An interesting thing happened recently, this year I'm not working as much for TAFE (3 days a week). This has give me the chance to catch up on some projects, like shooting and editing documentation of Brushes of Liquid. I used Premiere (which I haven't used in ages) to edit the footage. This gave me a great chance to revise and develop new skills and as I was working I did short screen recordings about using Premiere. So this meant I was doing two things at once, my own practice and getting ready for teaching video editing. It was a great blurring of the activities in a win win situation. Maybe I should haven't done the screen recordings in my own time, but they where quick to do. It was one of the times when the blurring between teaching and my art practice time has been positive. I would like to do more of this, and I hope with re-design of my site I will be able to use that project in a similar way.
Note sure if this will be useful to other people !!!! How I use it is that I do a blogger post at the beginning of week about what is happening during a face to face class. Students can then read that via a RSS reader or I have it feeding into the contents page webCT. At the start of day I use this flash script to display the blog post as a nice neat full screen powerpoint like presentation.
Using the forward and back keys moves between posts and the up and down keys change the font size and it just keeps on looping until it can download the feed. There is not a lot of error check in the script. Other uses for the it could be as RSS (well actually a ATOM) to presentation tool.
To point the .fla to your blog change the following line of actionscript. (the script is in the first layer, on the first frame)
rssurl = "http://diplomamultimedia.blogspot.com/atom.xml";
to
rssurl = "http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/atom.xml";
Before this tool I would build a powerpoint slide each morning to tell the students about what we are going to do. Not sure if it saves that much time !!!! but it does stop me having to copy or past the blog etc. What I really wish would happen is the students would login to webCT before coming to class, check the blog.
.fla file and here is the an example .swf
Here is the .fla file and hear is an example .swf