Showing posts with label show. Show all posts
Showing posts with label show. Show all posts
Wednesday, 11 April 2007
Slideshows ancient and modern
Another addition to the webtools site soon will be slide.com. With a bit of luck there'll be some pretty flowers above in a display made in just a few minutes with that tool. Substitute pics of students doing things or some course-related visuals and you've got a nice change to PowerPoint.
Don't get me wrong, PowerPoint is one of the Microsoft greats, its oldest features being, in my view, some of its best - like being able to make quick graphics and save them has got me out of trouble time and again when there's no familiar image editing applications for students in classrooms and it's an excellent way to fill the screen with something attention-grabbing.
However, just try figuring out animations and orders and the rest for something like the show above, never mind putting on-line for everyone to see at their leisure. That would take more than a few minutes!
For an imminent webtools session or two I'm using another alternative - Thumbstacks. Very simple, no special effects but I love the way you can just do it there, on the screen, and it's there, wherever you can access the internet.
Don't get me wrong, PowerPoint is one of the Microsoft greats, its oldest features being, in my view, some of its best - like being able to make quick graphics and save them has got me out of trouble time and again when there's no familiar image editing applications for students in classrooms and it's an excellent way to fill the screen with something attention-grabbing.
However, just try figuring out animations and orders and the rest for something like the show above, never mind putting on-line for everyone to see at their leisure. That would take more than a few minutes!
For an imminent webtools session or two I'm using another alternative - Thumbstacks. Very simple, no special effects but I love the way you can just do it there, on the screen, and it's there, wherever you can access the internet.
Saturday, 10 February 2007
Splashcast
Here's a new application that is worth a look and I'm sure you'll think of some way to use it. Splashcast provides a nice way to construct a web show that can contain video, images, text, narration or a soundtrack. The end result can be displayed on a web page via a little bit of code. Visitors got a neat frame with a rather obvious start button and your show will be streamed on your page. It looks as though all the heavyweight files are stored on the Splashcast servers too (so I don't know how long this will stay free or ad free!)
It's a very neat and smooth product and I can see it at one extreme as being a nice change from PowerPoint and, being web based, looks easier to make available anywhere than PhotoStory and certainly has better text addition features.
So far I've only played with a folder of images but I'll try doing something a bit more challenging in other traditional applications and see what happens when I get a spare moment.
It's a very neat and smooth product and I can see it at one extreme as being a nice change from PowerPoint and, being web based, looks easier to make available anywhere than PhotoStory and certainly has better text addition features.
So far I've only played with a folder of images but I'll try doing something a bit more challenging in other traditional applications and see what happens when I get a spare moment.
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