Taking roll the first day

I used a Flip video camera to record my students' faces as I took roll today. I want to get to know their names, and it was mildly entertaining to them as I did it. Not everyone was easy to see. A better way to do it would have been to walk up and down the rows, asking each to say his or her name into the camera.

It was the most efficient to use QuickTime Pro to watch the video and then pause and export for each student. The problem was the files were in a .pct format, which I then had to open with the QuickTime Picture Viewer before I could export as a .jpg. The Flip software does not have a still export that I could find and anyway was not working on my desktop computer. The other video programs did not have still export. Next time I might just take screen captures and work with MS Picture Manager, as I still have to crop each file.

Cropping was not so bad. I opened MS Picture Manager and selected the crop tool and was able to do each picture in turn. The web page took a little bit of work to create. I created a form with a radio group yes/no for each student and added each picture to the page. I included the code

<meta name = "viewport" content = "width = device-width">

to make the page fit my iPhone well, and it works! So I can take roll with my iPhone and record the results in a spreadsheet and get an email.