Welcome to Peter Bodnarchuk's Blooms and Shadows

I really wanted this video on my homepage (permanently) but couldn't figure out to get it to work. I tried to use VodPod like Marissa but couldn't make it work. Widgets? Couldn't find one appropriate. Any advice?

Large Video Files: The Advantage of Vimeo

Okay say you have a large video, over 100MB or over 15 minutes long, YouTube is out right.
SO NOW WHAT?
If your like me you'll spend a day searching sites uploading to megaupload, waste of time.
Then come across http://www.vimeo.com/ which is so easy to use and user friendly and free.
A fantastic site. All my daylong struggles could have been ended in half and hour with this site.
Check it out. :)

To all my mates in ECMP 355

Thanks for the time we shared together, chatting across the virtual world. Thanks to each of you who stopped by to read my blog and comment, that meant so much. I learned so much through your VLOGs and podcasts and attachments, all these new sites to explore and all the tools that I was simply unaware of or afraid to use, or admit that I didn't know how. It was so comforting to know that I'm not alone in learning and using the technology of the virtual world. I hope we can stay connected even after this class is over. Feel free to add me on Twitter or Facebook. Great summer to all! :)

Here's two fun movie trailers to celebrate the completion of our class!

"Make your decisions and live your life...

but probably don't do too much of this as a teacher!"

PowerPoint Frustrations Continued

So in the end of it all I ended up doing what I hoped I wouldn't have had to do, create all the PP slides to JPEGs, load them to iMovie, and transfer the sound recording from PP to iMovie in realtime...yeah 1 hour later it's done. That's not so bad but it'll take about 7 hours to finalize the movie, so my final reflections won't be posted until this evening.

MY ADVICE don't waste your time with PP if you want to create a slideshow movie, just create your JPEGs load them into iMovie and record your audio accordingly, way less time, once through and its done, no worries about problems with uploads and so forth.
I looked into Keynote, but it appeared that you would have to purchase it, so that wasn't an option at this point.

Here's a good example of my emotions over this project! Enjoy!

Power Point Frustrations

So I decided to use 11 slides, each with a separate image, and record myself talking about what I learned about the given tool. Everything went great, all completed and saved, unfortunately, I can't send the PowerPoint to video without losing the audio, even though I went through each slide and timed the presentation accordingly. Very frustrating, so I decided to take the evening off and went to a vocal recital in town and had a great time. Will try to figure it out tomorrow. If anyone knows how to fix this problem that would be much appreciated. :)

Virtual Friendship: Guffins

Guffins: Adopt your own virtual friend 

So in my quest for naming our duet I have found a dragon recipe site and now a virtual pet site where you can create and look after your own virtual fantasy creatures. I'll be fascinated to see where the future virtual world ends up. This is a free website and can be of use in teaching about caring for something like a real pet and other subjects like personal responsibility. Also (this site) for kids who can't afford a live pet, a free virtual pet may be quite wonderful!

Well...this website is not yet compatible with Macs! :( 

There's a dragon recipe website! (I like dragons!)

Dragon Recipes