Chris Hamady

This past summer was nearly entirely consumed by the design and creation of a new media production facility for our school, Toledo Central Catholic. The facility includes a full television production area where we produce and stream via the Internet the daily announcements for our Irish News Network, an instructional area where students learn multimedia creation on apps such as iMovie and Final Cut Studio, and a full multitrack recording studio where the students have access to Apple's Logic Pro, GarageBand, and DigiDesign's Pro Tools.

Recently, I asked the students in my Digital Audio Recording and Production class if they would record a radio commercial for our school. They agreed and were given a script that was prepared by the Director of Marketing for CCHS, Lisa Bowling.

We looked at the script together, and I assigned students to play the different characters in the script. Once that was done, I let them take over the entire project. One of the students acted as the recording engineer, and the rest did the voiceovers. Once they told me that they were finished, I was completely blown away by what they had done.

Check out the radio commercial that they created entitled, "Just say yes!"

Feel free to leave some feedback in the comments so that we can improve with the next one.

CH

No long blog post here. My take on Snow Leopard: Go buy it now! I was very skeptical as to whether or not it would be worth the 30 bucks. I bought a family pack for 50 and I'm glad that I did. It seriously rocks! The computer is much more useable in terms of speed and functionality. Check my Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/chamady for the details.

We are setting up the image for our student laptops this week. I'm interested in FREE, high quality applications that we might add to that image. So far we have:

Audacity

Blender

Celestia

ClamXav

Combine PDFs

DivX

EasyFind

FireFox

Genius

GeoGebra

GIMP

Google Earth

Google Sketchup

HandBrake

Image Tricks

LibreOffice

MindNode

Morph X

NeoOffice

Open Office

Perian

SeaMonkey

SeaShore

Stellarium

Sweet Home 3D

Thunderbird

Virtual Box

VLC

Are there any others that you might recommend? Please share them in the comments.

Thank you.

CH

Updated on 1-30-11 thanks to @tburns, @chad_rex and @thompsok

Recently we worked with our German teacher to help her figure out how to make German characters on the Mac like ö ä ü and ß. This involved using the International system preference and enabling the input menu. Here's a link to a tutorial on how to do it if you are interested in that.

Funny thing happened with that, however. As a result of working with the German teacher, I had my Mac switched to the German keyboard layout and mapping. I then left my office for some time to take care of some business on the second floor and returned only to find the screensaver asking for my password. Oops! Because I didn't switch back to the U.S. mapping prior to leaving my office, my keyboard was still in the German layout. The characters in my password that were now mis-mapped were not allowing me to authenticate to my account. What a nightmare!

Jeff Sankovich said, "Why don't you use fast user switching." He believed that by doing so you would then be using the keyboard layout of the other user and not your own to authenticate. It worked! I switched users and then used fast user switching to get back into my account and QUICKLY changed my keyboard mapping back to U.S.

Kudos to Jeff.

I've decided that I don't want to design this web site. I'm turning it over to my children. The changes made will reflect their decisions. I hope you enjoy the changes that they make to my site.

Thank you for visiting.

Chris