Some of you have written with questions about appropriate or fitting essay topics. Generally speaking, it’s a good idea to choose a topic that is related to our class theme: writing in the digital age. So a topic related to writing, reading, and/or technology would be fine. For now, think in terms of questions: Is Google making us stupid? I don’t know, but that’d be an interesting topic to pursue. Do we write better with technology? Worse? Different? What does it mean to be literate in the 21st Century? What does layered literacy look like in practice? What is the relevance of digital/screen-based technology when it comes to educating English students these days—at any grade level?
In class tonight, we’ll discuss topics and do some digging around online for useful media files. Specifically, we’ll be looking for images and video that we may use for our multimedia or multimodal essays.
A useful "ad on" for you Firefox users: For downloading videos as MP4 files directly from YouTube, open Firefox. (If you don't use Firefox as a web browser, you may download it for free.)
Under Tools in Firefox --> Add-Ons --> Easy YouTube Video Downloader 5.9
You may have to "search" for Easy YouTube Video Downloader in the search window if you can't immediately find it.
Once you've added Easy YouTube Video Downloader 5.9, close Firefox. Re-launch Firefox and go to YouTube. Find a video of your choosing and under it will be a "Download" dropdown button. Select MP4 and watch the magic happen.
Here's another trick that requires no add-on for Firefox (PC and Mac) to get media like videos and audio that might be slightly easier:
ReplyDeleteGo to Tools at the top menu bar, then click on Page Info.
In the window that pops up, click on Media at the top and you should see a drop down list of all the media on the website.
Select what file you want, then click Save As to save the file wherever you want.
I've used that trick before to get videos on sites where add-ons wouldn't work, but have had trouble getting it to work on YouTube sometimes.
ReplyDelete