Podcasts, Creating Video Clips & YouTube

DISCOVERY LESSON I: PODCASTS
The word podcast is used to refer to a non-musical audio or video broadcast that is distributed over the Internet. What differentiates a podcast from regular streaming audio or video is that the delivery method for podcasts is often done automatically through RSS. In 2005, "podcast" was named the "word of the year" by New Oxford American Dictionary.

Podcasts take many forms, from short 1-10 minutes commentaries to much longer in person interviews or panel group discussions. There’s a podcast out there for just about every interest area and the best part about this technology is that you don’t have to have an iPod or a MP3 player to access them. Since podcasts use the MP3 file format, a popular compressed format for audio files, you really just need a PC (or portal device) with headphones or a speaker.

iTunes, the free downloadable application created by Apple is the directory finding service most associated with podcasts, but if you don’t have iTunes installed there are still plenty of options.

Take a look at some popular podcast directory tools. Do some exploring on your own and locate a podcast that is of interest to you. Once found, you can easily pull the RSS feed into your email account as well, so that when new casts become available you’ll be automatically notified of their existence.

DISCOVERY RESOURCES I:
There are many, many podcast directories and finding tools out there. Here are just a few of the more popular ones in addition to iTunes:

• Podcast.com
• Podcastalley.com
• Allpodcasts.com
  

Here are a list of podcasts I gathered that might interest you and can be used for this task:

• LibVibe – Library related news of interest
• Booktalks Quick and Simple - Librarian Nancy Keane gives quick summaries of children's books for school media library specialists, updated daily
• Infopeople Podcasts - Book reviewer Michael Cart discusses literature trends
• The Library of Congress - Library of Congress webcasts on history, culture, education, performing arts, government, literature, religion, science and technology
• The Writer's Almanac - Host Garrison Keillor notes author birthdays and reads poems in this daily podcast
• White House - Access audio from Presidential speeches and remarks, the President's weekly radio address and White House press briefings
• My Trivia Podcast - Weekly podcast featuring 10 random trivia questions
• NPR: Sunday Puzzle - NPR's weekly word game featuring puzzle master Will Shortz
• NPR: Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me - Figure out what's real and what's made up in NPR's weekly current events quiz
• PRI's The World: Geo Quiz - Test your geography knowledge and learn about different cultures and places around the world
• That's News to Me! - Weekly current events trivia podcast based on the 1-hour, live Sunday chatroom trivia game by the same name

DISCOVERY ACTIVITY I:
Comment on your experience in this blog post and include a link to your favorite podcast. In your comments answer the following questions: How could podcasts benefit you at home or work? How could the library use podcasts?

*OPTIONAL DISCOVERY LESSON I:
What? You want to learn how to be a podcaster too?
Check out these optional resources/tutuorials to learn more about creating podcasts.

• How to Podcast
• How to Create Your Own Podcast - A Step-by-Step Tutorial
• Step-by-Step How to Podcast Tutorial
• Beginner's guide to Podcasts & Creating Podcasts
• Audacity: Free Audio Editor and Recorder
• KISS ::: The best FREE audio editor on the net!
• Podcasting Tutorial Easy to use podcasting tutorial and software that walks users through the process of setting up a podcast feed.
• Podcasting Tools Collection of podcasting tools and educational articles to assist podcasters.

*OPTIONAL DISCOVERY ACTIVITY I:

1. Using free resources create a podcast of your own and post the link to it as a comment on this post.
2. In your comment, discuss your discovery process as you explored this tool. Did you find anything useful here?

**OPTIONAL DISCOVERY LESSON II: CREATING VIDEO CLIPS

You don't have to be Steven Spielburg to create professional video clips online. Animoto is a web application that produces professional videos using their own patent-pending technology.

Animoto is the brain child of producers from ABC, Comedy Central and MTV who definitely know their stuff. Animoto analyzes your images and the music you use and pieces everything together to where it all flows perfectly in sync. If you don't like how your video turns out you can click the Remix this Video button and have Animoto automatically change it up for you or tweak it yourself.

No two video clips come out the same which makes for hours of fun. Here is an example of one I did using pictures from the Student Worker Appreciation Week 2009 Kick-Off. If you have trouble viewing this video in Firefox, try viewing in Internet Explorer.

NOTE: If you want a clip longer than 30 seconds it will cost. But, you can make as many 30 second clips as you want for free.

**OPTIONAL DISCOVERY ACTIVITY II:

1. Create an account on Animoto.
2. Create a 30 second clip or Animoto Short, by uploading at least ten pictures. You can use images from your Flickr account if you created one in our earlier activity. Animoto can link directly to it.
3. Choose from one of the songs in Animoto's music library or upload your own music file to go with your clip. NOTE: It can take several minutes for your video to be produced.
4. Embed your new 30 second clip in the comments of this post. There is a special code just for Blogger that you can use.
5. Comment on your experience in this blog post and include a link to your Animoto Short. In your comments answer the following questions: How could this type of web application you at home or work? How could the library use Animoto?

***OPTIONAL DISCOVERY LESSON III: YouTube
Online video hosting sites have exploded allowing users to easily to upload and share videos on the web. Among all the web 2.0 players in this area, YouTube is currently top dog. According to YouTube, people are watching hundreds of millions of videos a day on YouTube and uploading hundreds of thousands of videos daily. In fact, every minute, ten hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.

Founded in February 2005, YouTube is the world's most popular online video community, allowing millions of people to discover watch and share originally-created videos. YouTube provides a forum for people to connect, inform, and inspire others across the globe and acts as a distribution platform for original content creators and advertisers large and small.

YouTube allows people to easily upload and share video clips on www.YouTube.com and across the Internet through websites, mobile devices, blogs, and e-mail.

Some of the site's features include:

• Video embedding: Users can insert a YouTube video into Facebook and MySpace accounts, blogs, or other Web sites where anyone can watch them.
• Public or private videos: Users can elect to broadcast their videos publicly or share them privately with friends and family upon upload.
• Subscriptions: Users are able to keep track of their favorite users' new videos.
• Quick Capture: Users with a webcam and Flash software are able to instantly record video responses or normal videos onto the site rather than having to prerecord and then upload the video.

Do some searching around YouTube yourself and see what the site has to offer. You'll find everything from 1970s TV commercials to library dominos here. Of course, like any free site you’ll also find a lot of stuff not worth watching too. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t explore and see for yourself what the site has to offer.

OPTIONAL DISCOVERY RESOURCES III
Here are other popular video hosting sites you might want to check out in addition to YouTube:

• Yahoo Videos
• Google videos

OPTIONAL DISCOVERY ACTIVITY III:

• Explore YouTube or another video hosting site & find a video worth adding as a comment to this blog post.
• In your comment, talk about your experience exploring the site. What did you like or dislike about the site and why did you choose the video that you did? Can you see any features or components of the site that might be interesting if they were applied to our library’s website?

OPTIONAL DISCOVERY ACTIVITY III - PART II:
Try placing the video inside your Sandbox Wiki using the copy and paste code for the "Embeddable Player.” Note: you'll need to click the Source button to add the HTML code to your Sandbox.

Since many of us have been watching our waistlines, here is a YouTube Video that you might enjoy. I know that several of you have probably seen this classic...

Discover Support Learn: Dressing Up Your Photos

With digital cameras becoming available on so many electronic devices, we thought that it would be a great time to learn about how to dress up those photos. If you don’t have Photoshop or at least Picasa, what can you do? Last semester we played with Flickr and it's a great online photo album and even has some toys to play around with the photos.

But, what if you want to fix red eye or crop the photos before you post? After this exercise you can fix them online with just a computer and an internet connection.


There are lots of choices, but let's start with Picnik. You do not need to register and you can use your photos from Flickr, Picasa, and Facebook, etc. or you can upload from your computer or flash drive. You can fix the most common issues of photos such as: cropping, image size, exposure, red eye, and many more. You can also apply a few creative filters using the Create tab. When you are done, you can save it to your computer or flash drive. If you want to save it to your Flickr, Facebook, or Picasa account, you will need to be logged in to that account to open from and/or save to that location. The interface is fairly clean and they add a few cute bits to entertain you if a process is a bit slow to load.

Many people like to use Picnik because of its flexibility and that fact that it’s free and there is no registration required. You can just jump right in and start editing.

Picnik allows you to:
· Fix your photos in just one click
· Use advanced controls to fine-tune your results
· Crop, resize, and rotate in real-time
· Tons of special effects, from artsy to fun
· Astoundingly fast, right in your browser
· Awesome fonts and top-quality type tool
· Basketfuls of shapes from hand-picked designers
· Works on Mac, Windows, and Linux
· No download required, nothing to install


Want to try some others?
Splashup - No registration required. Upload, edit, and save. I found Splashup Light to be easier, the websites says it’s a more fun and casual image editing experience, but you do have to register and download it to your computer. In regular SplashUp, the Layers, Filters, even looks like a software window on the screen. Some effects are a bit slow to happen but they do eventually.

Pixenate - reads from and to Flickr or disk. No registration. Simple tools, can't handle high resolutions but if you don't have a high resolution camera this is fine. I found this one pretty easy and fun to use.

Snapfish - product of HP and there are strings attached. You do have to register and editing is limited. Free unlimited online storage! Well, not so free if you want to download or print your images. I only mention it as someone may ask you about it.

Pixer.us - cute name, but not very impressive.

ImageEditor - Associated with Google Photo Organizer, which is confusing since they also own Picasa another online photo storage and organizer site.

Discovery Exercise:
Pick one of the above mentioned Photo editors, or locate one of your own.

Use various tools to edit one or more pictures and save them to your computer, flash drive or online photo album.

Activity I
Comment on your experience in this blog post and include either a link to or embed one of the pictures you edited. You can post a before and after of your picture like the ones I posted at the top of this post from my visit to the St. Louis Zoo.

I used the photo editing tools in Picnik to crop, add a vignette, and add text to my image.

In your comments answer the following questions:
How could photo editing benefit you at home or work? How could the library use this type of tool?

Optional Discovery Exercise:

Smilebox

Smilebox is an easy-to-use application that lets you use photos and videos to keep in touch and share your memories. Best of all, it's free! (You can upgrade for a small charge, which allows you to view your Smilebox without ads and print your creations.)

What can I make with Smilebox?
With Smilebox, you can create animated scrapbooks, photobooks, slideshows, postcards, and ecards for any occasion, and email them to anyone.

1. Check out smilebox.com
2. Need ideas? Read one or more of Smilebox's newsletters or the Smilebox blog for a better idea of what's possible.


Here is a Smilebox screenshot:

Click on the link to view the entire Smilebox photobook I created.


Optional Discovery Activity
1. Download and install the Smilebox application.
2. Create a Smilebox project and email it to yourself using the program.
3. Comment on this post and share the URL of your project. (You'll find it at the bottom of the email you receive.) In your comments answer the following questions: How could photo editing benefit you at home or work? How could the library use this type of tool?

DSL II - Activity I

Welcome Back to the

DSL Program - Part II

Tagging
You may have recently heard the term "tagging" in the context of organizing digital photos. Tagging has been around for a few years. On the Web it is being used to categorize Web pages through social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, Technorati, and others. It is also being used on the Library's Staff Blog and Library Online Lounge (LOL) blog as what Blogger calls "labels".

Still confused? Here are a couple of resources to explain more about social bookmarking:

• Common Craft: Social Bookmarking in Plain English. (video)


• Seven things you should know about social bookmarking (pdf)

Adobe's Photoshop Album digital photo organizer software brought the tagging concept to the mainstream for digital photography, and the popular online photo sharing service Flickr also helped to spur the trend. Today many photo organizing software programs are using the tag metaphor, including Corel Snapfire, Google's Picasa, Microsoft Digital Image, and the Windows Photo Gallery in Windows Vista.

Tags are really nothing more than keywords used to describe a piece of data — be it a web page, a digital photo, or another type of digital document. Of course, organizing digital images by keywords and categories has been around for a long time, it just wasn't called "tagging" until fairly recently.

Adobe's visual metaphor of the tagging concept in Photoshop Album helped make the idea more accessible to the public. After all, a keyword or category is something abstract, but a tag is something tangible which you can visualize… like a gift tag, or a price tag. In Adobe's software user interface, they showed a very literal representation of the act of tagging. Your keywords were literally displayed as "tags" and you could drag and drop these tags onto your pictures to "attach" them to the photo.


Activity I - Delicious
Delicious is a social bookmarking manager which allows you to bookmark a web page and add tags to categorize your bookmarks. Many users find that the real power of Delicious is in the social network aspect, which allows you to see how other users have tagged similar links and also discover other websites that may be of interest to you. You can think of it as peering into another users’ filing cabinet, but with this powerful bookmarking tool each user's filing cabinet helps to build an expansive knowledge network.For this discovery exercise, you are asked to take a look at Delicious and learn about this popular bookmarking tool.

Discovery Resources:
· Otter Group Del.icio.us tutorial (8 min video) - Highly recommended!!!
· Us.ef.ul: A beginners guide to Del.icio.us
· Several Habits of wildly successful Del.icio.us users

Discovery Exercises:
1. View the 8 minute Del.icio.us tutorial to get a good overview of its features.

2. Explore the site options and try clicking on a bookmark that has also been bookmarked by a lot of other users. Can you see the comments they added about this bookmark or the tags that they used to categorize this reference?

3. Reply to this blog post about your experience and thoughts about this tool and answer the following questions: How could this benefit you at home or work??
How could the library use this tool??

Optional Activity I: If you’re up to the challenge, create a Delicious account for yourself and discover how this useful bookmarking tool can replace your traditional browser bookmark list.

Note: If you do setup a Delicious account, here’s a quick word about the Delicious Buttons. On PCs that have the toolbars locked down, these will install as options in your browser bookmarks. Use the “Post to my Delicious” link to add the current webpage to your account (you may need to log in). Use the “My Delicious” link to view your online account.

Optional Activity II - LibraryThing

Are you book lover or cataloger at heart? Or do you enjoy finding lost and forgotten gems on the shelf to read? Then LibraryThing may be just the tool for you.

Developed for booklovers, this online tool not only allows you to easily create an online catalog of your own it also connects you to other people who have similar libraries and reading tastes. Add a book to your catalog by just entering the title -- It’s so easy that you don’t even need MARC record training to do it – or connect with other users through your similar reading tastes. After a user catalogs books, he or she can tag them, add/correct cover pictures, and use social features. When a book is tagged, it can be viewed when other users or books use that tag.

There are lots of ways to use LibraryThing. You can even view your books on a virtual shelf, add a widget to display titles that are in your catalog or install a LT Search box on your blog.So why not join the ranks and create your own library online. With over 65,000 registered (BTW: LibraryThing also has group forum for librarians users and over 4.7 million cataloged books, you're bound to discover something new.

Check out Amanda's LibraryThing account she created for the Children's Lit class. When a batch of new children’s books arrives downstairs, she uses the bar code reader to scan them into this account, and quickly tag them by genre, book type, ethnicity, etc. She then posts the link to the account for the students in the class (to the blog and wiki for the class as well as into Blackboard).

Discovery Resources:
· About LibraryThing
· Library Thing tour
· LibraryThing blog (updates & news)

Discovery Exercise:
1. Take a look around LibraryThing and create an account.
2. Add a least 5 books to your library.
3. Reply to this blog post about your experience and thoughts about this tool and answer the following questions: How could this benefit you at home or work?? How could the library use this tool??