I know we are in the days of lots of free space, but it is worth remembering when blogging (or making webpages) shrinking images is worth doing for your visitors.
I don’t always do it, but today as I updates a Glow Blogs Help page, I saved nearly half the space by using, ImageOptim — better Save for Web.
There are other tools, but this one is free & open source, works on a Mac, but lists and links to windows & linux tools.
I had a a couple of nice example of how well google image search can work with uploaded images and a couple of descriptive words. Here is one.
While walking today I saw clouds of butterflies, although I tried to get a good photo I failed miserably.
This was the best one:
I uploaded this to the google image search, which gave me good feedback on my photo skills:
Google thinks my butterfly is a bear, dog or fish!
The addition of a few keywords nails it:
A google wrinkle worth teaching I think.
I’ve been interested in combining maps and media for a while now. Here is a recap of some of the methods I’ve been using. I’ve not often had the chance to do this sort of thing in a teaching situation but continue to believe that mapping media would be a valuable way to record experiences for pupils and a nice slant on digital storytelling.
Last Sunday I had a walk to Benvane & Ben Ledi recorded the gpx with the iPhone Trails app (one of my top 10 apps) took photos, video and some panoramas. Here are the three ways I’ve been developing of displaying them on the web. None of these are good as examples of story telling as I am still thinking about the workflow and tech.
I’ve built up a fair collection of these over the last few years. this one only uses iPhone photos which means I can skip the stage of matching photos to the gpx file. When I started doing these google maps API was at version 1, I move to 2 and now am behind version 3.
This is the most conventional story combining an image with text in a liner fashion along the track.
Benvane and Ben Ledi video map
I just blogged about this in the previous post
I am hoping that this can produce a more contemplative result.
Although I’ve only just worked out how to do this the workflow is a lot simpler than the photo maps. I’ve developed a mac application (using SuperCard) to make these. All I need to do is to drag some iphone videos out of iPhoto onto the application and it creates the smaller versions of the video and the HTML to display them along side the maps
I you have a mac and would be interested in trying the app, let me know.
This is the most recent development, after tweeting about the Video Maps @drewburrett suggested using photosynth for the iPhone to take pano photos and do something similar. I’ve not got a workflow for creating these and don’t think I’ve got the display method right yet but I am quite excited about working out different ways to present pano photos.
As I said I’ve been messing with maps and media for a long time (2006 example) I’ve blogged about it a fair bit, pretty much in a vacuum. I’d be really interested in finding some folk to play along with or a school interested in trying out some of this stuff.
I’ve been dipping into the stream of fun and information on the University of Mary Washington New Media Center Digital Storytelling Summer of Oblivion online course. Organised by Jim Groom it would be pretty hard to describe but it is producing lots of interesting stuff. A great way to spend a lot of time following links to posts that range wide.
Among the various weird and wonderful posts I found a series of website/blogs from the University of Mary Washington New Media Center which give a good introduction to basic Digital Media Tools:
I’ve also created a la list of these links on linkli.st: Digital Media · linkli.st. linkli.st is a service that make it easy (bookmarklet) to create & curate lists of links.
Update (a couple of hours later): I just found a wiki I put together last year covering some of the same ground: Digital Media.
Another positive of being an airhead was that one or two folk noticed my site was down.
@johnjohnston Flickr CC is down
Thu Dec 02 17:26:13 +0000 2010 from TweetDeck captured: Sun, 05 Dec 10 18:14:33 +0000
And when it came back, in particular A flickr CC search toy, tombarrett tweeted it again with the usual effect, including this one:
@johnjohnston @tombarrett looks good! Have you seen http://bit.ly/hevGEF It’s what we use in FE and HE.
Sat Dec 04 08:35:34 +0000 2010 from Echofon captured: Sun, 05 Dec 10 18:16:31 +0000
I think I had seen Xpert Attribution tool before but it was not at the front of my mind. Looking at it reminded me of the nice way they add attribution by padding the image at the bottom rather than the way I was doing it (stamping over the image). I had tried to work out how to pad an image before but failed. This morning I spent a wee bit of time digging around the PHP: Function Reference and managed to figure out a couple of things, padding the image, and wrapping the text when it is too wide for the image.
Like the rest of A flickr CC search toy the code is surely pretty horrible, but it seems to work.
I also looked over the How do I properly attribute a Creative Commons licensed work? on the FFAQ – CC Wiki again just to make sure I am keeping within the guidelines.
THe other thing that I’ve changes is to add a 3rd size to the stamped images. I’d avoided the small size as the attribution rarely fitted on the images, now I am padding them they do not present the problem.
Using the stamped image has the advantage of the attribution sticking to the image where ever it goes and as far as online use goes keeping the image under your control an avoilding problems if a user deletes their image when you hot link to flickr.
As always I am interested in any suggested improvements I can make to A flickr CC search toy the idea is still to provide pupils a practical way to use and attribute Creative Commons images from flickr.
SconicPics is an iPhone/ipod touch application that allows you to create custom slideshow movies. The movies are made from still photos which you can add from the photo library or take with the iPhone’s camera. You can then narrate a voice over and create and enhanced m4v video with chapters.
In this example I’ve just used some pictures from classrooms I’ve been teaching in recently. It only took a few minutes to create and I am sure taking a little more time would have produced a more professional result and few plosives. I exported the 4v to reduce the size which removed the chapters too.
This looks like it could be a useful app in a classroom equipped with iphones or iPod touches. With touches pupils could use images downloaded from webpages or screenshots.
A while back I made a simple flickr search tool this is not as slick as some of the beautiful search tools out there but it was designed for pupils to use to get images to embed into their blogs and to create the attribution, clicking on a thumbnail gives this:
Which has a text box with the html code to embed the image and attribution, you can choose to align left of right and to use small or medium images.
The tool if far from perfect an needs quite a lot of work but it has proved useful to quite a few folk and I believe used in glow training by LTS. Recently at the suggestion of a fellow ADE I added a more somber style to the rather bright colours I had used (a link at the top right of the page toggles the styles and sets a cookie to remeber your preferences).
At the Scottish Learning festival I was delighted to see Neil Winton‘s pupils using my tool and working with the images. This gave rise to the thought that it might be useful to create images that could be used without the embed code that show attribution. I’ve added a feature, above you can see stamp medium and stamp original links. Clicking on these will produce an image with the attribution stamped on.
my crop
So I am wondering would this be useful in your class and two, is this legal (stamping a No Derivs photo? ) and is the wording (Flickr photo by name – license) and I would appreciate your comments on both of these questions.
picPosterous is a photo and video publishing app for the iPhone.
At first glance I could not see the advantage of using this rather than the iPhone’s mail application, and neither could TechCrunch but a tweet or two from Sachin, one of posterous’s founders both put me on the right track and gave further evidence that the posterous guys never sleep.
The idea of the applcation is that during an event (or day or meal or whatever) you take photos and post to posterous. The difference is that you can continue to add images to the post after the first image is posted. This will certainly make it a useful application. Instead of waiting until the end of an event you can snap and post without crating a series of posts. picPosterous will also queue up the photos and post then when it can. You can quit the app and it will try to post again the next time you open it.
So the app is a lot more useful than I first thought. A couple of drawbacks/limitations: the only text you can post is the title and the media is limited to pictures and video (on a newer phone than mine). The auto post feature, which I have turned on for twitter, flickr and a test blog only posts the first photo, which makes sense for twitter but if I used posterous as a means of posting to flickr I’d probably want the whole album being added.
All in all a handy addition to ways of posting stuff online if not a whole solution I think I’ll be using picPosterous regularly.
I also imagine that if the development of posterous itself is any indication the application will be upgraded and improved regularly. Posterous itself has had an incredible rate of feature addition. The founders are very responsive to any suggestion for improvement making it the most exciting blogging platfrom out there.
Aside, I used Camera Genius for iPhone as a replacement for Night Camera for Anti-shake stabilization. night Camera didn’t make the upgrade to the 3.0 version of the iPhone software. Unfortunately Camera Genius doesn’t seem to take photos with location exif data so posterous does not get to produce a nice wee map.
Yest another mapping/iphone post. This might not seem like education but I consider the mapping of walks etc. a sort of trial for possible Teaching and learning activities. At Sandaig I was always interested in blogging trips (Sandaig Netherlands 2008 or Glencoe 06 for example). I am interested in trying to get pupils and groups to tell stories in different ways, audio, text, pictures and video adding location into the mix seems like a good idea. This week i was talking to some of the instructors at Kilbowie Residential Outdoor Centre Oban discussing some of the potential for adding some more ict into their mix through Glow.
On Friday I was going for a walk and decided to try a few different ways of recording the walk centred around the iPhone.
As usual I recorded a gpx file and took some photos with the phone for A Mapped Walk
I also took other pictures with my camera and geotagged them once I got home with gpicsync suggested by Dan Stucke in a comment here. gpicsync is a visual front end to exiftool that I’ve mentioned before and works well, unfortunately my iPhone battery gave up early as I was using lots of apps, but a few were mapped by Flickr. The rest taken on the way bak down are untagged.
At the top of the hill i decided to try audioBoo. I love the way Audioboo combines a picture, the audio and a wee map and is simple to use. Unfortunately I didn’t have a good enough signal to post the boo from the hill.
Instead I turned to posterous. The really good thing about posterous on the iphone is that because it used email you don’t need a signal, the mail app will just wait until it gets one and sends the mail. I found this out on my holiday this year when I seemed to get an occasional signal overnight, making posterous the easiest way to blog.
I’ve also found out how to combine images and audio in an email from the iPhone and because posterous now geo locates your post if there is a location in the exif data of any images posted you get the same effect as audioboo. See Ben Donich – John’s posterous.
The trick is, take a photo, switch to the camera roll and click the share/mail icon. choose the picture and copy it (This will work with several images). Then open up the Voice memos app, recods some audio and then mail it. You can paste the image(s) into your mail and send.
The last thing I tried was the lifecasting app iTunes url, this allows you to choose some photos and then record a narration over a slideshow of the images. The result can be uploaded to youtube or downloaded to your desktop as a m4v file (the app like many others acts like a wee server and puts up a webpage with the movies to download.)
Lifecasting works fairly well, the fact you cannot mail the file is a pity. The other problem is that the slides are shown for a fixed length of time, the example below is the longest, so you have to fit your audio to the show. I did duplicate a couple of images to give myself longer to talk. If the slides could be set to last the length of the audio and you could use mail or the metaweblogAPI to upload them this would be a great app for mobile learning.
I’ve downloaded a couple of other slideshow apps to investigate (at the vast expense of 59 pence each and will try them out whenever I can find them and have a bit of time).
Them ore I use my iPhone the more I believe that a device of this sort has a real place in the classroom for creating the sort of thing I used to use digital cameras, videos, imovie, garage bands and a blog for; the types of activity listed by Margaret Vass in her recent post on Learning, Teaching and ICT » Digital Storytelling ….. and ePortfolios?. We might need to wait a wee while the the right combination of price and feature set but it is getting more interesting every week.
Free way to very quickly create animoto slideshows with your iPhone.
More information Animoto on the iPhone and Itunes Store Link.
