Video Chat

I just experienced Google's video chat for the first time. It was pretty easy. Once I had downloaded the software, all I did was ask my old friend Mitch to chat and the next thing I knew, we were looking at each other for the first time in months. The quality was great, Mitch could hear me just fine. I could see myself using this a Russian classroom. I would have my students chat with some of my friends from Ukraine and Russia.

Lesson #6 - Ripping a DVD/Downloading a YouTube Video

I downloaded the YouTube video Numa Numa. It is a video that I thought was hilarious in high school of a fat kid singing and dancing to an upbeat foreign song. Here's the link.

Downloading it was easy with the help of the Mozilla Firefox 1-Click YouTube Downloader add-on.

I have learned that I can legally rip DVDs for educational purposes, and that once I have that DVD ripped, I can keep a copy of it for myself and am not violating any copyright laws.

Copyright

In class today I really enjoyed learning about Creative Commons--"a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright (quoted from their website, see http://creativecommons.org/about/). I have always thought that if I were a musician or some other type of artist I would not want to keep those who enjoyed my works from sharing/downloading my material. I think it is cool to know that I could still have my material licensed to me thanks to Creative Commons, but that it could be a lot more accessible to the public.

Video Idea

I'm going to make a video that serves as an example of an assignment I would have my Russian students do. The idea is that I would arrange for them to have video pals--students in Russian speaking countries who agree to send video messages back and forth to my students. The first assignment (this video) would be a basic introduction. My students would:

1) Introduce themselves - tell who they are, where they are from, and what they like to do.

2) They would provide a picture of themselves and their family, telling who each person in the picture is and indicate their relationship to the student. This would all be done in a voice over of the picture.

3) The students would include a 10 - 20 second clip from their favorite song, giving the name of the song and the artist.

4) Finally, the students would ask their video pal one question.