PILOTed

Don’t You Just Love Technology

Using Zoom Clips

Zoom has a feature called Clips, which let’s you create short (I’ve created 13 minute ones, but mostly used for 1-4 minutes) videos and share them out. Many of the people I know use Loom for this, but since it’s a feature embedded in Zoom, that’s what I use.

I like using clips, but all software has its quirks.

Whereas in a Zoom meetings, you can move back and forth between presenter dominating the screen and presentation, in a clip, you need to make your choice before recording: presenter only, screen share only, or screen share with presenter in a box.

You also cannot move the video box of the presenter, it is in the lower left corner. Actually, that’s a lie. You can move the presenter video, but on the recording it will always be on the lower left.

Zoom also creates subtitles for your clip. You cannot control where they appear, and sometimes they show up as one line, sometimes two lines, and every once in a while, four lines appear on the screen.

I found this out by wasting 36 minutes.

I had a PowerPoint presentation, and by default, PowerPoint included subtitles. When I viewed the clip, all was well, but then Zoom created it’s own subtitles, and it was weird having two sets of subtitles on the screen.

I re-recorded the 12 minute clip after turning off PowerPoint subtitles. But when PowerPoint includes subtitles, it shrinks the slides so that there is room for them on the bottom. After I recorded, I noticed that without the subtitles, my video blocked a key portion of all of my slides. But, I saw that I could move my video.

I re-recorded the 12 minute clip again moving my video window to the right bottom. But, while the video clip seemed fine as I was making the clip, on the recording it is stuck on the lower left still blocking a key portion of the slide.

Now, I’ve adjusted my slides and I’ve re-recorded the clip again.

And In re-recording the slides, I found out that if you are sharing and application window, the video is always going to appear on the bottom left corner, but if you are sharing an entire screen, you can place the video wherever you want to.

And I know now to leave the lower left of any slides blank if I am going to use them in a Zoom clip. And so do you.

Here is a link to the finished Zoom clip in case you are interested.

Setting a custom domain name

Many of us have set up websites where we want to use a web name that we own. In my case, I am creating a community called Mindshifting Educators which is for teachers and other educators who want to continue to develop their abilities to shift their own mindsets and those of their students. I own the URL MindshiftingEducators.org and wanted to use that as the address for the community.

The instructions are straightforward, and I’ve done this before. You go to your domain host. You choose to manage your domain. You change what is called you’re A record to whatever your website host requires. Once done, you return to the website host and fill out some form that tells them what URL the site should be using. That worked.

Many people are accustomed to typing www before a domain name. Technically, www.domainname is a subdomain and so you need to do another procedure for that. What I thought was that you go into domain maintenance, and request the subdomain to go to that domain, and that’s what I did. But evidently whatever I did undoes whatever A record change you previously made, I discovered this when a Mindshifting Educators member went to the community and landed on a page that offered to sell him the domain name.

After some research, I determined I needed to start the whole process again.

If you want your www to go to (or “forward to” using the terms my  domain host uses) your domain, you need to first set up your A record, then go back into domain maintenance, go to subdomain forwarding, and then enter the subdomain name (www) and type in where you want it forwarded to (in my case I wanted www.MindshiftingEductors.org to forward to MindshiftingEducators.org

This did work, but I hope I saved you the angst, effort and time I went through.

Now, whether you type in www.mindshiftingeducators.org or you type in mindshiftingeducators.org you will end up on the landing page (if you’ve never been there) or the last page your visited of the Mindshifting Educators community. 😊

Highly Functioning Collegial Learning Organizations

Do you want your school or district (or any organization) to be a highly functioning collegial learning organization?

According to authors Rosie and Robert Vojted, , authors of Motivate! Inspire! Lead! from Corwin press, you need to meet these ten criteria, with these implications if they are not met.

1. quality of life: If you are not providing the necessities for people to be able to live (salary, benefits, etc.) your organization will have low morale.
2. a mission: If you do not have a compelling sense of purpose, your organization will be marked by indifference.
3. adequate communications: If you to not share common vocabulary, build rapport, and exchange meaning, you will foster distrust.
4. accountability: If people do not feel ownership for their results and achieving their goals, you'll be hearing a lot of blame.
5. empowerment: If people do not have the responsibility and authority to hit their goals, they will be constrained.
6. autonomy: If people don't have freedom within will defined boundaries, you will either have dependence or chaos.
7. competencies or capacity: If people don't have the skills to do what they need to, and the group doesn't have the collective skills, you will feel that the individuals and/or organization is inept.
8. relationships: If there aren't connections between people, individuals will feel isolate, lonely, and disconnected.
9. interdependence: If everyone's results and work aren't mutually to each other's, then you will not get cooperation and mutual support.
10. results: If you haven't defined success and aren't measuring progress, you will find ambivalence and conflicting methodologies.

One way to move toward these is to learn the techniques of Mindshifting. Check out the next course starting October 22.