Incorporating Audio

Access to royalty free music is a handy resource to have at your disposal when creating media rich learning experiences. I have just downloaded a piece of music to my hard drive from the Incompetech website and found it a fuss-free experience.



Image : http://thelinuxcauldron.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/audio_icon.jpg

Slide-casting

Here's my powerpoint come slide-cast developed on this website.

Hpe lunchbox

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I found this process to be quite involved and time consuming, but aren't all things when you are just learning? I am sure the process is really quite straightforward once you have mastered it, particularly the audio software.
So the voice recording that I have added has problems, in that it needs to be edited to play only in the first slide rather then across the whole presentation. I aim to spend some more time with this program and learn how to solve this and any other useful applications.
I can see its pedagogical use in customizing presentations with its ability to enrich presentations with audio.

WIKIPedia

Add WIKIPedia to your bookmarks. Forget the cumbersome printed encyclopedia and click into a wealth of information. How handy is this to have at your fingertips when lesson planning? But more importantly encourage your students in self directed problem solving and guide them to the source of information. Rest assured that tight controls monitor accuracy of information.

Google Earth

Google earth as a digital story telling tool! I love it! I had never thought of it in this context before viewing Joe Woods presentation. Here is are some further great ideas I came across for using it in the classroom.
Image courtesy http://scrapetv.com/News/News%20Pages/Technology/images/google-earth.jpg

Teacher Tube Resource

I have been considering working on a unit in HPE focusing on building self-esteem and optimism in students. Below is a link to a clip from Teacher Tube to use in one of the learning experiences. It contains some famous faces as role models and I would hope the students find it inspiring and motivating.

Manipilating files

Having problems loading the online file altering program Picnik today, I instead experimented with Adobe photoshop which I had installed on my computer already. I would recommend it as a tool for adapting image files for the web or print.
I think that it is essential to have a handle on some type of file altering technology due to the ever present concern of file size in the digital environment. Incorporating images into your pedagogy is useful in order to stimulate your students and add a richer level to content.
Here is an image I played around with, then reduced it to 75dpi resolution which is suitable for web and only takes up a small 68k in file space.

Visual Communication

As they say a picture speaks a thousand words. Having discovered the wealth of images in the online photo sharing system Flickr I am excited about the potential. Importantly, copyright issues are covered and images can be used freely for education purposes. There are literally millions of photos, many of very high quality. The system is well organised for easy management of your own images plus an effective search engine for searching within categories of other files.

Image courtesy Flickr