Thursday, September 22, 2022

Out of Sync

The school has started doing video announcements in the morning. 

Every morning, in the second class of the day, a couple of students from the student government read through the various things everyone at school should know. It's club meetings and sports events and spirit weeks. Stuff like that. They've been doing morning announcements every morning for the entire time I've worked for the district.

(We had morning announcements when I was in school, too.) 

During the virtual school year, they made video announcements that were pre-taped. Since going back to in-person, it was back to announcements over the PA. 

But this year, they've started doing them on camera. As of last week, they have a two day a week schedule. 

What that means for me is that I have to connect to the school's YouTube channel and play the video on the in class projector. 

Alas, this proved to be a problem. 

(I couldn't figure out how to mirror the screen of a Chromebook to the projector. It turned out that the step I'd been missing was having the Chromebook already plugged into the projector and the projector turned on. I was trying to set things up before connecting everything. Sigh.) 

Because I couldn't figure out how to project the announcements, I did the next best thing. I sent the students the link to the video and had them watch it on their individual computers. 

Great solution. There was one problem...

Not all of their videos were entirely in sync. So, when they played the audio...

It was quite an interesting effect, to hear the same thing on 20-odd computers just milliseconds off. 

Well, now that I know what I was doing wrong, we won't be having that issue again. 

21 comments:

  1. As the yrs go by, and the world changes, more technology advances things change. We always had morn announcements also, no videos for it though.

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    1. No video when I was a kid, either. There was some movie where some rich school had them, but I didn't think I'd ever get to see that for real.

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  2. I would be totally lost and have someone se hook it up for me

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    1. I imagine they'll figure out a way to set it up for those who can't figure it out on their own. (I'm sure there are many teachers who have the same issue.)

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  3. Echo...echo...I would need a great IT department if it had been me.

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    1. If I were to be in the class for longer, I would have reached out to someone to fix the issue sooner. But it crept up on me, and I only had to worry about it twice.

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  4. I can imagine …

    My cable company is weird, I can be watching the same show in my living room and in my bedroom, and the playback isn’t in sync, so I get an echo effect

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    1. I can be watching the same thing as my roommate, and one of us is always behind the other.

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  5. Oh man. That must have been annoying.

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  6. More time spent getting it ready to watch, when all they need is to read it over the PA system. Like the students really care to watch them?

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    1. They don't. But they're more likely to watch than to just listen.

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    1. I just felt stupid not having figured out what I was doing sooner.

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  8. We don't have things like this in school here with the announcements so it's interesting! We still have the old fashioned newsletters, although they are online and email now, haha!

    Hope you are having a lovely day :)

    Away From The Blue

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    1. Your kids are younger, right? It's a middle school/high school thing. With clubs and events and dances and sports, they have to have some way to let students know what's going on. It's been done this way here for decades. I remember announcements when I was in school in the '80s.

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  9. A tough situation :3 Have a nice weekend!

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  10. Oh my gosh, I can imagine the echoes, lol. Apps and videos! Is it my imagination that your school system had become more tech than it was 2 years ago.

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  11. Audio input can be overwhelming. So, yikes! Be well.

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  12. *shudders* That would have been an awful sound.

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