Setting Up Your Harvard Web Space

Hey,

Here's a video (admittedly my worst performance yet) that demonstrates how to set up your havard web space and to put your web pages onto the internet for everyone to see (at least everyone to whom you give the address.)

Just a note... when I begin showing you how to enter your site information in Dreamweaver, make sure to watch it through to the end... I screw up a couple of times, but eventually do it right. :)

Video: Setting Up Your Web Page on the Internet

Your web account can be visited by typing: http://gseacademic.harvard.edu/~spencech

you'll want to replace the "spencech" with your harvard/webmail user name. In fact any time I write spencech in this video, you should write your user name in its place. I think I fail to mention that on a couple of occasions.

Dreamweaver Tutorial

Sorry for the late posting... final projects are killing me

Here are the links to this week's set of videos on Dreamweaver and simple web page development.

Getting Started
Setting up the Site
Creating your first Page
Adding an Image
Creating a Second Page and Linking

Encoding and Reszing MP3's in Audacity

The following set of tutorial videos cover the steps necessary to create MP3 files for the web and Book Builder in Audacity. If you are using Microsoft Windows, there is one gigantic oversight in the second video. The following description will make absolutely zero sense until you've seen the video, so just remember to refer back to it when I show you how to download the MP3 encoder/maker in Video 2 (I also make a reference to it in Video 3).

If you are on a PC, when you download the lame encoder, I incorrectly indicate in the video that it should look like the file that I download onto my Mac... that's wrong! If you're working on a PC, the file you will look for when you unzip the LAME folder is called lame_enc.dll

Video 1: Making MP3s with Audacity;
Video 2: Downloading the MP3 Encoder (If you're on a PC, refer to the correction above)
Video 3: Make your first MP3
Video 4: Reducing your MP3 file size (The best way)
Video 5: Reducing your MP3 file size (The not quite best way)

Book Builder Tutorials

The following video tutorials support Thursday's lab on Book Builder

Create an Account at CAST
Create your First Book
Create a Title Page with text and image
Create Body Page for your content
Add Sound to your first page (apologies for the fact that you can't hear my sound at the end)
Add links to a Glossary
Learn about Coaches

How I Learn New Things (on the internet)

For my media lab, I've decided to take a somewhat unusual approach to teaching in which I demonstrate how I learn. Specifically, I use the video tutorial format to illustrate how I learn to use technology for problem solving. In the introduction video, I indicate that I often get asked how I know whatever it is I might know about technology; my answer is invariably, "I just taught myself." Believe me, it's not as impressive as it might sound,

So my intent in these videos is to demonstrate/act out my approach to figuring out a new skill on the internet. In this case, I set a task that I genuinely had never done before (converting a song I heard on TV into an ipod music file (mp3)) and just narrate what I'm doing as I go through the process. Because I tried to keep this authentic, and didn't want to re-record any parts of it, I stumble, mis-speak etc., here and there. I even get stuck on something that doesn't work (imagine that!). My goal, in this case, is to demonstrate how you can go about figuring something out, and to provide visual evidence that even the tech savvy among us, must deal with many of the same learning obstacles.

Introduction
The Search
Failure and Redemption
Audacity
iTunes

Audacity Tutorial

Here are the links to the training videos I made to support Thursday's Audacity section. They're a little rough, but hopefully they're helpful in getting started with this software.

Audacity Installation
Recording your First Sound
Removing Weirdness, Ummmms, and Lip smacks (or whatever weird stuff you do when you talk :) )
Reducing Noise
Adjusting Volume
Special Effects (Fade, Pitch, etc.,)
Exporting for PowerPoint

What I'm doing outside of class

I'm in the process of developing, with a team of HGSE's best, a video-based professional development website that teaches educators how to use free internet technologies (such as blogs, diigo, wikis, etc.,) to enhance pedagogy and learning opportunities. That's a mouthful, but an idea we're extremely excited about. The material from this class seems as if it will be particularly relevant from the standpoint of the children whose education we ultimately hope to enrich, but also from the perspective of our students (the teachers), because they too will likely need sufficient scaffolding to become comfortable with these technologies.

As the semester progresses, I hope to develop my understanding of how these tools can provide new learning opportunities for students, and to begin incorporating these ideas into the development of our PD curriculum. I plan to post some of the videos as I make them, and might beg some feedback from anyone who happens upon my blog. I'm embedding a video below that I think does an excellent job of demonstrating the sometimes new and frightening principles underlying internet technology. Commoncraft.com makes these wonderfully descriptive videos of abstract concepts (what's a wiki? for example...)

Hey Everyone.
I’m a high school teacher and football coach, turned Harvard TIE grad student, turned quasi T560-TF/student. I will be more than happy to help you with any of your technology-related needs over the course of the semester, though content related questions should most definitely be forwarded to either Peter or Rachel, who are far more competent TFs than I can hope to be. I was the TF in David Dockterman’s T522 Educational Software Design class last semester, where I played pretty much the same role (glorified computer helper).

I signed up for this course because I’m interested in developing educational web sites and applications for informal learning environments. I taught high school for seven years (9th and 10th grade Biology), and became eager to see what else is out there in the world of education. I’m definitely looking forward to exploring new career opportunities here at Harvard as the semester progresses. Interestingly, my primary reason for leaving teaching was the poor support provided to educators who were teaching increasingly diverse classes and asked to satisfy increasingly demanding standards and exams. Seems like the content in this course would have been quite useful for me and others in my situation.

I’ve become something of an amateur Flash developer over the past few years, and am very interested in developing web and desktop deployed content that can be accessed and enjoyed by all folks along the diversity continuum. I am presently developing the next incarnation of the Darius Goes West documentary website, which hopefully will replace its predecessor within the next month. If you don’t know about Darius, check him out at dariusgoeswest.com (the old site). That dude with the southern accent in our class is also a good person to ask if you’re interested in learning more about the movie. He made it.


I’m married (will be two years in May) to my fourth grade crush. It’s a long story, and most anyone who knows me has suffered through it, so you can ask any TIE member for the Cliff’s Notes. I now live in Medway MA (born in California, lived in Kansas, but spent most of my life in MA), and my car’s a piece of junk so I’m pretty much forced to take the train in to Boston (winds up being about a two hour trip from door to Ivory Tower). I did my undergraduate studies (Biology and Environmental Studies) at Williams College, and am presently a full time student at HGSE. That’s my story.