There is one issue about the ISTE Conference, it ain’t cheap and if you are locked in the middle of the country like the Ninja is, the Conference isn’t all that easy to get to. (And the next couple of years isn’t going to be much easier, 2012: San Diego, CA; 2013: San Antonio, TX; 2014: Atlanta, GA; 2015: Philadelphia, PA; they really like the perimeter of the country don’t they?)

So if you are like the Ninja, you aren’t going to ISTE to take advantage of all the learning and fun (though 2013 might be doable.) No reason to feel left out though, you can take in some of the adventure in Philadelphia from the comfort of your own home! There are two ways that you can going about this, the cheap way or the way that will cost you a little bit of money.

First, the one that will cost you some money: ISTE is offering both Virtual Workshops ($79.00) and Remote ISTE ($99). In the Virtual Workshops you will be able to view seven recorded workshops being streamed at various times during the day. The Remote ISTE is like attending an actual day of the conference. Choose from one of the two tracks (or mix and match), pre- and post-conference activities and access to resources. It also looks like you get a tour of poster session, playgrounds, and exhibits. Sounds cool.

Let’s be real honest though, the Ninja has his eye on a new MacBook Pro and is trying to budget for that, so can you attend ISTE on the cheap? Like for free? The answer is yes!

Remember how I said that the folks attending the conference loved to share. Well, that is definitely true when it comes to what they are learning at conference. They do that is several ways: They write reflections or “live blogs” of the sessions that they are attending but that isn’t typically as immediate as we would like. That’s when we need to turn to our old friend Twitter. No really! Stay with me. Attendees are nice enough to tweet out what they are learning, addresses to resources they receive in sessions, and in the past I have found presenters who have tweeted out addresses to live streams of their sessions for free! Awfully nice of them isn’t it? Through the use of Twitter you can really piece together some really cool stuff. Now it isn’t in a nice neat location like the Virtual Conference or the Remote ISTE but it is a whole lot cheaper!

How might you go about using Twitter to keep up on all the action at ISTE? Well it is really simple and you don’t even need to get an account (but the Ninja would highly recommend getting one). Here are a few steps to stay in the know from the comfy confines of your couch (or where ever you prefer to use the computer.)

• Sign in to Twitter or if you aren’t getting an account (and you really should, just sayin’) go visit Twitter.
• See, that wasn’t painful. Now, look for the search field. If you are logged in, it will be near the top of the page like the diagram below. If you are not logged in, it is large and in charge in the middle of the page. It will look like the second image below.

• Now you are going to search for #ISTE11. Include the number sign or as Twitterites refer to them as hashtags.
• This will bring up a list of Tweets that have been marked with the #ISTE11 hashtag. It will also let you know when there are new tweets with that hashtag.

Now a few tips about reading Twitter feeds or searches, because it can take some getting used to:

• Mentions: You might see @username (for example: @edtechninja). This refers to another Twitter. This is called a mention. Someone might mention another Twitter user for many reasons. They may be replying to someone, they might be giving attribution to where they got the info in the tweet, they might just be mentioning another Twitter user or they might want that person to notice that particular tweet. You might see several @ mentions in one tweet, they are just different users and if you click on that it will take you to that person’s Twitter feed.
• Hashtags: You will see  #hashtags in many tweets. Since you are searching for #ISTE11 you will see all of the tweets will have that hashtag. Hashtags are used to tag or group tweets to make them easier to find. Another hashtag that you might see is #edchat (an education chat that occurs on Twitter every Tuesday at 6 pm (CST) and #edtech which is the hashtag for tweets dealing with educational technology. Some people use hashtags to add humorous asides.
• Shortened URLs: You will probably also see some odd-looking URLs or links. They might look like http://bit.ly or http://ow.ly or something similar. Those are links that have been made smaller so they fit within Twitter’s 144 character limit. Clicking on it will take you to the link.
• With the huge amount of tweets that will be coming out of ISTE, you won’t be able to read every single one. Go in with a mind-set of getting what you can when you are online.
• You might want to follow #ISTE2011, #peepsnotgoingtoiste, and #isteflashmob as well.
• Look forward to seeing video from the ISTE Flash Mob! Double dream hands!
• Watch out for Twitter give aways from ISTE Exhibitors. The Ninja even won something a few years ago and he wasn’t even at ISTE!

That’s the very basics of Twitter and you will quickly pick-up on the rest.

If you are lucky enough to go to ISTE, please remember those of us who are sitting at home trying to gleen everything we can from your blogging and tweeting. Share! Share! Share! Thanks in advance.

Any which way, the Ninja hopes that you are going to get in on the ISTE fun whether you are attending or even if you are a hundred miles away.

The first couple of years the Ninja painstakingly placed each picture and video in either Final Cut or iMovie, a very time-consuming process during a time of year where there isn’t a whole lot of extra time. A couple of years ago, he wised up and started using a tool that he had used with his students in the past, Animoto.

As a bonus, Animoto has offered a free educator’s account that allows teachers to make longer videos than you can on the typical free account.

Once you have your account setup, I recommend that you get organized before starting. Get all the pictures (JPEG, GIF, TIFF, or PNG format and no larger than 10MB in size) and video clips (mp4, avi, mov, qt, 3gp, m4v, mpg, mpeg, mp4v, h264, wmv, mpg4, movie, m4u, flv, dv, mkv, mjpeg and ogv no more than 200 MB) together in one place on your computer. For pictures, Animoto suggests that you pre-crop your images to a 4:3 or 3:4 (landscape or portrait) aspect ratio, ideally at a resolution of 1280×960 pixels or higher for best results but the ninja has put all kinds of different shaped pics in Animoto and hasn’t had any issues. Animoto also suggests an average, 18-40 items (text, images, video clips) get displayed per minute of video depending on the song’s tempo. For full-length videos, you can choose to have your images displayed at half or double speed. On half‐speed, 12‐20 items will be displayed per minute. On double‐speed, 48‐80 items will be displayed per minute.

Once everything is nice and organized, the hard part is over. You will need to log in to your Animoto account and click the “Create Video” button in the upper right hand side of the webpage.

Next, you will select a style for your video. Ninja is partial to the Animoto Original.

The next screen will start you on uploading all the pictures and videos that you have to Animoto. There are several ways of getting pictures into your video as you can see below…

If your pictures and videos are on your computer, click “Upload.” You will get an Open dialogue box that you allow you to select one or more of your videos or pictures. (Control-Click to select more than one file.) Click “Open.” Don’t worry if you missed some, you can always go back and upload more files. Then allow Animoto to upload those files to your account. Depending on how many files you are uploading, this could take a while. The Ninja would definitely recommend a high-speed connection. This brings you to the area in which you can control the order of your pictures and video. To move a picture or video, simply click and drag that photo to the desired location.

Near the bottom of the page you will see the Animoto tool bar as seen below.

1. To add more pictures or video, click the “Add More” button to go back to the upload interface.

2. To add two lines of text to the video, click “Add Text.”

3. If there is a particular photo that you would like to feature or show longer than other photos, select the photo and then click “spotlight.”

4. If an image is oriented in the wrong direction, you can rotate it by 90 degrees by clicking the “Rotate” button. Keep clicking it until your picture is oriented in the correct direction.

5. If there is an image that you would like to show more than once, you can click on that photo to select the picture and then click “Duplicate”. Animoto will create a copy of the item that you had selected.

6. To delete an item, select it by clicking on it and then click “delete.”

7. The “Shuffle” button frightens the Ninja a bit (and very few things frighten the Ninja). If you are like the Ninja, you have placed each picture and video right where you want them and you don’t want them mixed up. By clicking “Shuffle” button you will randomly mix up all your pictures and videos. Thankfully this button has a confirmation screen that will ask you if that is what you really want to do.

8. Click “Done” when you are satisfied with your configured photos, text and videos. This will move you on to the next step. You can always come back and edit things even after you have clicked “Done.”

A couple of notes about videos:

Remember that Animoto will only feature 10 seconds of your video, you can’t insert any more than that. As a result you will need to choose how long you want your video to play and what portion of the video you want to play. To do that, click on a video in your work area.

On the left, you will get some information about your video.

You can set the length of your clip up to ten seconds or the length of the clip and then you can drag the white bar seen above to choose what portion of the video you want. By default, the audio on your video is muted. If you want the sound on the video to be heard, click the little speaker icon and Animoto will handle all the volume and ducking issues.

On to step two, music.

You can either choose a song from their library or you may upload your own MP3 files. The audio files must be in the MP3 format. Click here to read Animoto’s tutorial on how to make a non-MP3 file into an MP3 file that Animoto can use.

When finished select “Continue.”

Step 3: Customize the video.

Here you can change the speed of the photos in the video, you can choose a Short or Full Length video. You have the opportunity to change the video style. When you have that configured, time to press “Continue.”

On the next screen you can add some information about the video and change the thumbnail. When you think you are ready click “Create Video.”

You’re all done!  Animoto will now create your video. Depending on the length of your video, it might take a while to go through this process. Animoto will e-mail you when your video is done. (Be sure to check your spam if you don’t get the e-mail or just log back into Animoto to see if it is ready.)

When the video is complete, you will be able to watch the vid in a low res file (240p).

1. Click the “Share” button to quickly share your video on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Blogger, Posterous, WordPress, Tumbler, etc. This button will also allow you to e-mail folks about your video or just give you a direct URL to the video.

2.”Embed” will give you the code needed to embed your video on a wiki or blog.

3. To download the video file, click “Download.” You can download a low res version of the video for free. The Ninja recommends that you spend the three buck to upgrade to 480p version to download to burn to your DVD.

4. Use “Export” to send the video to YouTube or SmugMug.

5. Under the Tools menu you can have Animoto remix your video and create a new video or you can delete the video.

6. There are a few quicklinks to put your video on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or e-mail.

That is the essentials of creating a video using Animoto. You can always return the My Videos page to view, delete, rename or create a brand new movie using those pictures. If you have purchased the upgrade for the DVD quality, you will see it directly under the 240p version.

A Few Ninja Tricks Using Animoto:

If you are anything like the Ninja one little three-minute isn’t gonna cut it. Animoto limits your song to 10 minutes and that still isn’t quite enough for the Ninja.  Here are some ideas to skirt around the 1 song/10 minute limit.

Open up Garage Band (Mac) or Audacity (PC) and drop in three or four songs and combine them into one file. Make sure it is no more that 10 minutes long. Save the new file in an MP3 format and upload to Animoto to use.

Still not long enough? Create two movies and then pull those two videos into iMovie (Mac), Windows Movie Maker (PC), or Jaycut (Online) to cut the two videos into one video.

Once you have completed the video you just need to burn it on a DVD and then duplicate it. (Duplicating it can be a pain. Thankfully the Ninja’s church has a DVD duplicator that they let him use to make short work of coping the DVD, otherwise you will have to sit there and do it one by one. Check your resources. If you have lots of time and cash you might try a self publishing outfit like Lulu to make copies but you will have to have the video done WELL in advance of the last day of school and its going to cost you, making 25 DVDs with a Jewel Case is going to set you back $148.75 and I don’t think that included shipping.)

Pedagogically Speaking…

Now creating a video to give out to your class is a very basic use of this tool. What if we turned over the simple but powerful tools to our students? What could they do?

Maybe they could create a pretty rockin’ timeline using pictures found on the internet. Or create a short story told with both pictures and a small amount of text. Perhaps they can demonstrate a step-by-step procedure, show off geometrical shape or their letters. (Check out the examples movies at the bottom of the Animoto Education page.)  Leave your ideas in the comments.

The linked file is a PDF and will require the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to view.

>> Download Now! << (649 KB)

So for mail merge we will be using two programs: Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word. We have three major steps to accomplish:

1. Create data spreadsheet
2. Create document to merge into
3. Merge, save, or print.

We will start by starting up Excel.

Create Data Spreadsheet

Excel is a spreadsheet program that can perform all kinds of ninja magic on numbers and other data. A spreadsheet consists of rectangles called cells. Like other coordinate grids, each cell has a name that comes from the letter of the column and the number of the row. The highlighted cell below then would be named B2.

Basically we are going to use the spreadsheet as a data table and we will use row one for our headers. Double click cell A1 and type Fname.  Then you can either press the TAB key or double click on cell B1 and type Lname. These headers can be anything you want. Address, City, State, Zip, Parents are some common headers that the Ninja uses quite frequently. A reminder, pressing TAB will take you to the next cell in the row, ENTER or RETURN will take you to the next cell in the column. If you hold down SHIFT with either TAB or ENTER it will take you to the previous cell rather than the next. As you type your text may leave the cell you are typing in. Don’t worry, it will do that.

Once you have the headers in, it is time to fill in the data for your students under the header. Each student gets one row. I have an example below of what your data might look like when you are finished.

You will notice that some of the text is cut off when it runs into another cell. That is fine, your text is still there. The Tech Ninja normally has separate columns for City, State, and Zip but combined them for space. As needs arise, you can always go back and add more rows if you get a new student or new columns to track additional data. The ninja usually makes a spreadsheet with names and addresses before the start of school each year and then just add as I go on through the year.

Now save your spreadsheet. Remember where you saved it!

Create Document to Merge Into

Now we head over to Word.

Type up your document as you normally, however where there is data that will come from your spread sheet, just leave a space there.  See the sample below.

Once you have finished writing the document, it is time to start the mail merge process.

Click the Mailings tab and then from the Start Mail Merge drop down, choose “Letters”

Next from the Select Recipients, choose “Use Existing List.” An Open Data Source window will open. Browse to where you saved your spreadsheet file and click open.

A Select Table window will open. Select Sheet1$. Make sure that First row of data contains column headers is checked and then click OK.

Now to double check you will get the names you want, let’s click Edit Recipient List.

Now you should see the data that was in your spreadsheet. If you want to exclude a student from the mail merge you can remove the check from in front of their name. You might want to scroll down through the list to make sure there are no blank rows that have checks in front of them. Once you are satisfied with the list you can click OK.

Now we need to tell Word where want our data to appear in the final letter or document. To do that, place your cursor where you would like the first bit of data to appear. In the example below, I have place the cursor right after “To the parents of:” (1). Click the Write & Insert Field (2). Click the lower part of the Insert Merge Field (3) and then choose Fname (4).

«Fname» will appear where your cursor was. Continue to add fields to your document. You can change the formatting of the fields by applying underline, bold, italics, font, font size, etc. to the fields. You can also copy, paste and move the fields around your document. In the completed example below I have made the grades bold and two font sizes larger. Note: the complete field is the text between the double greater and lesser than signs. If you alter those signs or text in between them, the field will not merge properly.

Next, we need to preview the document to make sure that everything will merge correctly. Click the preview Results drop-down button and select Preview Results. You can use previous and next record buttons to see other data sets.

If you are happy with the result, we can go on to the final step.

Merge, Save, and Print

Now click Finish & Merge. Here we have three options:

1. If you edit individual documents Word will create a new document with each record on a different page. You can edit each individual letter, save the document and then print.

2. You can print the documents. When you merge to printer, a window will come up asking which records you would like to print. If you want all of the records printed, simply click OK and print away.

3. If you included e-mail addresses in your original spreadsheet you could also e-mail this document to parents by selecting Send E-Mail Messages. Word will ask you which column in your spreadsheet has the e-mail address and it will ask if you want to send the e-mail message as HTML so the document will appear in the e-mail message formatted as you have done in Word, Plain Text so the document will appear in the e-mail message but it will not be formatted, or to send the document as an attachment. Each recipient will get only the record that is associated with the e-mail address in the spreadsheet. Cool.

Now that you have created a data source, you can always go back and add info and use it for other mail merge documents, decreasing the amount of time that you are working on personalized letters and documents.

If you are using an older version of Word and Excel, the process is pretty similar however in Word you need to go to Tools and then Mail Merge for a mail merge wizard that will walk you through the steps for merging. One thing to remember, when you choosing your data source in older versions of Word, it doesn’t automatically look for spreadsheets so you will need to change the File Type to either All Files or Excel Spreadsheet.

Happy merging!

The Ninja has collected these links from one of his favorite blogs  Teachers Love Smartboards. Jim has a wonderful collection of resources and ideasfor the SmartBoard using Ninja. Check him out!

Before we get into the nitty gritty of the how, there are a few issues that the tech ninja would like to touch on. First, just because the video is up on a video sharing site and you have the ability and the know how to get said video doesn’t mean that you should. This is the part of the presentation that the Tech Ninja reminds you about NETS Stardard 4a that says:

4. Teachers understand local and global societal issues and responsibilities in an evolving digital culture and exhibit legal and ethical behavior in their professional practices. Teachers:

a. advocate, model, and teach safe, legal, and ethical use of digital information and technology, including respect for copyright, intellectual property, and the appropriate documentation of sources.

Yeah, I know copyright is a bummer, but it is something that we need to be weary of, if for no other reasons that to keep ourselves out of trouble. Secondly, there are many different ways to get these videos and put them in Notebook, I am going to share the way that I find the easiest.

To get the video and to embed it you will need the following software:

• Firefox web browser. I really like the new version 3.o. If you aren’t using Firefox, the Tech Ninja recommends this. You can get it at Firefox’s website.
• A browser plug-in called Video Download Helper VDH).
• Of course you will need Notebook.

Got everything installed? Good.

Step #1: Finding and Downloading your Video

When you are looking for a video to use for one of your lessons, you will need to use the Firefox browser. Double click the Firefox icon. If you are familiar with Firefox, you will notice the addition of a new icon in Firefox after you download and install Video Download Helper. The icon is seen below.

If you don’t see this icon, the Video Download Helper isn’t installed, go back to the site linked above and install the plug-in.

When the plug-in detects a flash video on the website that you are viewing the icon will become animated and begin spinning.

To download the flash video (.flv) click the down arrow next to the Video Download Helper icon. The menu that comes up will list all the media on that webpage that is available to download.

Click the video that you want to download. A Save dialogue box will come up. Choose the place you would like the movie to be saved and click the OK button. VDH will begin the process of downloading. Remember where you saved it.

Step #2: Now what?

If you want to use the movie file in a Smart Notebook file you are lucky, Notebook can handle the .flv file that you downloaded without any extra fuss. In your notebook file, go to Insert -> Video File… and navigate to where you saved the video file. Select the file and choose okay.

The video should appear in your Notebook file.

Near the bottom of the video will be an arrow pointing to the right. Click it to access the video controls like play, pause, volume, and mute as seen below.

In order to drop this video file into some other kind of presentation or to just view it on your computer without using Notebook, you will need some kind of conversion tool. For our purposes here today, I will just deal with free solutions. The Tech Ninja recommends Media Convert because he doesn’t like waiting for an e-mail that might get caught in some kind of spam filter. Media Convert will allow you to upload and wait to convert and download it immediately. Another nice solution is Zamzar. They offer free and for pay solutions, however you will have to wait for an e-mail to let you know when your file has been converted and ready for download. Once that is completed and depending on what type of file you created, you can view it on your computer, drop it into a PowerPoint (the ninja suggests .wmv) or Keynote (the ninja suggests .mov) presentation or drop it onto a video iPod, iTouch, or iPhone (the ninja suggests .m4v) or any other multimedia device.

That’s all there is to it! Share the videos that you find with ease!

If you have a question that you would like to ask the edTech Ninja, leave it in the comments or e-mail the edTech Ninja: