One way a teacher can communicate with students online is through a Web site. Ko & Rossen (2004, ch. 7) recommend several ways for the inexpert to create a site, but I particularly appreciated their repeated references to Netscape Composer, a tool that is also available on a related browser I prefer called SeaMonkey. As a webmaster with nearly 10 years experience, I recommend this tool as superior to many commercial software applications. It generally creates simpler HTML code, which means quicker load times, and its code tends to have fewer glitches. Although saving word processing pages as HTML is easy, it produces extremely complicated (and often buggy) code.
Ko & Rosson offer a number of good ideas for adding multimedia to files. A couple more alternatives to Photoshop are the stripped down versions of Photoshop or similar software often bundled with digital cameras. A sophisticated — and free — alternative is the open source program GIMP, which has many of the same capabilities as Photoshop, including layers.
And here’s one more idea — an alternative to PowerPoint presentations. Apple’s comparable product Keynote can export presentations as QuickTime movies with options as to size, whether they’re self-playing or interactive, and whether or not they include a sound file. I have successfully converted a PowerPoint presentation into Keynote, then exported it as a movie. The advantage of doing this is that movies can be streamed instead of downloaded, which means students don’t have to wait as long to start watching them.
GIMP sites
- GIMP for Windows
- Gimp for Mac OS X (requires installation of X11 from the OS disk)
- MacGIMP, which can be purchased as a download for $29.95.
No comments:
Post a Comment