Posted by New Media Specialist April - 3 - 2009 - Friday ADD COMMENTS
DivShare is an all-purpose file storage site that allows users to share photos, videos, documents, music and audio. You can share your files with a private web address (URL) or you can embed them into your own web pages. Like YouTube and SlideShare, you sign up for a free account and you get 5 GB (gigabytes) of space, and you’re allowed to share 10GB worth of files every month. There is even an iPhone version that allows you to view your documents on Apple’s ubiquitous device.
Just as YouTube is a video sharing website, SlideShare is a service that allows the sharing of presentations that were created using PowerPoint, Keynote (for the Mac), Open Office, and even PDF slideshows. The idea behind Slideshare is similar to YouTube. You upload your presentations and they are then converted for presentation on a web page. The presentations can then be viewed at a specific page on Slideshare.net or you can use code that is provided to embed the presentation on your own web site. You can even embed the slideshow in a Course Management tool such as Blackboard.
SlideShare also has a great feature for adding audio to your presentation called Slidecasting. Let’s say you gave a presentation publicly and audio was captured. You could take the audio file and synchronize it with the slides to create a Slidecast. The slideshow would play automatically with synchronized audio, providing a presentation that was just like the live event.
Keep in mind that you do lose any animated transitions that you used in your presentation, however the original slideshow can be downloaded by a visitor with all the transitions and animations in tact. You can upload up to a 100MB presentation, so it’s a great way to keep from using up space on a web server or course management system. There are also privacy settings that allow you to share a “private” web address for your presentation. It won’t show up on a list anywhere and the web address is virtually un-guessable.
Overall, SlideShare is a pretty valuable service. Features are being added regularly like support for PowerPoint 2007, the ability to incorporate YouTube videos into presentations, and the ability to view presentations easily on a mobile phone.
Posted by New Media Specialist January - 8 - 2009 - Thursday ADD COMMENTS
You probably are and this site is for you. It’s a site that will introduce and talk about cool, and free, technology tools. That will include websites and web services and software that you can obtain for . . . um . . . free. So check out Stuff for Starving Students – it’s highly nutritional.
Posted by New Media Specialist January - 8 - 2009 - Thursday ADD COMMENTS
Here is a Glog that I created for the Spring 2009 Orientation session. Our “technology showcase” featured a service called Glogster.com where you can create online posters that include many different types of media. Here is the example that I used in the presentation:
Step #2 – Getting your video on the computer: Depending on what you used to shoot your video, you will need to get it onto your computer. If you have a camera that uses mini-DV tapes, you’ll need a firewire cable to transfer the video. If you are using a PC, Windows Movie Maker can be used to transfer the video from your camera. iMovie will be the software you will use if you’re on a Mac. If you are using a camera with a flash memory card, a hard drive, or using a digital still camera that has a movie setting, you’ll need to use a USB cable. If you have a camcorder that uses mini-DVD, follow the directions that came with your camera to get video onto your computer.
Step #3 – Editing Your Video: Assuming you will take the raw footage from your camera and add titles and transitions, you will need a video editor. Again, if you use a PC, then Windows Movie Maker is the program that is included with the Windows operating system to edit your video. If you use a Mac, iMovie will be what you use. When you have a final edited version, complete with titles, transitions, and any additional audio, you will need to save the movie for uploading to YouTube. YouTube can accept many different formats of video as long as the length of the video is 10 minutes or less, and as long as the file is less than 1GB (gigabyte). If you are using Movie Maker you can save the file as a .wmv file. This will be a compressed file that will be decent quality and be much smaller than the 1GB restriction. If you use iMovie, you can save the file as an MPEG-4 file and again it will be compressed to a much smaller file. If you are using iMovie ‘08, the program has a built in uploader to YouTube. If you want a similar capability on the PC, then download a free video editor called VideoSpin from Pinnacle Systems.
Step #4 – Uploading Video to YouTube: If you are using VideoSpin or iMovie ‘08, then you will upload the movie directly from the program. Look in the help file for specific instructions on how to do this. It’s fairly intuitive for both programs. If you are using Movie Maker or a previous version of iMovie, you will upload the compressed video file that you saved onto your computer from the editor. A .wmv file from Movie Maker and a MPEG-4 file from iMovie. If you haven’t already, you need to sign up for a YouTube account. You then sign in to YouTube and look for the “Upload” button in the upper right corner of the page.
You will then need to provide a Title, Description, a Category, and include at least one “tag” (a keyword) so that people can search for your video. There are other options that you can choose, such as making a video private or public (they’re public by default), as well as date, mapping, and sharing options. It will take a while for the video to upload, depending on the size of the file, your connection speed to the Internet, and how busy the YouTube site is. Once your video is done uploading, additional time is needed to convert the video to the format that will play on the YouTube site (flash, also known as FLV). Again, depending on how busy the site is, your video will be available generally within an hour. You can now tell people about your video by linking to it, or by embedding it in your own web page. Congratulations, you are a YouTube video producer!
Welcome to the University of Mary Washington New Media Center. The UMWNMC is a sub-division of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT), and as part of its mission, provides research, oversees development, and offers production assistance and consultation for new media approaches to supporting technology-enhanced and online learning at UMW.
The University of Mary Washington is a member of the New Media Consortium, which we joined in 2007. The NMC provides programs and services that foster the exploration of new media and new technologies. The NMC provides an annual Horizon Project that reports on the emerging technologies in education.
