Presentations with Audio

Many faculty on campus are adding audio to Powerpoint presentations and posting them to the web or Blackboard for students to access 24/7.

There are reasons to convert Powerpoint to another format before posting the file online. First, the file size grows when audio is added and the "right" conversion will reduce file size without degrading the audio or visual content. Reduced file sizes mean a shorter download time. Second, Powerpoint can be modified by others, so saving as a Powerpoint show is one option. But the PPS file is not a universal file format on the web, Flash (swf), Acrobat (pdf) are the most popular player formats as well as Quicktime (mov).

Patty Harris-Jenkinson has been working with Powerpoint for years and is now adding audio. She has three files ready to take to the next level ... and we are experimenting today with converting her audio enhanced lectures into PDF, MOV and SWF. After converting these files and posting to a web site, where she can access the files from campus, home and laptop locations, she can make an informed workflow choice of final delivery format. The next issue is where to store the files, a media server is the best choice, she can also use her wserver web account or post them directly into Blackboard. At this time the wserver account is the best option.

To preview how we might use Acrobat Professional 8 for eLearning, sign up for an Adobe membership when you find the event listed below. Go to http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/

From the pull down menus, choose Acrobat then Education and click the GO button. From this list of presentations, click on "eLearning: Adobe® Acrobat® 8 Professional in the Digital Workflow. Learn how Acrobat 8 and its Adobe PDF documents enable easy, more secure communication, collaboration, and timesaving electronic workflows across campus and beyond." Move the playhead to 6 minutes to begin the Powerpoint conversion segment and about 23 minutes in the rich media (movies) segment begins.

Membership has it privileges and you will have access to other on-demand seminars as well as curriculum guides for Adobe products. They do not send spam messages.

Scanning Documents to Word

Ginnie Gessford (Tutoring/LRC) asked for assistance on scanning a 20 page document into Microsoft Word so she could edit it.

In LR 110 we have just the right tool for this type of task. The Epson GT-2500 document scanner will scan single-sided pages into an Adobe Acrobat document or TIFF or JPEG. The image types could be helpful, but the real power is PDF. We purchased this scanner because it is Network-Aware and any computer in our lab can access the scanner.

Our first try was to use the Epson Scanner software on a Windows computer. The scanner signaled it understood the request, but the pages did not feed into the scan bed. (I'll have to investigate further). Our next try was to use Adobe Acrobat Pro v8 and the Create a PDF > From Scanner option. This time a dialog box asked to select the device and TWAIN did not work ... but Epson GT2500 did. Other options in the dialog box were left at the original settings and ... volia! the scanner responded by feeding pages.

After the last page, Acrobat began automatically processing the IMAGE into LIVE TEXT by OCR (optical character recognition). Now, how does this Acrobat (PDF) document get to be a Word file? Under the Acrobat > File > Export menu are three options of interest: 1) Microsoft Word, 2) Rich Text, 3) Text > Plain Text.

The Word export created a faithful rendition of the pages except that the text is in individual boxes on the page. What a pain to edit. The Rich Text version did the same. The best option for words that flow into paragraphs and can easily be selected is Plain Text. Now it is easy to select text, set paragraph styles and format text as needed.

Our experimentation, learning and end result took less than 20 minutes. Ginnie opened Outlook Web Access and emailed herself the final Word document as an attachment.