Video player for Palm & Pocket PC

At the TTG animation workshop (by the way, great summary Kathy but you've got your Greg's and Graeme's mixed up!) we were talking about playing video files on Palm OS and Pocket PC devices. The application I've used for a while now on my Palm is an open source job called TCPMP (The Core Pocket Media Player). As you can see from the wiki info, it plays a wide range of video and audio formats and it's free. It's also available for the Pocket PC.

It's actually been superceded by a an app called CorePlayer and is now a commercial product (US $24.95), but the older free version is still readily available. Interestingly, the CorePlayer is about to be released on the Symbian platform (used by Nokia mobiles, and others) which will hopefully make them compatible a broader range of video file formats.

Here's the Wikipedia info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Core_Pocket_Media_Player

The Pocket PC download:
http://handheld.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia-Graphics/Video-Players/The-Core-Pocket-Media-Player-8609.shtml

The Palm download:
http://handheld.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia-Graphics/Video-Players/tcpmp-Palm-OS-7895.shtml

CorePlayer info:
http://www.coreplayer.com/

Also, here's the link to the open source screencast (recording) application I was talking about on the day. It has nowhere near the feature set of Camtasia but it works pretty well and you can't complain about the price...
http://www.camstudio.org/

Cheers
Graeme

m-learning and Gen Y

In early August I was walking passed two Cert II in Electrical Technician students, Troy and Derek, who were completing some orientation tasks from their Research and Study Skills unit at the Regency Campus, TAFE SA. As part of this orientation task, Troy and Derek were asked by their lecturer to become more familiar with the campus.

Troy was using his mobile phone to photograh the layout of the building map. When I asked him why he was using his mobile phone he said, "I'm to lazy to write things down, and then I can refer back to the photo later".

I thought this was a great example of how our students are incorporating mobile technology into their training.

Stop Motion Animation Workshop with Sasha

We had a great workshop last Friday - learning a bit about Stop Motion Animation with Sasha from Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT). She took us through a workshop that she uses with primary school students (!!), creating video by making plasticine figures and taking individual photos - slightly moving the figure and taking another photo, then when you play all the photos in sequence it creates a moving video.

Then we learned how to use special software to convert the video into .3gp files that are appropriate for playing on mobile phones. Once the videos were created we practiced sharing them with each other using Bluetooth and Infrared technologies.

Thanks Sasha for providing us with a great, fun way to learn some new skills and about the features available in our own mobile phones!

Here are some links to our first foray into stop motion animation!

Kathy & Pam

Peta & Graeme

Pauline & Greg

Sue & Ilia

(By the way, "Quicktime Player" should play these .3gp files. Let me know if you have problems and I can give you instructions to point all .3gp files to the "Quicktime Player".)

We tried to record (create a podcast) the workshop, but there was a technical hitch (translation: "I pushed the wrong button") and it didn't record. Sorry to those who would have liked to hear it. But I'm sure those who were present can give you a quick tutorial and overview. The shareware software that Sasha provided was very effective and easy to use.

Here are a few photos of our Workshop - taken with my new mobile phone/camera/video recorder - player/Bluetooth device/Infrared device/Learning device!

I am on a steep learning curve at the moment!

There was also a demonstration of the "Podmo Free Server" that we have set up in the Computing area of the Tea Tree Gully campus. A few people were successful at downloading the Podmo application to their phones and accessing the FREE content! We will be looking at ways to use Podmo to distribute content - especially music / video / graphics that students have produced.