Introduction


Welcome to the TeKno(Teacher Knowledge) website!

About

This website is for teachers, professional development providers, facilitators, and researchers. Teknoclips offers a growing selection of authentic classroom video clips for viewing, commenting, and analysis.

Teaching is a complex and cognitively demanding process. Teachers need to understand where their students are in order to figure out what to do next to move them along. This requires constant interpretation and decision making in real time. Being good at this process - knowing what to pay attention to and what to do next - can make instruction more effective. Analyzing teaching by responding to video clips of classroom instruction makes this process visible.

If you are a teacher TeKnoclips offers you the opportunity to participate in exciting research designed to understand the kind of knowledge teachers access and use during instruction. This research is rooted in your teaching practice and hopes to contribute to a growing knowledge base for teaching. By responding to these videos you have the opportunity to observe possibly alternative ways of teaching, which might provide a starting point for examining your own practice. By reviewing how your responses evolved over time you may also get an idea of your own professional growth. Depending on research project you might even be compensated for your efforts.

If you are a PD provider or facilitator whose program is designed to help teachers engage more deeply into content exploration, the analysis of student thinking and understanding, or to expand their teaching repertoire, you and your teachers can follow their learning through these video analysis tasks.

If you are a researcher and are interested in studying teacher knowledge or aspects of teacher learning you can use this software to set up your own videos and analysis tasks.

Technical Requirements


General

For viewing Teknoclips website, we recommend the following software and settings. Otherwise, you may not be able to view the website properly.

Windows(Xp and later)
  • Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and later.
  • Mozilla firefox 3.0 and later.
  • Chrome 2.0 and later.

Macintosh
  • Safari 4.0 and later.
  • Mozilla firefox 3.0 and later.
  • Chrome 2.0 and later.

You will also need to install adobe flash player in your browser.

Posting Videos

The videos posted to the teknoclips site should follow the following specifications :

  • Container Format : FLV/MP4.
  • Video Format : H.264 video.
  • Total Bitrate (Audio + Video) : 300-350kb/s.
  • Video Resolution : 320x240, full frame or letterbox (but no borders on all 4 sides).
  • Adjusting Aspect ratio: Depending on the input video resolution, the aspect ratio might change. There are different ways to deal with this:
    • Stretch the video to fit.
    • Add a black border left/right or up/down.
    • Cut a strip up/down or left/right.

Subtitling

Subtitles should not be burned into the video itself. A separate "xml" file containing subtitles should be provided along with the video.

Preparing a subtitle file

For every clip video file, create a XML file containing the captions for it. Name this file something based on the video file. For instance if the video file is called "myfile.mp4", name the caption file "myfile_captions.xml". Be consistent.

Open the file in notepad (or create it there). At the top of the file, add the following text:

<tt xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2006/10/ttaf1">
    <body>
        <div xml:id="captions">

Now, for every caption you want to appear, write a line such as the following:

        <p begin="00:08" end="00:10">- Nothing is going on.</p>

where the begin time is in minutes:seconds format. You can include line breaks as follows:

        <p begin="00:36" end="00:38.5">- We need to talk.<br/>- Jason, are you deaf?!</p>

When you added all the captions to the file, end it with:

        </div>
    </body>
</tt>

Here is a complete example:

<tt xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2006/10/ttaf1">
    <body>
        <div xml:id="captions">
            <p begin="00:08" end="00:10">- Nothing is going on.</p>
            <p begin="00:10" end="00:12.5">You liar!</p>
            <p begin="00:13" end="00:15">Are you?</p>
            <p begin="00:17" end="00:20">Violetplease!<br/>- I am not your babe!</p>
            <p begin="00:24" end="00:29">You,<br/>look what you gone and done now.</p>
            <p begin="00:34" end="00:36">Viplease.<br/>- Leave me alone!</p>
            <p begin="00:36" end="00:38.5">- We need to talk.<br/>- Jason, are you deaf?!</p>
            <p begin="00:41" end="00:43">Whats going on?</p>
            <p begin="00:43" end="00:45">Get out there and try to salvage this!</p>
        </div>
    </body>
</tt>


Uploading the subtitle file

Upload the file to a webserver. The webserver needs to be setup with Adobe Flash cross-domain permissions for teknoclips. This is already done for lessontag.com

If on lessontag, place the subtitle file in the same videos directory. Instead of ".mp4" or ".flv", the filename should end in "_captions.xml".


Setting up the teknoclips clip to show the subtitle

For teknoclips.org to display the subtitles for a clip, use the following notation in the url field of the clip:

http://www.lessontag.com/videos/CTKN001-3-005-LVF_256.mp4&captions.file=http://www.lessontag.com/videos/CTKN001-3-005-LVF_256_captions.xml&plugins=captions-1

So next to the location of the video file, you are now specifying the location of the captions file and request the caption plugin to be loaded.

Save the clip. When viewing it (anywhere on teknoclips.org), you should now be able to see the subtitles.



Note : If you encounter any problems while encoding videos as per given specifications,the teknoclips team can help you in making these conversions and publishing the videos.