...and surveillance is up. Taking advantage of our distraction.

https://www.bespacific.com/government-secrecy-is-growing-during-the-coronavirus-pandemic/

Government secrecy is growing during the coronavirus pandemic

The Conversation: “Students at the University of Florida who want to know how they are being protected from the COVID-19 pandemic can’t find out. The university is hiding its emergency response plan under a legal loophole intended to keep terrorists and enemy combatants – not viruses – from exploiting government weaknesses. Since the spread of coronavirus accelerated in recent weeks, local, state and federal officials throughout the United States have locked down information from the public. Examples include:

• The city of Palestine, Texas, banned a news reporter from a city council meeting on March 23, even though fewer than a maximum of 10 people would be in the room, and did not allow the public to listen in on the meeting through a toll-free phone number, as required by state law.
• The Council of the District of Columbia decided on March 19 that district employees do not have to respond promptly to public records requests any more.
• The FBI no longer accepts requests for information online or by email because of the virus. If anyone wants information they must mail their request, which ironically is more apt to pass along the virus…”

Tools.

https://www.freetech4teachers.com/2020/04/video-puppet-turns-your-powerpoint.html

Video Puppet Turns Your PowerPoint Presentations Into Narrated Videos

Video Puppet is a new tool that you can use to quickly turn your PowerPoint presentations into narrated videos. If you have less than twenty slides in your presentation you don't even need to create an account on the site to turn your slides into a narrated video.

To use Video Puppet simply head to the site and click "create a video." You'll have the option to upload a set of PowerPoint slides or upload a written transcript. After you upload your slides you can customize your video by choosing the voice that you want to narrate your video, background music, and the aspect ratio of your video. When your video is done you can download it to post on your favorite video sharing sites or just save it in your favorite cloud storage service.

… Google Slides users, don't forget that you can download your slides as PPT files that you could then use in Video Puppet.

Before you try Video Puppet for the first time you should know that it works best with slides that have speaker notes including in them.