June 21st, 2010

e-Tools — No Comments
21
Jun 10

PDF to Text

Here is a fairly common question with a simple answer. Google Docs will now extract text from images free. This new feature has only recently gone live but may have arrived just in time to help staff ploughing through and restructuring new specifications. Or perhaps stripping out content, exam questions or restructuring exemplar materials from….. well, from anywhere. I will give you a quick example, a colleague recently wanted to use a registration form, similar to an example he had collected on his school visits. With a little technician help, he didnt have to start from scratch, but perhaps this may have been a better starting place. When uploading files to your account, tick the ption to run an OCR scan, Google does the rest. Extracting characters and placing them within a new text document. Incidentally, I am happy for colleagues to use almost everything I create, but check and at the very least acknowledge the original document or IP.

Popularity: 1% [?]

ICT / IT Network — No Comments
21
Jun 10

Movie Maker or Just a Frozen Project File?

I am pretty sure that full featured online video editing is not far away? Youtube have just announced that you can now ‘Edit in the Cloud‘ and thats fun, but its also limited and perhaps ‘rough around the edges’ but promising, offering the ability to;

  • Combine multiple videos you’ve uploaded to create a new longer video
  • Trim the beginning and/or ending of your videos
  • Add soundtracks from our AudioSwap library of tens of thousands of songs
  • Create new videos without worrying about file formats and publish them to YouTube with one click — no upload necessary

In the meantime, our students are still fighting with Windows Movie Maker. We have looked for cost effective alternatives but there is not much out there in our price range (FREE). It seems to be the case that whilst Movie Maker does the job, its difficult to justify any expenditure however after another frustrating term, our patience is wearing thin.

So, Windows 7 Movie Maker Live Essentials. Is up to the job, our technicians seem to think so. Our plan is to test it over the next few weeks (given time) as a stand alone installation, before we make the move to a Windows 7 environment in Sept. We will let you know what our students think.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Challenge — 1 Comment
21
Jun 10

Get Going

You don’t have to get it right; you have to get it going! Mike Litman

Popularity: 1% [?]