Tip of the Week: Using SlideShare to share presentations and videos

Tip of the Week:

Use SlideShare to share presentations and videos

SlideShare is a free service very much similar to YouTube.

Users can upload Slideshows (i.e. PowerPoint) from their classes to SlideShare’s public website. Students can then view these slideshows at home, or alternatively, slideshows can be embedded into eColl for students to view there.

SlideShare’s website is set up so slideshows can be grouped through topics and keywords, a function known as tagging. By clicking on one keyword, i.e. ‘Science’, SlideShare will automatically bring up a list of every slideshow that is related to Science.

For a tutorial on how to use SlideShare, please visit the Tech Crew section in eColl.

To start using SlideShare, click here.

Tip of the Week: Inserting video clips into Microsoft Powerpoint

 Tip of the Week:

Inserting video clips into Microsoft Powerpoint

The actual process of inserting/embedding a video clip is much like inserting an image or other object into a presentation.

On your top toolbar, click

Insert > Movies and Sounds > Movie from file …

Navigate to the stored location of the video you want to embed, choosing from a personal video file, or from any other digital video provider.

Click OK.

Choose whether or not you want the video to play automatically when the current slide is displayed.

Click and drag the video frame to the desired location on your slide.

If the size of the video cilp doesn’t fit your slide design, you can change the video’s physical attributes so it fits well within your presentation.

Click the video once to select it.

Click and drag one of the six small white boxes that appear around the perimeter of the video.

Keep in mind that some physical changes can cause the video to distort. To keep the video in its original proportions, always click and drag using one of the four corner boxes.

Test your embedded video. At the top menu bar, click

Slideshow > View Show

If you did not set the video to play automatically then hover your mouse over the video location until your cursor turns into a hand and then click to start the playback.

Click again to pause the video.

 

You may also find our posts on TeacherTube and Zamzar helpful.

Tip of the Week: Heard of TeacherTube?

 

Tip of the Week:

Heard of TeacherTube?

 Launched on March 6, 2007 – TeacherTube is a video sharing website designed and created for teachers,  by teachers.

 Just like YouTube, TeacherTube allows users to view and share videos for free.  The main differences between the two sites include TeacherTube being much safer than YouTube,  and also TeacherTube having an education focus.

To visit TeacherTube, click here.

For further tips on using TeacherTube, click here.

 

 

Tip of the Week: Use Picasa2 to remove red eyes!

 Tip of the Week:

Use Picasa2 to remove red eyes!

Picasa2 is a free program by Google that is perfect for image editing and management.

 

Extremely user friendly,  Picasa2 is packed with features that allows you to remove red eyes quickly and easily,  as well as adjust the lighting and darkness in your photos to ensure a perfect print.

 

For a full description of all the useful features Picasa2 has to offer,  see our post below. 

 

 

Picasa2: Features

Organise

Picasa instantly locates and organises all the pictures on your computer.

Find the pictures you forgot you had.

Picasa organises your entire collection while you watch, scanning the images on your computer and automatically sorting them by date.

Move and re-name pictures from inside Picasa.

Want to clean up messy folders and move pictures around on your computer’s hard drive? Simply drag and drop pictures from one folder in Picasa to another. Picasa will make the change permanent after double-checking with you. Want to change a picture’s filename from 671056398a.jpg to Lisa.jpg? In Picasa, it only takes seconds to re-name one picture or a group of pictures.

Make an album.

Use the “Albums” collection to tag your photos into quick groupings inside Picasa. Viewing and sharing the pictures you grouped under an album is easy – they make great slideshows and movies or you can email them to friends.

Add a star rating.

Give a gold star to any photo you love: it turns your favourites into visual standouts at a glance. Picasa even has a star search that reduces your entire photo collection to the best of the best in less than a second.

Keep one picture in multiple albums.

Picasa creates a new “instance” of each photo you label without taking up more space on your computer, so you can put the same picture into multiple albums.

Password-protect collections.

Have photos you want to keep to yourself? You can add passwords to any of your Picasa collections (this does not affect which pictures you and others can see on your computer’s hard drive).

Edit

Turn a grey sky into a picture-perfect day.

  

Basic Fixes are back – and better.

Picasa’s Basic Fixes are buttons that make it fast and easy to crop, remove red eye, fix the contrast and colour, and enhance your digital pictures.

Amazing effects turn so-so pictures into works of art.

You can see how much Picasa’s 12 new visual effects can improve your photos – and in seconds, not hours. Go sepia. Warmify. Make pictures pop with colour or try austere black-and-white. Try easy one-clicks or the more finely tuned sliders for better control where you want it. And of course, you can undo your changes at any step along the way.

Write captions that stay with the picture.

Picasa makes captions the way journalists do – using the IPTC standard. That means your captions are saved within their pictures and stay with them, whether you export as a web page or make a CD presentation. Picasa captions are fully editable and searchable, and you choose whether to display them or not.

Zoom. Pan. Tilt. Get the angle you intended.

So you did not get the shot? With Picasa, that is not the end of the story. Go in closer and move the focus slightly to the left. Your camera was slightly crooked? So what? Your picture is perfect anyway.

Know how to use a camera in manual mode?

Photography aficionados can now fine-tune their photos with Picasa’s EXIF display. This window shows you all the camera data that is stored in a picture’s original file – such as camera model, date the photo was taken, even if a flash was used. The EXIF display also has a RGB histogram, a real-time graph that shows the intensity of colours in your picture and how they change when you make edits in Picasa.

Share

The hardest part of sharing your pictures is choosing your favourites.

Send photos via email that are a joy to receive.

Take the guesswork out of sending photos. Picasa automatically resizes and attaches pictures to email messages at sizes your friends will be able to open. Works with most email programs, including Google Mail.

Put pictures on your own site, for free.

 

Picasa Web Albums is the fast and easy way to put your photos on the web. Just select the photos in Picasa that you want to share and click to publish. In seconds, those photos are on your own web page, ready to share with the people you know. Check out  a few things you can do with Picasa Web Albums. If you’re looking to post multiple photos onto your blog, Picasa’s “BlogThis!” button does the hard work for you by automatically transferring selected photos directly to  Blogger.

Make beautiful slide shows.

With Picasa, you can turn a group of photos into a presentation with one click, then share your slide show on a CD.

Move to any device or folder.

You can take your photos with you no matter how you like to carry them. Picasa works with all the newest compact flash devices.

Prints & Products

Print beautiful pictures at home with more custom sizes or order prints, gifts and books from your favourite online companies.

 

Custom and standard sizes are now fit to print at home.

Picasa automatically fits your pictures perfectly onto the expensive paper used by your home printer. It is finally easy to print wallets, 4×6, 5×7, full pages, more sizes and even (hallelujah!) more than one picture on a page.

Export pictures to popular photo processing websites.

You can pick photos straight out of Picasa and upload them directly to your favourite photo finishers to order prints and other products.

Backup

Do not lose your digital memories. Safely back up your photos with Picasa 2.

Burn to CD or DVD for archive purposes.

Picasa makes it easy to protect your pictures by archiving them on a CD or DVD. Picasa even displays the pictures that have not yet been backed up to make absolutely sure you do not make mistakes with images that matter.

Give gift CDs with slide shows.

Effortlessly create slide show CDs for friends and family.

Create a network backup of your pictures.

Save to a folder on your computer, plus any device that is an external drive or disk. Moving edited pictures out of Picasa has always been as easy as clicking the Export button. Now you can also control the quality and sizes of your exported pictures. Picasa even will save photos back to any drive, including the newest flash memory cards and sticks.

Create

Enjoy your pictures in fun, creative ways – it is what photography is all about!

Turn your photos into a movie.

It is so easy to play filmmaker with your pictures. Select your best shots, then adjust the delay time, dimensions, and video compression settings. That is it – Picasa will render a movie, complete with title graphics, that you can play and share.

Make a personalised desktop picture or screensaver.

Your best pictures are now on display. Pick a favourite photo as your desktop picture or add several into your screensaver rotation. What better way to enjoy your photographic genius at your desk?

Create a poster.

Picasa can tile any picture you select, allowing you to print each part and reassemble them at poster size – up to 1,000% larger than the original.

Make picture collages.

Select a group of pictures, choose one of the beautiful templates, and Picasa will create a collage that expands your creative horizons. Picture pile it. Make a multi-exposure image. Create a contact sheet. Done? Simply save your collage to a folder, as a new desktop background or as a screensaver.

Sound good?

Call the IT Support Team to get Picasa2 installed!

Tip of the Week: Using PrintScreen

Tip of the week:

Using PrintScreen

Where can I find the PrintScreen button?

What does it do?

PrintScreen takes a snapshot or picture of all the images and text that are currently on your display screen.  It copies and stores this image on the Clipboard (an invisible holding area for content that is copied). An example of the PrintScreen function is shown below.

To use this image in an application, just simply press Ctrl + V (paste shortcut).  This will paste the screenshot into your open document i.e. MS Paint, Microsoft Word, Powerpoint etc.

Alternatively, you can use ALT + PrintScreen

Using ALT + PrintScreen

Where can I find these buttons?

What does it do?

In the previous section we used the PrintScreen function by itself, and we learnt that this button takes a snapshot of all, and whatever is on your display screen.

By using ALT + PrintScreen, only a snapshot of your selected window will be taken. An example is shown below.

Like before, pressing CTRL+V will paste the snapshot image into your selected document.

Tip of the Week: Keyboard Shortcuts

Tip of the Week:

Keyboard Shortcuts

Did you know that instead of right-clicking on a file and selecting cut, copy or paste- you can instead hold down the control key (CTRL found on the bottom left of most keyboards) and press X if you want to cut, C if you want to copy or V if you want to paste.

i.e.  CTRL + X to cut

         CTRL + C to copy

          CTRL + V to paste

These keyboard shortcuts are generally universal and can be used on most programs from Microsoft Word to Adobe Photoshop.

But most importantly, keyboard shortcuts will help you save time.

Tom’s Photoshop Tip for t3h day

“Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E” in Photoshop merges the layers that you have viewable into one layer. To toggle the layers you want to form into one layer, use the little eye symbol beside each layer in the panel.

How to use “Zamzar”

Zamzar is an online file converter and one of the easiest ways I know to get a YouTube video stored on your hard drive, rather than requiring access to the web whenever you want to access it.

Below are the steps to obtaining a ‘hard copy’ of a YouTube video. This is particularly useful for teachers when they want to show a video in class, but do not want to use up their bandwidth showing the same video to different classes.

1. Open up Internet Explorer or whatever web browser you like using.
2. Type ‘www.youtube.com’ into the URL field at the top of your browser.
3. Find the YouTube video you wish to download using the search box in the top right corner of the site.
4. Once you have found the video you want and click on it to begin playing it.
5. Copy the URL of this page. This can be achieved by highlighting the URL, then right clicking on it and selecting ‘Copy’ or by the holding down the ‘Ctrl’ key on the keyboard and pressing the ‘C’ key.

6. Type ‘www.zamzar.com’ into the URL field up the top of your browser.

7. On the Zamzar site, under the section entitled ‘Step 1’, click on the word ‘URL’ in the sentence “Select files or URL to convert (up to 100MB in size)”.

8. Delete the ‘http://’ already inserted into this box and then right click in the box and click ‘paste’ on the menu that comes up. You should see a long incomprehensible URL in this box now that will end with something along the lines of ‘AbcDeF123’. Click the ‘Add URL’ button.

9. Under the section entitled ‘Step 2’, select a format to convert to from the drop-down list. I recommend you select ‘mpg’ which is the third option from the bottom.

10. Under the section ‘Step 3’, enter the email address you want the link to the video to be sent to. Eg. A.staffmember@wellington-college.school.nz

11. Click ‘Convert’ under step 4.

12. You will notice a progress bar appear at the bottom of the page. Wait for it to complete. You can now close Internet Explorer.

13. After a few minutes of processing, Zamzar will send you a link to claim your video via email. Click on this link (it will be the longest URL in the email).

14. You will be taken to a page that has a green button that reads “Download Now”. Click on this button.

15. A box will pop up asking you what you want to do with this file. Select “Save” rather than “Open” and then select the folder in which you which to store your video.

16. Congratulations! You now have a copy of the video stored on your computer for viewing at your leisure.