Digital Commons at Penn State

Dr. Peter Froehlich and Dr. Maggie Froehlich assign one podcast and one video in their four sections of English 15 taught at Hazleton.

The podcast is a podcast narrative highlighting a year in American history (post 1945) of the students choosing.  For the video, the students were put into groups by era (e.g. the early 1990s) to create a 10-minute video narrative based on their combined years.

About the Course Project

Course: ENGL 15 – Rhetoric and Composition
Instructor: Maggie Gordon Froehlich and Peter Alan Froehlich, Hazleton
Number of Students: 80+ students across four sections
Semester: Spring 2009
Duration of Assignment: 4 weeks for podcast and 5 weeks for video

Benefits

Students exposed to writing for new media. Students uploading podcasts to iTunes have a better sense of who the “audience” is in terms of writing.

Because iMovie 09 no longer encapsulates media into the project file like iMovie 06, the procedure to backup an iMovie 09 project and media is slightly different than just copying a single file to the Digital Commons Server.

iMovie 09 will autosave all of its data into the users Movies folder. You will notice that there are a number of folders created. Each one has a special purpose and must not be renamed or else iMovie 09 will stop working.

The iMovie Events folder contains all of the media imported into a project.

The iMovie Projects folder will contain all of the actual edit information.

If you have Shared a project out to another program, it may also appear in your Movies folder.

The Digital Commons editing workstations delete all of the projects which have been saved to them every night when the system updates. It is absolutely necessary that you save your work somewhere other than the hard drive of the editing machine once you intend to leave the Digital Commons. This tutorial will cover your various options for saving your projects. It is important to remember that you need to save both your finished file (.m4v or .mp3 for podcasts, .mov for movies) and the project file (iMovie file or Garageband file) so that you can make any changes later to the project file. If you save only the finished file and not the project file you will lose the ability to remove effects/transitions or edit just a single track.

Option 1: Save to the Digital Commons Storage Server
Please visit The storage server tutorial for more information

Option 2: Bring your own external Hard Drive:

The Digital Commons makes 50 GB of storage space per project available to students and faculty for storing their digital media projects. Please note that this storage is strictly for saving your project, when accessing your saved project, be sure to copy the project to your local computer. When finished, save your work and then transfer your project back to shared storage.

The first step to using this space is to create space for your project on your campus’ local server.

To create space for your project:
1. Go to https://clc.its.psu.edu/dc