Author Archives: Matt Ewens

DIT hint of the week – quickfire embedding with Edublogs

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DIT hint of the week – quickfire embedding with Edublogs

In this quickfire hot hint of the week, we’re going to show you how to embed a YouTube/Vimeo video into an Edublogs page.

It’s very simple, but will save you a lot of time trying to find embed codes.

To embed a video into your Edublogs page, just find the video you want to include on YouTube, copy the URL, either from the browser or via the share link below the video.  Go to your Edublogs page or post edit screen and simply paste the URL into the page/post!

(Vimeo acts in exactly the same way, so just copy the URL and paste it!)

DIT hint of the week – How to use Audacity to remove noise from an audio file

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DIT hint of the week – How to use Audacity to remove noise from an audio file

Have you ever recorded an interview or captured film and then found that in the editing process your audio file is distorted?  This DIT hint will take you through some basic steps to help you clean up your distorted audio file.

The first point to make is that it’s always a good idea to firstly check all your recording equipment and microphone to ensure that they are setup correctly, so that clean audio is captured in the first place.

Sometimes it’s not that simple, you may be in a hurry or you may have forgotten to get a set of headphones to monitor the sound.

How to use Audacity to remove distortion

To try and make this easier, I will make available an audio file that I recorded with distortion that you can download yourself and have a play with to clean up.

(Please note that this isn’t perfect and the aim of this blog post is to provide a relatively quick and simple solution – if your audio file needs to sound professional, you’ll need to potentially re-record it)

  1. To begin with, please download the following audio file: http://bit.ly/2mudRAO (note the content is irrelevant, please ignore what I am talking about!)
  2. Open up Audacity, then go to File > Open > Select the downloaded audio from the location you saved it on your computer.
  3. You should see a small waveform, play it and just listen to the distortion in my voice.Bad audio wave
  4. You need to firstly zoom into the waveform a bit because we’re going to select a small sample of the waveform for analysis – so go to View > Zoom in. (you may wish to zoom in two or three times)
  5. Next click with the left mouse button and drag it over a small section of the waveform.
  6. With the selected section, go to Effect > Noise Reduction.  This will open the Noise Reduction pane and you then need to click on ‘Get Noise Profile’.
  7. It may appear that nothing happens, but that’s okay. Now this time, go to Edit > Select all.
  8. Go to Effect > Noise Reduction > At this point you’ll need to be wearing headphones so that you can listen to the audio previews.  Leave the standard settings in step 2 and click on Preview.Cleaned up audioAt this point you may think that it still doesn’t sound too good.  You’d be right!  The advice I can give is to play with the settings in step 2 and keep previewing your audio file.  It took me about three minutes to get the preview to sound acceptable and my settings can be seen below.Noise reduction settingsYou may well be able to further improve this track by tweaking the settings and previewing the sound. 

Have a go and when you’re happy click the OK button and it will process the changes.

DIT hint of the week – flipped learning and cool apps for sports

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DIT hint of the week – flipped learning and cool apps for sports

To start off this new blog blast for hot hints of the week, we want to focus on sport and feature mobile apps that may be of interest to coaches.

What apps are great for analysing sports technique and performance?

Football

  1. Coach’s Eye – allows players to be captured on video and motion can be slowed down.  Video can be annotated to track technique – videos can be contrasted side by side.  Including audio commentary and more. (Apple download) (Android download)
  2. Dartfish – Capture video or import from your device.  Video can be slowed, contrasted side by side with two videos.  Drawings and labels, angles with voice and text notes. (Apple download) (Android download)
  3. Soccer Coach – Team Sports Manager – Manage football teams, create coaching sessions.  Player profiles, practice and training, team management and statistics. (Apple download)
  4. Coach Tactic Board: Football – Create tactics and drills, training modules and exercises, drawing tools, create teams and players and more. (Apple download)

Gym and fitness

  1. MyFitnessPal – log your exercise, track steps, extensive food database, recipe importer, calorie counter, goal setting, diaries and more. (Apple download) (Android download)
  2. Ab & Core Workouts – video guides on core strengthening and back strength exercises. (Apple download) (Android download)
  3. Simply Yoga – video tutorials for different levels, audio instructions and routines. (Apple download) (Android download)
  4. Fitness: Workout for Gym-Home – provides workouts and routines and effective plans for power workouts, interval, crossfit and home. (Apple download)

Swimmer

Additional

  1. Ultimate Stopwatch – enables the use of multiple stopwatches in one place. (Apple download)
  2. Educreations – interactive whiteboard and screencasting tool – easy to annotate and narrate and save/record instructive videos.  A very versatile app and it’s free! (Apple download) (not available on Android)
  3. Visual Anatomy Lite – Interactive anatomy referencing app with images of every aspect of anatomy.  Features quizzes, highlighting tools and more. (Apple download) (Android download) (Windows)

The above apps are only a small selection that could enhance training & development as well as management.  What do you use, what’s your approach?

Mobile devices have often worked well with a flipped learning class and can provide an extensive range of options in terms of analysing performance and tracking health.

Flipped learning and its definition are described quite well by the Flipped Learning Network as:

Flipped Learning is a pedagogical approach in which direct instruction moves from the group learning space to the individual  learning space, and the resulting group space is transformed into a dynamic, interactive learning environment where the educator guides students as they apply concepts and engage creatively in the subject matter.