pafa.net

Congratulations to the seven children in New York State who submitted videos about their favorite books to the nationwide StoryTubes video contest.

All the New York State entries have been posted to the NYS Summer Reading Program web site.

To enter the contest, children in grades 1 to 6 made short videos about their favorite books. And they’re delightful to watch!

All of the entries from around the country can be viewed at the StoryTubes site. During May, finalists will be selected the following categories and everyone will be able to vote.

• May 5 - May 11, 2008 - Hair-Raising Tales
• May 12 - May 18, 2008 - From or For the Heart
• May 19 - May 25, 2008 - Of Heroes and Heroines
• May 26 - June 1, 2008 - Facts, Fads and Phenoms

The StoryTubes project was created by the folks at Gail Borden Public Library in Elgin IL. Staff of the Children’s Services department at Middle Country Public Library in Centereach & Selden NY were the coordinators for the Northeast region.

Flip Video has committed to giving away 1 million Flip Video cams to qualified non-profits to help them tell their stories. Check their guidelines to see if your library or organization qualifies.

Pure Digital Technologies announced the Flip Video Spotlight program in September 2007 at the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative. We imagine the impact that video would make if every nonprofit organization had a camcorder to tell the world about problems that need to be solved, opportunities that need to be seized, abuses that need to be corrected, and people who need to be extolled.

The Program will distribute Flip Video Ultra camcorders. These are easy-to-use, high-quality devices with on-board software to enable editing, organizing, and video publishing through AOL, YouTube, MySpace, and other popular video sharing sites.

flickr has been hinting at including video for a while now and now it’s there. I haven’t uploaded anything yet, but it  looks as easy as uploading photos. Check out  flickr’s blog post on the new service and their FAQ page as well.

Videos can be a max of 90 seconds  and no more than 150 MB.  Video upload is available to Pro members, though anyone can view video content. I like flickr’s description of video as being a “long photo”.  I like that they’re trying something new that members have asked for and that they’re not quite sure how it will work or where it will go. Trusting their community, way to go flickr!

I’m so glad I’ve taken some short videos this week, I’m going to see if I can upload something.

(via Angela at Melange)

Thinking about buying some of those terrific little Flip video cameras for your library? Then check out this rebate that Melissa Bergin from Niskayuna High School came across today:

If you go to Flip Video’s website  there is a rebate of $15 each if you buy three or more cameras. If you go to “where to buy” at the top menu, then pull down to “educators”.

Thanks Melissa!

In the NYT tech section today, David Pogue give the simple little Flip video cam a terrific review - Camcorder Brings Zen to the Shoot

I bought one about 4 months ago, lured by its ’shiny new toy-ishness’. And it truly is a terrific little camera. Perfect for schools & libraries doing video projects with kids and teens (and adults). I’m thinking durable and easy to use. Is it the greatest video quality in the world? Not really. But is it good enough for fun youtube type videos? You bet!

This is the camera I’d throw in my beach bag or give to kids to use at a pool party. And I might just buy the waterproof case mentioned in the review. I think a snorkeling trip to Hawaii would be a good way to test that one out. Aloha.

I’ve been looking at lots of video tools this weekend. I’m sure I haven’t made much of a dent in looking at everything out there, but here are some notes on a couple. I’ll try to add more notes as I look at more tools.

Dabble.com
I really like the idea of Dabble.com. (thanks to the Library Instruction WIki for suggesting it) According to the Dabble site, Dabble “tracks more than 600 video hosting companies, and thousands of independent video websites and video bloggers”. Sites like YouTube, blip.tv and LiveVideo. It lets you create playlists of videos and even gives you an RSS feed for each playlist. This could be a nice collection tool to add content to library web pages and feed readers. (I’ve added a test of the playlist feed on the Testing RSS tab at the top of this blog.)

Problem is, Dabble doesn’t seem to actually search those 600 sources. (more…)