DV for Teachers

Macworld’s Tom Negrino explains five solid tips for making the most of the latest PowerPoint for Mac.

I’ve been screwing up.

I’ve taught basic workshops on Windows Movie Maker for years now, usually early in the semester. When they work on their assigned projects weeks later, too many students don’t correctly back up their unfinished video projects. They think the Project.MSWMM file is all they need, and don’t back up the video clips that go with that project. So, when they try to finish on another machine, either at home or on another PC in the labs, they see the big red X’s instead of their video clips. Result? FAIL. Must figure out how to make this clearer, but for now, find the steps after the jump.

Today I’m showing some ECE students how to find and use free photos on their edublogs. Here’s a nice airplane from János at flickr.com to illustrate!

Before I do that, I want to make sure everyone knows how to find images that are licensed for reuse. The Creative Commons license allows that, as long as you provide attribution – i.e., you have to give credit to the photographer. This video from the Creative Commons site makes it easy to learn how to search for CC-licensed images using the Firefox browser.

Watched the video? Know how to make sure your images are licensed for putting in your blog? Let’s go:

Among my favorite sources for this is flickr, with tons of images under the CC license from professional and amateur photographers around the world.

I’ve posted more stock image sources here and here and here at DV for Teachers. Have fun!

x-posted.

Leading a workshop on the 10th – tomorrow – and I’m compiling a list of resource links for it. I’ll add more as I find them, but for now here goes:

Second Life in Education Wiki

Best Practices For Education in Second Life

Second Life in Education (SLED) ListServ

SLED Blog

I’ll be teaching a workshop shortly on Non-Linear PowerPoint Presentations. I asked the Internet for help, and the Internet came through for me. Thanks, Internet.

Update: The workshop has been cancelled, so more time to work on other projects. Yay.

Further update: Here’s a nice non-linear presentation example, and another full of other tips I find useful.

Prepping for an inservice presentation, I found The How-To Geek”, a slew of helpful tips for Windows, Mac OS X, Office, Linux, and much more.

For example, I was looking for tips on Microsoft Word, and found Search and Replace Specific Formatting (fonts, styles, etc.) in Microsoft Word. I did not know you could copy and paste style attributes like that – I knew about it in advanced video editors, but not in Word. A valuable tip.

Digital Producer’s been posting clips from the latest training DVD from Lynda.com on the new Office 2007 for Windows. Exploring The PowerPoint 2007 User Interface

In this segment David introduces you in the actual nuts and bolts of navigation using the Powerpoint 2007 User Interface.

The interface is different. The Office Suite’s menus and toolbars have been redesigned, and you’ll need a guide to learn your way around.

The University of South Carolina Beaufort offers this nice tutorial on web searches

So, you’re still getting those 1,670,000 responses to your search queries on the Web, and you’re still too busy to do anything about it, like reading the lengthy, and sometimes confusing, “help” screens to find out how to improve your searching techniques.

Look no further! Real help is here, in the USCB Library’s “BARE BONES Tutorial.”

I think I’ll use it as a guide for a workshop, either this summer or fall. (The cute dancing boney guy is from their site.)