digiprimer

digi primer

commentary and links for Interactive Internet Content-making

If your toolbox holds just a hammer, then you see the world in terms of nails that need to be hit.

But by adding tools, you also add new ways to see your creative outlets, and in particular, you see

what is easily within your reach and can envision all sorts of uses of your new tool set.

Here are some useful tools!

IMAGES find them, edit them, present them

Picasa (www.google.com/downloads) Mac/PC allows you to work with a whole folder of images together: Picture >Batch Edit >I'm feeling lucky. Then you can further adjust them one by one. Type in captions. Finish by such things as: Export to HTML (makes online album), Contact Sheet, Printout, upload to PicasaWeb space, Save all edits and export to new folder at original size or resized (changes shown inside the Picasa environment only affect your screen view; the source files are not affected). Example, http://picasaweb.google.com/eastasia108 as well as individual photos on Picasa, but displayed on the maps.google.com (my Korea trip panoramas: http://tinyurl.com/3yjbq). Picasa gives 1 gb free space (including movies).

Soundslides (http://www.soundslides.com/) Mac/PC allows you to load a folder of images that you've edited (captions data travels with the image file, so you needn't retype). Then you can pick an audio file you wish to use as soundtrack (music, location sounds, voice over or mixed combination). The completed audio slideshow can be fine-tuned by sliding each image along the timeline to advance at the timing you choose. [trial version is free, $39.99 to unlock fully functional version]

AUDIO find it, record and edit it, present it

Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) Mac/PC allows you to edit sound files you may have received or downloaded, or to record onto computer (using your plug-in mic) and then save as mp3 or other file format.

Juice (http://ipodder.sourceforge.net/) is the new name of iPodder, one of the programs to catch Podcasts by automatically checking podcast sources online that you wish to keep up with. Then it downloads the recordings to your computer or portable mp3 player directly. Or look-up more aggregators or podcatchers, as they're sometimes called. Lots of neat podcasts are organized by topic as www.npr.org/podcasts

VIDEO find it, record and edit it, present it

Flash video recorder (http://mysmallwonder.com/ AND http://theflip.com/) lets you do short clips in full video speed and quality, but compressed for easy DVD or online use; very basic editing features (titles, cut and sequence) included: $100.

Find video content or contribute your own: blip.tv, video.google.com & youtube.com, teachertube.com, watchknow.org (how-to lessons from wikipedia guru L. Sanger)

MISCELLANEOUS

Gmail account (http://gmail.google.com/) is a key allowing you access to several services: blogger.com (for rapid posting of images, text and audio: just send the content to your secret email address to post online instantly), Gmail itself for 2 GB of storage, PicasaWeb for 100mb of images in online albums (direct uploads from the Picasa photo organizer), Googlepages for instant webpage publishing (e.g. my example, http://anthroview.googlepages.com/ or http://big1file.googlepages.com/coffee), among many other services and functions online.

Flickr account (http://flickr.com/) using a yahoo ID, http://www.yahoo.com/ for this and many other functions and services as with google's account. This photo database lets you post private, semi-public or fully public images and then tag them with keywords so that others who browse a given category will find your image and others like it. Images can further be geo-tagged to search for all images registered to a given location. Images can further by marked with pop-up text for a person to mouse-over and read.

Web 2.0 (http://big1file.googlepages.com/web2) is a set of links; Ed-Tech (http://big1file.googlepages.com/edtech) is a set of extracts from this vigorous electronic list.

Google tricks (http://www.google.com/) when searching for files, images &c

Set preferences (e.g. Display 30 or 50 results) :: Search within Results (foot of page) :: Cache vs. Live version (in case of interrupted server) :: Type 10 words only (not case sensitive) :: Exact phrase matched with quotation marks :: Exclude the term preceded by a -minus sign :: filetype:pdf menu bistro

USING THESE TOOLS

1. Audio slideshow to review words, faces, dates, places; script a vignette or capsule-sized lesson.

2. Movie clips to so the same; script a vignette or capsule-sized lesson. Student work can use these, too.

3. Use blogger to rapidly assemble tidbits from websites, emails, documents.

Rapidly loading images into PowerPoint for display

Suppose you wish to rapidly prepare a set of pictures for display on LCD projector or

computer kiosk. Some photo editor/manager software has a loop SlideShow. And the

accessory, Windows Picture and Fax Viewer allows simple browsing of a folder of images

in filename order. The full version (not the free player) of Quicktime has "create image sequence"

to load a folder of pictures to playback at a fixed pace, or manually; looping or not. But for most

people, the most familiar and accessible software on hand will be Microsoft PowerPoint.

[GPWitteveen, July 2008, http://temporary108.googlepages.com/digiprimer]

created 2 August 2007 ...updated 19 July 2008