February 22, 2008
Rusty has been so generous with his time providing Weather With Rusty sessions to our students. We have enjoyed working with him so much. We joke with him that we must keep our “on air talent” happy so that our students will get quality programming! Today, we spent some time refining some of the supportive technologies that we use to manage this project. Most of the enhancements today relate to his blog…which we found out his boss reads, too!
Our updates include:
- Added Clustr Maps to his blog.
- Added stat counter to both his blog and the website.
- Found a plug-in for threaded comments. Yes, when you read about this plug-in…it is no longer being developed or supported. Cross your fingers for how long it will work!
(We were having a problem of how to handle student questions. Sometimes 20 students will leave him comments with additional questions in them. Now, he can reply to each question individually.) - Created a new online evaluation using the Google Docs Live Form. We still have not figured out how to make the form public from the hosted apps for schools. It will work from my regular Google account, but not from my EDLINK12 one.
- Recaptcha was already added, but we did find some comments caught in the spam filter, so those were released.
Next Steps:
- Upgrade endpoint in “Rusty’s Studio” to new Polycom HDX with “people-on-content”.
- Get paint to paint the wall the “green screen” color.
- Move the Sympodium from the computer lab where no one knows how to use it into “Rusty’s Studio” so that when I show the videos or images, I can annotate them and point out key elements for the students.
Posted in Supportive Technologies, Weather With Rusty
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This is such a great example of what can be done when you get people together that truly want to make an impact in education and aren’t afraid to put in the extra time and energy to make it happen. The other thing that stands out is that you continually evaluate things and make improvements. This project NEEDS to be shared over and over again. It is very unique. You may already have this included, but one suggestion I have for an additional piece for the studio is a document camera, like the AVerVision CP300. It has a flexible gooseneck and auto focus, so Rusty could share all kinds of small objects and obviously any maps, pictures, etc. The other cool thing is that if you connect it to the PC you can use the document camera through software that comes with it and annotate over it with your SMART software.
Are you saying that I can hook this doc cam to the PC? That would be awesome because we use the AVerMedia QuickPlay to connect the PC.
We have also started using YouTube videos. Just search “tornado”on youtube. It is great!
Yes. As long as the document camera has a USB output, you can connect it to the PC and use the document camera software (usually comes with it) to view the document camera through the PC and then also use it with the SMART software.