Have you ever wanted a customized map for a special trip or event? Give Google’s “My Map” feature a try. Here’s a quick video that explains how to create a customized map in Google Maps.
What applications do you see for customized maps in education? Post a comment with your ideas for how customized mapping can be utilized in education.
Beyond simply embedding a YouTube video clip into a blog posting or web page of your choosing, did you know that you can actually specify where a particular video clip should begin playing? In episode 224 of Tekzilla Daily, Veronica Belmont explains the steps to specify the beginning point for either an embedded YouTube video or one that is linked to.
For the Web-based Learning Technology Repository (WBLTR), at the end of Module 4 and Module 8 you’ll be your compressing (aka: zipping) the site you are developing and submitting for grading via the dropbox in D2L. Both the Mac and Windows operating systems have the built-in capability to create compressed .zip files for submitting. Below I’ve provided short video tutorials illustrating the process for both Mac or Windows.
One of the powerful illustrative features of web-based communications is the ability to easily add various types of media to illustrate, explain, or describe. For our ELT activities in our course, a portion of the grade for each assignment is based on how media is used in the posting.
So, what are some easy ways to add media to a blog posting? Perhaps the easiest is to take a screen capture of a particular screen of a technology or tool when describing the various features. There are many, MANY different ways in which to take screen shots and post them. I’ll share my favorites here, but I’d love to hear from others what are your favorites.
On my Windows machine, I personally use the free Howies’ Quick Screen Capture software available as a free download from howiesfunware.com. Below I’ve included a screen shot I took of the software open on my PC desktop, along with the available preferences available.
So why do I use “Howie’s” screen capture tool? A few reasons…
On my computer, I create a “Captures” folder and then have Howie’s set to save all my screen shots to this folder so it doesn’t clutter my desktop. Then, when I’m ready to add the images to either a blog post or some other online communication, I have all the images at my fingertips!
On my Mac, which is my preferred computer system, there are several, even easier ways to take screen captures. Mac OS X has a built-in keystroke shortcuts to take a screenshot of the entire screen (Command+Shift+3) or (Command+Shift+4) to have cross-hairs to select a specific location on the screen to capture. Here’s a short video description of how to capture screen images using Mac OS X.
Once you have a screen shot captured, whether you do it on a Windows or Mac computer, you can then easily upload the image(s) to your blog and embed them in your blog posting. Perhaps someone in our class who has already done this would be willing to record a short screencast explaining the steps? I’m hoping someone will take me up on this challenge 
If you’re a Mac user and you’re interested in going to the next level in you screen capture capabilities without spending $ for software, I’d recommend giving Skitch a try. Skitch is free Mac software bundled with a is a webservice that provides 1-click uploading of images for fast and fun image sharing. Here’s a 3 minute video introduction to Skitch.
So there you have it…hopefully, you have a few more ideas regarding adding media to your blog posts. If you are already using screen capture software, what software tool(s) are you using and why? If you have questions about screen capture or posting different types of media to your blog, make sure to bring those questions to an upcoming synchronous class session.
Adding images to a blog post is a great way to add visual appeal as well as more effectively communicate your message. It’s quite simply to add images to blog posts in Edublogs. This 3 minute video demonstrates how to add images to a WordPress blog post (note: WordPress is the open source blog software that powers Edublogs)
Perhaps the most difficult task in adding a images to a blog post is to upload the images to a server online so that they have a source URL and can then be inserted into the blog post. Images displayed in blog posts are actually just embedded, meaning that the files being displayed are housed on another server but just displayed within the blog post. Numerous free image sharing services are available, like Flickr or Picasa, that you can upload images to and then share with others.
I personally use Flickr and have my personal images at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jrhode. When I want to include a diagram or other image in a blog post, I upload the image to my Flickr account. Then, using the Firefox browser, I right-click on the medium sized image and then “Copy Image Location”. That is the URL that I need to add a photo as described in the previous tutorial.
If I want the reader to be able to view a larger version of the photo, I add a link to the photo I just inserted back to the original source image. Here’s an example of a diagram I created to explain RSS. Clicking on the image below, you can display a larger version of the image.
If you’d like to give Flickr a try for yourself, here’s a 2 minute video below to help you get started.
Leave comments with additional questions you may have about adding images or other media to blog posts or bring them to an upcoming synchronous class session and I’ll answer them there.
As we’ll be using KompoZer extensively throughout our course, I want to ensure that everyone has located and begun viewing the various KompoZer tutorials that have been provided for our course. We’ll be discussing during our weekly synchronous sessions the technical specifics of creating your website using KompoZer but in the meantime you may want to refer to the provided tutorials. Bring any questions that you have to our synchronous class sessions.
Here are links to each of the “5 minute session” tutorials that you may want to bookmark for future reference…
Do you ever struggle to remember the link to that recent website, blog, our YouTube video clip is located? Then you need start storing your bookmarks online rather than simply in the favorites of your browser on your computer.
Watch this 3 minute video that explains what online bookmarking, also referred to as “social bookmarking” is and why you should sign-up for a free account today!
I personally have a delicious account, available at delicious.com/jrhode and have found the activity of bookmarking my favorites to have totally revolutionized how I use the Internet. I encourage you to give delicious a try. If you already have a social bookmarking account, leave a comment sharing what service you use and why.
On a side note, a secondary bookmarking service that I use specifically for bookmarking academic research articles that I find is CiteULike. My CiteULike library is at citeulike.org/user/jrhode
If you are using Google Reader like I am to read all our course blogs, you may want to create a folder for our class and add all your subscriptions our classmates’ blogs into the folder to keep them organized. Rather than create a video tutorial on how to do this, I found this great little video on YouTube that explains how to organize your feeds using Google Reader.
I personally have a folder for our class where I’ve added everyone’s blog subscriptions, so I can easily focus on just the new contributions from our class. If you are a Google Reader user, give folders a try!
Google Reader is a fabulous free tool for subscribing to and reading any RSS content. I personally subscribe to each student’s blog in my Google Reader account so that I don’t need to manually visit each blog to view the latest contributions. You should subscribe to my blog as well as the blogs of all the other students in our course.
If you’ve never heard of Google Reader before, watch this brief video that explains Google Reader in Plain English.
The power of blogging can be found in the ability to easily syndicate and subscribe to content through the wonderful technology called “RSS”. Watch this 3 minute video that explains what RSS is and why you should use a RSS reader to read blogs.