Tag Archives: itunes

news

Ripping CDs may be made legal

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Here in the UK it is (still) illegal to rip a CD to your computer (so when using iTunes or Windows Media Player you are technically breaking the law if you import a CD).

Ripping CDs may be made legal

However the BBC reports that this may soon change…

Copying music from a CD to a home computer could be made legal under new proposals from the UK government.

Millions of people already “rip” discs to their computers and move the files to MP3 players, although the process is technically against copyright law.

This is of course of those things that we do on a regular basis, but is in fact still illegal, I would suspect most people don’t even realise it is illegal.

apple, podcast

iTunes U, now more than University

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Apple have expanded their iTunes U service to cover other educational broadcasts beyond Universities.

iTunes U

Ars Technica in their reporting say:

Apple has now created an entire new section of “the U” just for you active learners, however. In a section coined “Beyond Campus,” Apple has begun hosting podcasts from educational sources other than academia. In a Chronicle article Apple VP of iTunes Eddy Cue says that lots of people are happy to share this educational content, but that they just didn’t have a means until now. 

Looking like their could be some more useful content available.

blog, blogging, video

Nice selection of animated “how to” guides

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Russell Stannard has posted a range of online animated guides that demonstrate various ways in which you can incorporate learning technologies into teaching.

These videos were created for teachers to help them to incorporate technology into their teaching. My own background is in teaching English, so some of the sites are specific to ELT and are grouped separately. The rest are for all teachers and there is also a section for those interested in more difficult multimedia products like Flash and Director.

The cover how to use iTunes, PowerPoint tips, creating blogs and many other things.

He has used Camtasia to produce the video guides. Personally I am a fan of Captivate which does a similar job, for those looking for a free tool, Wink is certainly one option which does work quite well.

Well worth a look.

firefox, keynote, video

My Top Ten Applications for e-Learning

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My top ten applications which I use to create and support the use of e-learning are…

Keynote – a superb presentation package, not matter how many times I start creating a presentation in PowerPoint, I virtually always end up in Keynote. The latest version (iWork ’08) is a real improvement on the previous version and I will admit I do like the audience going “ooh” when I use the cube transition.

Toast – not only a superb disk burning piece of software, but extremely capable of converting a range of video file formats and doing it well. Another useful video conversion tool I have started using is VisualHub.

EyeTV – though Windows Media Centre (and now Vista) has a much better interface, the versatility, the editing and exporting functionality make EyeTV the only real choice when it comes to recording and editing television. Combined with Toast and VisualHub you suddenly can record, edit and watch that video wherever, whenever and on whatever you want.

Dreamweaver – steep learning curve, but if you need to get your hands dirty with HTML and websites then this package is perfect. Though I do like Dreamweaver, I know with web tools such as WordPress and Drupal tools such as Dreamweaver are becoming less essential than they were in the past.

Fireworks – For manipulating images for the web then I go with Fireworks every time. Can also be used to create simple animated gifs. I do use PhotoShop, but for web image editing I always start Fireworks first.

Firefox (with Safari a close second and Flock in third place) – I can’t work with non-tabbed browsers, so on the PC it’s Firefox all the time, on the Mac I mainly use Safari. Safari with it’s .mac integration allows me to share my bookmarks over multiple computers and over the web. Now Safari (in beta) is available for Window and I like how Safari for Windows looks almost exactly like Safari for the Mac. Flock is for me relatively new and I do like the integration with online tools such as Flickr, del.icio.us and WordPress.

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