Online Teaching, Streaming Multimedia, Copyright and All That Jazz - October 19, 2011

Along with 249 other registrants, I listened to and viewed a presentation by David M. Hooten, Music Instructor at McLennan Community College in Waco, TX, speak about his use of Softchalk to create his online music appreciation course. He demonstrated for the group how he incorporated images, streaming audio, streaming video and links to articles into his course. It was so encouraging to see how many library resources he utilized!! His use of Encyclopedia Brittanica (a tool we have FREE access to in Minnesota thanks to ELM) and other library databases (specifically Naxos Music Library) was refreshing! He also mentioned free tools such a YouTube and NPR as resources. He commented on how difficult it can be to find operas to include in the course as while much of the music is in the public domain, the performances are not.
He referenced three tools he has utilized to edit materials to incorporate into his course: Snag-It to add captions to images, Sound Forge for MP3 files, and Camtasia for streaming video. He noted that it is important to keep video segments short - both for the end-user and for the streaming video server. He specifically mentioned how vital library resources are for online courses!

MLA Conference - St. Cloud - Oct. 14, 2009

My highlight for the MLA Conference was the Pre-Conference session entitled “Cataloging Streaming Media.” The timing of this was perfect as we have just started to catalog our streaming videos this year at Minnesota West. While we started the collection a few years ago, I hadn’t taken steps to get the titles listed in our catalog, but this year we are putting more resources into that collection so the titles need to get into the catalog. Mary’s presentation was well done and highlighted areas we need to focus on when cataloging streaming video or audio resources. This entire presentation was practical and will be useful to my work! Thanks to SAMMIE for funding this professional development activity.