You may think that this is a fairly frivolous undertaking until you look at the numbers.  I’m reaching more people, with less effort than at any time in my 3+ years at BOCES or my 10+ years teaching people anything, anywhere. The newsletters are about 5 minutes long (on average) and take me anywhere from 5 to 10 hours to produce. The newsletter is published to a Moodle course page where guest access is allowed and a link is then sent to our entire staff. This means I can see the stats for how many times the newsletters were viewed. As I write this, the three newsletters published to date have a total of 561 views. If I averaged 7 hours per newsletter then I’ve invested 21 hours into these informative videos.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been able to teach 561 people anything in 7 hours and I’m not sure that anyone could in any other way. This is an incredible resource for us, in my humble opinion. I think it’s doing a hell of a lot of good for our reputation also. It shows that we’re concerned with the ability of our customers (the staff, faculty and students) to have a better experience with technology and that there is an entire team of people dedicated to supporting it for them.

And I’m not done yet.

I’ve already added an iTunes specific feed and product (.m4v files) as another variation on the newsletter. Adding a small amount of time to processing, but providing the content to (potentially) more customers to consume at their leisure. Soon, there will be yet another product. A version suitable for Windows compatible PMP’s. This will most likely be an AVI or MPG version that will be formatted for a smallish screen. This is in the hopes that we will have a Windows Media server on-line soon so that we can distribute this content over the network to anyone that would have it, on any device that can support it.

Well, here goes nothing.

The Sansa is a dream! First connection to my computer resulted in Microsoft Media Player recognizing the device and allowed me to instantly transfer several music playlists that I already had to the device. These playlists were both music and podcasts that Media Player had found on it’s own while searching and cataloging directories as I instructed it to a long time ago.

Amazing how things just work, isn’t it?

The one thing that I did have trouble with was the media converter. There’s this very simple little software app that comes with the device called Sansa Media Converter. It takes virtually any movie file and converts it to a format the Sansa understands and then plops it on the device, when it works that is. Don’t get me wrong, my environment is entirely to blame but this is going to be a warning for you if you intend to use this software on your Windows PC on a Windows network. The following configuration will cause an error that you are not able to fix yourself.

• Using a Windows PC.
• On a Windows network.
• Where your My Documents folder is redirected to a network drive.

The error is that the file cannot be found. The original file can and it even plays in the preview. What the converter software does is take that original file and create a temporary file in your My Documents folder in a special Sansa Media folder. This temp file cannot be found by some process that the converter software uses. My guess is that it cannot even be created. This issue is cause by code inside the app and is not anywhere in any of the application profile files or in the registry that I could find. So, being unable to affect the software I’m left with having to do something else to get it to work.

I have to log out of my windows network profile and log into a local user profile that I have on my computer just for testing stuff like this. This works flawlessly, of course, because this profile is not managed by my network. The temp files are created in that special folder under that user profile’s My Documents folder and then transferred to the device quite handily. This is a fairly quick process also. I managed to do a 700+MB file in just a few minutes.

All that software stuff aside the Sansa is a very pleasurable device to use. When folks see it their amazed at it’s bright screen and incredible sound. When I show them the video they’re really blown away. The screen may be small but it is very clear and bright, did I say that already?

Other features? What other features?

Oh yeah, it’s got this FM tuner that is ok, it works and that’s all I really have to say about that. You need to be somewhere that is well in the open to receive good signal or forget it. It can record FM radio while you listen as well. Interesting feature that I think I grew out of at age 12. That’s when I received my first radio, a Sanyo AM/FM cassette player that had just one speaker. I loved that thing. I made my first mixed tape by listening to the radio with my finger on the record button, just waiting to catch my favorite songs and try to miss the DJ’s and ads.

The voice recorder is ok too. I’m not a big user of this type of thing but I probably should be. It might make keeping my thoughts together on things like this more detailed. It does work however and I should add that the battery isn’t dead after 2 hours of recording. Hello Apple, are you listening? Nope, didn’t think so.

Storage isn’t an issue with this thing, even though it’s only 8GB. What I want on it can be put there in just a few minutes and is erased just as quickly. The Sansa also shows up as an attached hard drive, nice feature as I’m all about that sort of thing. One more place for me to carry home cool digital photos or vids that I’ve worked on at work in whatever class we had that day. This is the sort of multi-function that I expect from a device.

The only thing I haven’t mentioned yet is the Speck case that came with teh device. Actually, it came about two weeks after as it was just being released when we ordered it. Fits like a glove (it’s supposed to after all) and really makes it look rugged! I haven’t tested it yet but it looks like it would protect the Sansa in a fall which is what it’s for and no, I will not be testing this if I can do anything to help it.

Better than the iPod? You bet! Better battery life, trustworthy storage, no funky software that works when it wants to and it just plain looks cool. The price just dropped also, less than $199 almost anywhere you look. That’s a deal and a half for what you get.

Interested in figuring out how something like this will fit into education (instead of using an iPod)? Drop me a line and lets talk, I’ve already got our SLS folks jazzed up about this so who knows where you’ll be seeing them next.