The Musical Priest
Posted by simonsays on July 3, 2007
Well we have come to the end of the school year and I know all teachers are ready for a rest, and that definitely includes me. However, I have been hearing a lot lately into research about how keeping an active mind can be beneficial in reducing the risk, or at least delaying the onset of diseases such as Alzheimer’s. So I have thought about what I am going to do, usually reading , bu they say you should change things up a bit. If you just do the same thing over and over then your brain will just get used to it and you will reap little benefit. So I was going through a box of my old stuff when I found a tin whistle that I started to learn about 15 years ago and then put it away. So I thought maybe I would pick it up again and try to learn a few tunes over the summer. To that end I sought some inspiration and so I did a search on YouTube for tin whistle and was amazed by what I found. A Jesuit, Ryan Duns who teaches a course on the tin whistle at Fordham University has a number of lessons online. It amazes me what is available online and for free these days. YouTube I think has great potential for the classroom. I tried using it in one of my lessons, however, due to the limited bandwidth at my school it was not completely effective. All I can do is keep trying to improve my students classroom experience by continuing to use these tools and hopefully those who make the decisions about bandwidth and technology in the classroom in general will see the benefits and give us the support we need.
As for now, I am going to try and pick up some of the skills that this very talented musician/priest/educator is offering to me, and anyone else who is interested over the next few weeks. Below is a little sample of what I am a long way from achieving. The tune is called The Musical Priest!
July 5th, 2007 at 3:51 am
Simon,
I never try to use YouTube in class, even though our bandwidth at MSJ seems more robust than that at Trinity… I still prefer to have a standalone file to use from the local hard drive.
Take a look at http://www.vixy.net You just pop in the Youtube URL and choose your format, then it processes the file and spits out a finished video file that you can download to your computer.
The other alternative is to use Firefox and install a plugin called Unplug. It let you grab the Youtube video off the page and save it as an .flv file. This works really well if you wanted to use the video in a SmartNotebook presentation because the Smart software plays really nicely with Flash format video (.flv and .swf) Give it a go.
Ther is also a converter for Windows called Freez flv2avi (I think) that will convert the .flv file to a Windows .avi video file. But Vixy is probably simpler if you want the same result.
Hope that helps
Chris