A while back – actually nearly two years ago – I became aware of a tool called Seesmic on which you could record video clips and others could respond by recording their own short clip. At the time, I used it to join in a few conversations and also to practice speaking Catalan / Mallorquin after a looong break. It was easy to do and fun as well.
I was asked last week by Chris Fuller to make a short video sharing my thoughts on using
Twitter in the languages classroom and why it’s such a good idea in my opinion for a presentation he’s doing soon.
As I was home alone, I had to do it in a way that didn’t involve another person filming me, and my hand is unsteady at the best of times! I had never used the film option on Photobooth, and I was also concerned about delivering it to Chris via email in case the file was too large.
I had picked up a tweet at about the same time from
Leon Cych asking for volunteers to be involved in a project this year called
Remixing Education, and one of his methods of ‘recruiting’ was via Seesmic.
So, having been reminded of the existence of this site, and having recorded a response for Leon, I decided to use it to record my clip for Chris.
It’s very easy! Once you’ve signed up for an account, you press Create a video and start talking into your webcam (iSight camera in my case). Once you’ve finished you can review the recording and start again if you’re not happy. It’s then posted on the site – you can choose whether to allow it to appear on the public timeline or just to keep it on your page.
Once finished, I sent the URL and embed code off to Chris so that he could use the clip as he wished, editing it etc to his purposes.
I thought that would be that, but the ever eagle eyed king of RSS feeds,
Joe Dale, picked up the clip on his radar and, having ascertained why I’d posted a clip to some mysterious ‘Chris’,
blogged it!
And then I was astonished to receive a lovely response from
a lady in Anaheim, USA who had seen the clip and wanted to tell me how good it was! A wonderful surprise and so exciting for someone unrelated to my life – real and virtual (Twitter, my blog etc) – to make such comments about my thoughts and ‘work’.
We all need a bit of encouragement sometimes, so thanks to Joe and Freida for giving me some to keep me going when I’m seizing up with all this cold ;o)
