Recently in Showcase Category

This year we wanted to do something a bit different for our 10 minute "speech" to the parents attending the annual Open House Night at our school. So using Adobe Visual Communicator, we decided to create a "video tour" of the units we teach in Technology Education at Amherst Middle School.

Sure we could have pre-recorded these segments, and had the benefit of starting over if we flubbed our lines, but hey what fun would that be? We decided to perform LIVE so parents could see Visual Communicator in all it's simplicity.  Simply put, there is NO other comparable software out there that has greenscreen capability, live output, a built in teleprompter, and so many templates and wizards making video production a snap!  All made possible with software costing less than $150 edu retail.

Suffice to say, this will now be an annual event for us as it went over extrememly well and was highly effective showing what we teach in our classrooms.  We had a lot of positive feedback from administration and parents, and the video was featured on SchoolTube for all to view as well.

Production Note-- nearly all of what you see was created exclusively with Visual Communicator, except for the classroom footage which we used our handy Flip Video cameras for, worked great!

Dr. Devin K. Joshi is an Assistant Professor in the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. This interview was conducted by Alex Karklins of the DU Center for Teaching and Learning regarding his use of CourseMedia™ as a faculty member.

DU CourseMedia™ is a course media management system that helps instructors organize and present media materials (images, video and audio). Instructors have access to large collection of art and world history images, library reserve videos and audio works.

I wrote a new AIR app called LiveStreamer available now via the Adobe AIR Marketplace.

This started as a simple mechanism to display a live RTMP stream from Flash Media Server to a client machine and related projection system. So... not for broadcast over the web- just sending a live stream from one physical location to another.

While developing the application, I came across the need to test an RTMP stream and it was so simple using this app that I decided to expand it. In the current version (0.9.0), it will accept RTMP and HTTP streams- just type in the URL and you can easily test it in order to verify that it is correct before trying to publish anything on a website or whatnot. You can also use it as a fullscreen projection or display mechanism as was originally intended.

If you have some FLVs or MP4s or whatnot on your local machine- you can just drag those into the app to watch them. I'm thinking about adding some playback controls and other options a bit later.

Application for display of video streams via RTMP, HTTP, or local filesystem. Just drag in a file or enter a stream address and away we go!

At the University of Denver, we have built a good number of AIR applications at this point. Some are internal data management tools, others are full, complex, private applications such as the VPS Projection system, and then we have small utility apps like this which others may also find some use for. These we make available to others free of charge as part of our community outreach.

The University of Denver Center for Teaching & Learning has (finally) released the DU CourseMedia™ Course Media Management System. This has been a focus of my work for the past 5 months or so and is one of the major CTL projects for 2009. Some may recall the mention of the DUVAGA system from time-to-time. CourseMedia™ is DUVAGA reborn.

DU CourseMedia™ was developed by the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Denver as a course-based media presentation tool for organizing and presenting high quality images and videos to system participants. Although it was initially built with the needs of faculty in the school of art and art history in mind, DU CourseMedia™ is now used by faculty in many other disciplines in approximately 250 courses each term.

Through DU CourseMedia™, instructors have access to over 50,000 art and world history images and over 2000 library reserve videos. DU Course Media™ allows instructors to create online galleries that can include streaming video, images, text slides, discussion boards, quizzes, and voice narrations.

Some of the highlights of the new release are as follows:

• Complete overhaul of how media objects are accessed
• Entire media galleries can now be shared across permitted websites
• Gallery object functionality is raised one level to become more accessible for users
• The new Media Viewer is written from scratch with the input of DU faculty, staff and students
• The Media Viewer is a Flash application written upon the Flex framework
• The VPS Projection System, an application which runs upon the Adobe AIR runtime has also recieved a number of updates

I'll be presenting on DU CourseMedia™ at the Adobe Education Leader Institute this summer.

To see an overview of the new features, you can check out a screencast produced by Alex Martinez, ColdFusion developer for the CTL.

A screencast specific to the Media Viewer was also authored by Jenn Light.

This article was originally posted at In Flagrante Delicto!

This year Amherst Middle School's musical was written by our own creative team of music teachers. This gave us the ability to record and sell it on DVD as a fundraiser. It was titled, "It's Middle School...The Musical" and was a big hit!

The "Collector's Edition" DVD our kids produced was absolutely phenominal! It contains the entire recorded performance shot with 2 camera angles, a slideshow set to the show's music, and a 30 min documentary containing cast interviews and bloopers.

There were 8 Adobe products involved in this project, to learn more and view sample footage, visit my blog site here:
http://blogs.schooltube.com/robz/2009/04/making-the-dvd--behind-the-scenes-of-our-2009-school-musical.html