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New Kodax Zi8 Camcorder

in
I am thinking of setting up some kind of digital journal for myself and my staff using a private site (am thinking of WordPress or Posterous..) I want to be able to capture moments throughout the school day/week, interviews with students, staff and parents, samples of student work and so on... (I'll see how this goes... :-) ) and create a digital reflection that I might share with staff to highlight best practices I see around the building, and also to pose questions about our practice. As part of this process I have been looking for a pocketable HD camcorder and last week I picked up a Kodak Zi8 HD camcorder.

 I have been looking for something that I can walk around with at school and use quickly. While we also have a few Flip's at school, the Kodak feature set is a bit stronger including recording in multiple HD formats, SD card support, built in HDMI support with included cable, the ability to capture stills,  and the option of using an external mic.

I haven't played around with it that much yet, but as I play with it more, and get my journal site up, I'll share some more results.
Yesterday I took it on my ride and shot a little bit of video and took some stills. Below is the playground at Buckman Elementary. I worked at Buckman for 10 years and ride by it quite a bit...

Download now or watch on posterous

105_6737.MOV (23896 KB)

Posted via email from Tim Lauer

217/365

in ,

This past year I attempted to shoot a photography every day. I started out pretty well, but in the end only ended up with 217 days where I shot some kind of photograph. I spent some time today reviewing those images and adding them to this set. The process was insightful and looking back on the year I was taken with how many of these images were shot with my iPhone. As it as been noted, the best camera, is the camera you have with you. Promise to take more next year... Happy New Year...

Posted via web from Tim Lauer

Using Instapaper to send suggested reading...

in

My son received an iPod Touch for Christmas and has been busy the last few days doing the normal things that a 12 year old does with such a device, mainly playing games, browsing web sites, and communicating with family and friends via things such as Skype, SMS and email. I also helped him download a few reading applications such as the Kindle Reader, and Stanza. 

We have also installed Instapaper, an application at allows you to reposition web content for easy reading on devices such as the iPhone/iPod Touch. Basically you just install the Instapaper bookmarklet on your browser and then when you find content that you want to read on your device, you just save it with the bookmarklet and it is then synced to your Instapaper account and accessible through your iPhone/iPod Touch. We have started our mornings with me finding articles of interest and him sitting next to me reading off the iPod Touch.

Posted via web from Tim Lauer