What I did at school today: 5/28/13

Prezi is a presentation application that has a nice WOW factor.  Although I've been using it for awhile, there are two factors that have made a difference for me.  First and foremost, I taught it in one our YCSD webinars, we call Tech Tuesday.  I'm not sure there is a better way to learn something than to teach it.  The second is that the people at Prezi have been working continually to make it more user-friendly and add new features.  Anyway, I spent part of my day working on a couple of presentations.

I also worked on a teacher's video in iMovie on the iPad.  I was trying to add music and became stumped.  Sometimes when I inserted music, it was added as "background" music and played throughout the video, repeating itself until the video ended.  (You can turn off this looping feature under PROJECT SETTINGS.) Other times, it just got added as an audio clip, was placed on a separate audio track, was movable, and only played once.  I just couldn't figure out why different audio files behaved differently.  So, I went to my old friend, Google, and started searching.  I discovered that clips less than one minute are added on the audio track, while those more than a minute are added as background music.  (I'm not sure what happens if it's exactly one minute.)

I also came up with a workaround for when you don't want a longer piece of audio to be added as background music.  I opened the file in Audacity and split it into smaller chunks, each less than one minute.  Then I added these chunks one after the other into my iMovie and they didn't get added as background music.  Now, instead of just reading this, go and try it.  That should get you further up the pyramid.