New Media @ City

Firefox - Add-on Speed

2009-10-01T11:30:00.000-07:00

Speed Dial is a way to visually organize web sites you visit often.

In the lab we have just installed a new add-on to Firefox called Speed Dial. This utility let's you customize the display of multiple sites in tabs. You have got to see this to appreciate it. Here is the process to install the Speed Dial Add-on:

Launch Firefox web browser (update to current version if appropriate)
Go to Tools > Add-Ons menu
Click the Get Add-Ons button/tab
In the Search box, type speed dial
Click Speed Dial from the search results
Click the Add to Firefox... button
Click Install Now button
Restart Firefox
Confirm that Speed Dial is in the browser toolbar and available from Bookmarks menu

A demonstration would be helpful to jumpstart your Speed Dialing:

Download our D2L SpeedDial collection -- for Windows or Macintosh.
Import our D2L & LMS Resources SpeedDial settings:

If SpeedDial is on your toolbar, click the side triangle to access SpeedDial Options
In this dialog box click the Settings button > Import Settings...
Locate and click the D2L-SCC-LR.speeddial file and click Open button
Approve the import settings message
Now our tab of resources is available to you

Customize with your own Groups (aka tabs):

Click the side triangle to access SpeedDial Options dialog box
On the Main page, click the Organize Groups button
Click the New button and then give your group a Title (how are the sites related), click OK
On the blank group page click any box and type a URL to have the page load as a clickable thumbnail image
Experiment!

If you are using Speed Dial - Export your settings as a backup.

The look of D2L - LMS Resources Speed Dial and the SCC - LRCCD Speed Dial groups. Our organization keeps all the sites you need for Desire2Learn handy and the SCC set keeps Outlook OWA, Employee Self Service and other sites at your finger tips.

Macintosh Tips & Tutorials

2009-06-30T12:35:00.000-07:00

Visit the Find out how site at Apple to view tutorials on basic Mac tips, photo, web, music and more. I like how the site is organized with a few topics for each category and the navigation is very easy to follow. In the Photos area, tutorials are listed for the current iPhoto '09 and for iPhoto '08 (and Aperature 2).

Acrobat to the Rescue

2009-06-26T15:08:00.000-07:00

This story is about adding digital images to a Word document to be posted in an LMS - Blackboard then D2L. Originally the Word doc was exported as a PDF (Acrobat) file and posted to Bb. One of the documents was only 34 pages but 77 MB in size - WOW.

Using Acrobat Pro's Advanced > PDf Optimizer menu, the file slimmed down to only 2.1 MB. Now students can easily access the file online or quickly download it.

Video File Converter

2009-06-16T09:51:00.000-07:00

Jim Hill (Media Services) described a program that converts video files from one format to another. StreamClip. This is free for Windows and Mac and is conversion video software. I'll be looking to install StreamClip in the lab for testing and use. Drop by with your video clips on a USB Thumb Drive and we will convert them as needed.

http://www.squared5.com/ Supported input formats: MPEG, VOB, PS, M2P, MOD, VRO, DAT, MOV, DV, AVI, MP4, TS, M2T, MMV, REC, VID, AVR, M2V, M1V, MPV, AIFF, M1A, MP2, MPA, AC3, ...

Adobe Connect - Virtual Classes

2009-04-30T14:10:00.000-07:00

Here is my list of topics covered in the University of Washington - Department of Nursing Connect demo. The session audience is media support staff.

Must have an adobe login to see these on-demand archives.
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=set_registered&id=1474214&loc=en_us

Big ideas for me are the Wacom Cintiq display/tablet, mobile Connect carts, USB light snake

Fast forward to
3:56 for the agenda – video conferencing – traditional to Connect (audio)
4:38 - 2 electronic classrooms for nursing
5:18 – campus infrastructure funding used to upgrade video-based
6:58 – our tech eval process & solution review
Goals - Screen sharing, share documents, give presentation rights, ease of use +
9:35 – Connect supports dial-up for worldwide audience (14.4Kbs) so this audience stops video and syncs the PPT slides
10:50 – remote service – end users upload files then UW doctor reviews in common session
11:40 – screen sharing – two video feeds – operations center for multi-cameras in classroom PLUS presenter feed
12:55 – multiple audio mic sources (PCM mics for audience)
14:29 – classroom shot – small – 20 students
15:02 – presenter’s monitor to a feed (mirroring effect not typical) - no visual
15:38 - screen sharing with whiteboard tools over top , move mouse around – no visual
16:28 – Wacom Cintiq display is a monitor and graphics tablet (SMART CLASSROOM & ITV CLASSROOMS)
18:00 – more on Cintiq display — see http://www.wacom.com/index2.php for details
18:45 – funding for classroom tech
19:40 – location of control room – be
19:58 – mobile capture cart details – classroom or remote locations, multi mics, Canon GL2 camcorder
21:00 – immediate release of event by URL without post production work
21: 16 – classroom camera shot (audio on another topic)
21:38 – control room operator skill set
23:19 – connect prefers digital audio input- xlr to shure not as good
23:47 – convert analog audio to digital with USB light snake (???) makes for superior Connect audio
24:29 – more than using just a web cam for audio

And more, but this much covers the big ideas, next steps and conversations I need to have with Media Services.

Cintiq display - http://www.wacom.com/index2.php

Powerpoint - On a Diet - Redux

2009-04-21T13:10:00.000-07:00

Cheryl Chan (Dental Hygiene) stopped by to compress the two Powerpoint files full of 35 mm slide images she scanned last summer. I had established a high resolution scan setting for her, and a Photoshop batch process to make the images ready for adding to Powerpoint. The batch process is easy to forget. The high res images are 40 MB + each and 40 images in one presentation will cause a laptop to meltdown. No, not really, but a presentation with large images is not very responsive.

Our discovery is that Powerpoint 2004 on a Macintosh computer does not have a Toolbar > Picture > Compress function like the Windows version. So after compressing for web/screen the 400 MB presentation file became a 2 MB file. WOW.

Another way to compress presentations is to convert them to Acrobat (PDF) files. Sometimes just converting saves space, the 400 MB ppt file became a 150 MB pdf file. But Acrobat can compress files using the Advanced > PDF Optimizer function and dropped the file to 2.5 MB.

PDF files are ideal when adding to D2L - Desire2Learn or any other learning management system.

A Blog for All Seasons

2009-02-11T09:40:00.000-08:00

Keith Heningburg (History) stopped by to review options for a class blog. He has a Manila site but I'll be showing him Blogger, a Google tool.

This means Keith can create a blog for each class he teaches. Each blog automatically includes an RSS feed. "A what?" you ask. Blogs are ideal for quick posts that can be shared with students by subscription. So by adding a new post, this "news" is broadcast to subscribers. Actually the New Media @ City blog has an RSS feed and I'm hoping you keep track of your colleagues this way. To review what Blogger has to offer, see the Help pages or view the Blogger Videos posted to YouTube. RSS feeds can be added to Manila pages, websites, browsers (Firefox and Safari) or appear on smart phones!

One interesting Blogger feature is the option to email a post directly to your blog. This answers another question Keith had ... "How do I forward campus announcements to students?" When a message appears in his Outlook Inbox, he can copy the message to a new email and edit it for his student audience, then press the Send button. The message will be posted to the blog and any subscribed students will get the information on their computer or smart phone. Well, that's what the description says. We'll test it out and let you know ... in a new blog post here.

Smart Tech = Low Tech

2009-02-11T09:27:00.000-08:00

Richi Kroupa (Japanese) stopped by with questions about how to provide class handouts to her students. Since SCC is between learning management systems, and this semester's D2L training will begin in late February the ideal solution was to create a web server account.

Many faculty have wserver accounts for websites managed through FrontPage or Dreamweaver or iWeb. Other faculty post content to the wserver and then link to these files from Blackboard or D2L.

In Richi's case, she will give the exact URLs to students for now and they can access the handouts any time.

One additional twist was to convert her Word documents to PDF (Acrobat) files and post them. It was easy to see why. In looking a the PDF version the browser automatically displayed the file in printable fashion - including the Japanese characters. The DOC or DOCX files would be best to download, just clicking the filename showed a 'character alphabet soup' instead of content.

iCalendar Events

2008-12-09T18:46:00.000-08:00

I bet you are in the same boat: many emails come with details about a future meeting. But the information is not easily added to my Outlook calendar. But it can be if the author takes a little time to prepare a calendar event:

This is an easy way to help others calendar your events! iCalendar events can be sent to email addresses outside our campus network or posted inside a LMS.

Windows:

Create an Outlook calendar event
Use Actions > Forward as iCalendar
Email opens new email message with iCal event.ics attachment; address and send email

Macintosh (two options):

Create an iCal event
Control+Click or click right mouse button and choose Mail Event
Email opens with new message and ICal event.ics is attached; address and send email

Create an Entourage calendar event
Click the Invite icon in the toolbar
Add email addresses and send

Anyone know how to easily add a Calendar event as a link on a web page or blog? Please let us in on the secret!

Distribution Lists - Outlook Email

2008-10-23T09:57:00.000-07:00

Send email to your list using the BCC field to not show everyone's email address.

Maybe you have noticed several campus lists available in the TO: field when you are preparing email messages. This sparked the imagination of Jennifer Griffin and Gioia Fonda (Art), and they made an appointment to learn how to create email distribution lists in Mac Entourage and in Outlook Web Access (OWA).

This was really an exploratory session where the three of us poked around to see the options. The online help was helpful. Here is what we learned about OWA:

Use the NEW>> Distribution List button and then Name your list (be specific in naming your lists)
Distribution LIsts are stored as CONTACTS - you will forget this important detail
Click the Find Names button and type your college in Company and department name in Department the pop-up Search screen
Click the checkbox for a name to be included in the list then click Distribution List
The Search report stays visible and you can select other names to add

What about a list for students in your classes?

Create a list, Like Engl 300 - Tu 9am or MATH250 Online
Ask your students to send you an email from their preferred email account - in the body of their message include name, class and student id number -- and anything else you need to know
Open the email and copy the email address to the ADD field and click the Add button
In the Email Properties screen, paste the email address and edit the Name field, then click the Apply button

A shortcut is to type like this: First Lastname [emailaddress@somewhere.com] and click the Add button. The square brackets instruct OWA to add the name and email address. Experiment and see what works for you.

Edit a Distribution List in OWA

Lists are stored as Contacts, find the link for Contacts on the left menu
Look in the upper right corner for the Contact page number and triangles to go to next or previous pages
Find your list and click the list name to open it
Edit names, delete names and rename the list as needed

List Management suggestions

For the current semester, add an "1 - " to the list so it always appears on page 1 of the contacts list
At the end of a semester, change the name to be "Fall 2008 - Engl 300" so you can contact students in the future

Slide Scanning for Powerpoint Lectures

2008-06-11T16:42:00.000-07:00

Carol Minter, Dental Hygiene, took time this summer to scan the slides she's been using for years. The New Media Lab is a quiet place where she can concentrate and work. Carol was very productive in just two days of scanning using the Nikon Slide Scanner. Yes, there are more slides to scan but the remodeling and moving the New Media Lab interrupted her efforts.

Carol created folders for each lecture and named each slide relating the picture to specific lecture topics. Our plan was to scan the images at high resolution, saved as TIFF files at about 55MB each. Later we will use Adobe Photoshop to create contact sheets for each folder and then to reduce each file size for placement in Microsoft Powerpoint.

The Contact Sheets will have the filename and are placed 5 across and 5 down the sheet. Some folders have more than one sheet of images. At this stage we could burn the folders of images and the contact sheets to a DVD for longterm storage.

There is an intermediate step before using the automated resize process - move the vertical files into new folders. In changing the size of the images to best fit a presentation slide will have an ideal dimension for landscape images and a shorter dimension for portrait images.

Why scan at the large file size? Well these slides are old and there is a color shift on the photographs. So if color correction will be done, it will be best to work with a high resolution scan then reduce for presentation.

Add RSS to Blogger Posts

2008-04-02T18:32:00.001-07:00

This tip was hidden in the Help site for Blogger. The default news feed is in Atom format and if you modify the URL it can be RSS v2.

?alt=rss

This technique will be used in Ingeniux pages.

Firefox and Safari browsers handle RSS differently. For Feed2JS projects where the feed must be in http format, use Firefox when surfing to the feed source.

Recipe for Slides to Powerpoint

2008-02-26T16:42:00.001-08:00

Bruce Pierini (Anthropology) has been anxious to complete the process he started last semester: digitize his slides and create Powerpoint presentations to enhance lectures. Well, remember that slide projectors are going away soon (Kodak is discontinuing the product line).

Bruce scanned images into two folders - Physical Verticals and Physical Horizontals. What? The batch process will resize the images and he needs to keep the landscape and portrait images together. The final sizes will be landscape 10 inches wide and portrait 7.5 inches tall. The files are all TIFF images and about 40 MB each!

Using Photoshop we recorded an action for resizing horizontal images and another action for vertical images. These new actions how up in File > Automate > Batch... and act on a folder full of images.

Here are the steps in testing this process:

Open an original image
Use Image > Image Size... > edit the pixel per inch field
Save the image as a new file
Open Powerpoint and insert image on a slide
Preview presentation to evaluate picture quality

In Photoshop, Window > Action to show Action Palette

Create a new action, name it - resize 10i 100px
Create a new action, name it - resize 7.5i 100px
Open a new image and apply the action

In Photoshop, File > Automate > Batch ...

Choose one of the resize actions
Select the folder of original images
Select the folder for processed images (destination)
Click OK

Watch the process happen ;-0

Bruce's original scans settings:

high resolution 4000 pixels per inch
1.312 inches wide, .68 inches high
40 MB each - TIFF
Processed images
projector resolution 100 pixels per inch
10 inches wide, 7.5 inches high
2 MB each - TIFF

Our last step was to convert the TIF files to JPEG. Again, we tested these image by adding them to the test Powerpoint with four high quality images. In the presentation mode, watching a speck of detail on the TIFF and JPEG images - we could not tell the difference. The JPEG pictures are about 500 KB.

We recorded an Action to convert TIF to JPEG in a File > Save As sequence and ran this Batch on all images and subfolders (without consideration of landscape or portrait orientation). Photoshop easily ripped though this assignment.

Summary of file sizes

40 MB each - TIFF - original scans
2 MB each - TIFF - resized images
500 KB each - JPEG - compressed images

Adding pictures to Powerpoint can be done from the Insert menu or try 'drag and drop' from the Macintosh Finder to blank Powerpoint slides.

In his presentations, Bruce will use a black background so the images stand out.

This sequence is available for others to use. Thanks Bruce for being a digital pioneer!

Create Your Own Videos

2007-12-03T16:51:00.000-08:00

VC^2 = "viewer-created content is tv made by anyone with a camera, drive and a story to tell." Current.TV offers tutorials and production tips in a hip and informative way for student audiences at http://current.com/producerTraining.htm.

Combine Multiple Handouts into One Download

2007-11-09T14:00:00.000-08:00

OK, I admit it, I am a huge fan of Adobe Acrobat. Here are a few details of recent visitors to LR 110 and how Acrobat fits into their campus work. Please check your version of Acrobat Reader and download the newest version (8 as of this post).

Laurie Sheppard (Nursing & Extended Campus Coordinator) has a unique challenge - the Sutter Extended Nursing classes begin January 2nd when our Blackboard server will go offline for maintenance. We will be experimenting with providing content to nursing students on a USB Thumb Drive as PDFs. Many nursing students bring laptops to take notes during lectures. They will be able to add comments directly the the PDF file.

Expecting a change from Bb to a new LMS. - Our proposed model of course content in PDF on a Thumb Drive will allow student to access course materials, web links and markup pages without going online for the basics. Faculty will develop content in familiar software like Word, Powerpoint and Excel then convert to Acrobat. There will be fewer files to upload by faculty. Students will go online for current announcements, content updates, discussions, surveys and submitting assignments. (There is a "green" component to this approach.)

Andrew Jones (PE) is teaching his first hybrid course. He has been surfing the web and creating PDF files from web sites - easy for him on his Macintosh computer. He came by to learn how to combine the files into one document using Acrobat Pro v8 in the lab. Adding the files was easy, and each independent file became a bookmark in the combined PDF file.

Mick Dunne (Dental Hygiene) create Powerpoint presentations with scanned images and digital photographs for posting in his online course. The PPT file is huge. Converting the file to Acrobat.

David Fabionar (Communication & Secretary of Academic Senate) has a standing appointment to scan past Senate Minutes and Agendas to create a searchable online repository of past committee work. The Epson scanner in LR 110 will scan paper documents (25 pages at a time) and create a PDF file then add optical character recognition so the file is completely searchable.

Adobe Software - Academic Purchases for Home Use

2007-10-20T09:03:00.000-07:00

The Foundation for California Community Colleges works with ComputerLand for student and staff software purchases of Microsoft Software and now is offering Adobe Software from October 15, 2007 through March 15, 2008. This is a terrific opportunity, when I bought just Acrobat Professional v8 at the academic price the cost was $150! :-0

http://www.uscollegebuy.com/0ab/asl.htm

The ComputerLand employee purchase requires verification of employment using either

Photo ID AND official, current institution paycheck stub (you may block personal information)
Photo ID AND official letter on school letterhead verifying employment from your manager

See the How To Order/FAQ page for details.

Acrobat Professional 8 ($64.00) and Photoshop Extended ($179.00)- or the combination packages of the Creative Suite v3 -- which are really sweet deals :-)

Publishing Rich Print and Online Content: CS3 Design Standard for Windows or Macintosh includes PhotoShop, Acrobat Pro 8, InDesign (think PageMaker), and Illustrator for $214.00
Adding Dreamweaver & Flash: CS3 Premium for Windows or Macintosh includes PhotoShop Extended, Acrobat Pro 8, InDesign (think PageMaker), Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, After Effects, Premiere Pro, SoundBooth and Encore for $314.00
Adding Video, Audio and Animation: CS3 Master Collection for Windows or Macintosh includes PhotoShop Extended, Acrobat Pro 8, InDesign (think PageMaker), Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, After Effects, Premiere Pro, SoundBooth and Encore for $519.00

I recommend the Design Standard Suite ($214) because when I add up the individual cost of Acrobat and Photoshop, you save money! If your interests are animation or video production, consider spending the addition money on Premium ($314) or go for the gold and purchase the Master Collection ($519).

The computers in the New Media Lab have the CS3 Premium Suite and we are developing some workshops to introduce these tools individually and in combination.

Slide Scans to Powerpoint

2007-10-01T21:42:00.000-07:00

Jennifer Griffin (Art Department) stopped by to checkout the new Nikon slide scanner. She will be scheduling time in the lab for scanning work. Over the last 18 months, Jennifer has become an expert in scanning and I look forward to learning her tricks. Already she has offered to help me fine tune the post scan BATCH processing to (1) create contact sheets of the images and (2) create a two-step process to resize images and change them from TIF to JPG. Then the images can drop right onto presentation slides. "Yes," she says, "I've attended the PhotoShop Scho0l of Hard Knocks and I can save you from some headaches!"

Right away Jennifer made an important suggestion: use the filename to distinguish vertical and horizontal slides. The batch process will change all slides to one length and vertical slides will loose image area. An alternative method is to have an additional folder for vertical images.

Google Images & YouTube Videos for Powerpoint

2007-09-20T11:51:00.001-07:00

Nokes Kelley (Music) asked to consult with me on Powerpoint (and this qualifies as an Independent Professional Development Activity if you need to fulfill your flex obligation.) and we just started playing around with concepts to energize his Jazz History lectures with images, sounds and video clips.

He picked "Charlie Parker" and we used Google Images for an initial search. Wow, this day Google returned over 243,000 hits. Since Nokes will be using his presentation in a classroom (fair use copyright issues), I demonstrated how to drag 'n drop images from web pages to Powerpoint slides and why some images should not be stretched to bigger sizes.

Next on the Google video link were hits to YouTube videos. (When our campus network is busy, these videos will not play smoothly, so plan on searching for YouTube videos at home, at night.) Oh my, wonderful stuff is on the internet.

In addition to displaying images about jazz musicians, and playing music clips, now Nokes can offer links to performance videos on Powerpoint slides and print selected slides as handouts.

Hey -- any faculty out there using YouTube ... stop by because I'd like to know how you are using it to supplement classroom content. And I need some Independent Professional Development Activity time for my fall 2007 flex obligation.

Gradebooks in Excel

2007-09-20T11:21:00.000-07:00

I've been meeting with faculty since the semester started and helping them customize the Excel Gradebook to meet their needs. The benefit of using this Excel file is that next semester, you can just replace the names, adjust the attendance pattern, set the print area and your gradebook is ready to go.

The Turn Your Roster into an Excel Gradebook flex workshop is a quick overview and often faculty ask for follow-up appointments to review the steps. Marie Maschmeyer (Family Consumer Science), Nokes Kelley (Music), Leila Stone (Human Career Development) and Sharon Richmond (Anthropology) are first time gradebookers while Joanne Moylan-Aube (Psychology) stopped by to update her file from last semester.

Microsoft Office - Home Use License

2007-09-19T18:58:00.000-07:00

Faculty or Staff Member currently employed by a College or University ordering software media for Work-at-Home use for Windows and Macintosh.

I promised to share the URL for the Microsoft Office purchase from the Foundation for California Community Colleges - and here it is

http://old.foundationccc.org/msca/default.aspx

Several pages into the online form you will encounter this information:
----------------
"Due to regulations set forth by Microsoft, we do not have a complete online ordering system. You are required to either fax or mail in the appropriate verification of employment and signature of acceptance when you print the last page.

After filling out the following information you will be issued an order ID number to send in with your identification and agreement signature. You will not be asked to submit any payment information online. Filling out the order form in this manner helps to ensure the accuracy and speed of our data entry."
-----------------------
In the past, I have made a copy of my payroll report and marked off the personal details but left enough for them to see LRCCD, date, name, address/campus. An ALTERNATIVE to your payroll report might be to have your dean write a letter on campus stationery. You might offer to draft the letter for your dean to use for other staff as well. FAX your verification along with the printout of your order(or take Light Rail to the 13th Street Station and walk one block to the CCC building, 12th & O Streets.)

There are several products to choose from on this list. At this time, on campus we still use Office 2003 Pro (Windows) and Office X (Macintosh). If you are adventurous, consider Office Enterprise 2007 (Windows). This will have some challenges in saving documents to share with colleagues not on the "bleeding edge of technology." The next version for Mac has not been release by Microsoft yet.

The new home page for the CCC Foundation is at http://foundationccc.org/
1102 Q Street, Third Floor
Sacramento, CA 95811
Toll Free: 866.325.3222
Fax: 916.325.0844
Hours: 9am to 5pm M-F

I AM SO GLAD YOU ASKED FOR THIS INFORMATION because I just found out that ADOBE has been added for student purchases through the Foundation. For details to share with your students on the program managed through Computerland, visit http://www.uscollegebuy.com/0ab/asl.htm

Put Powerpoint Files on a Diet

2007-09-10T13:18:00.001-07:00

Sometimes your students will just want to print the presentation slides as a study guide handout. That's what Mick Dunne (Dental Hygiene) had in mind. He posted his vocabulary presentation for students to download. But the Powerpoint file is over 8 MB in size. The larger the file, the longer the download time.

Since Mick wanted his students to have the study guide handout, it was best to use Adobe Acrobat to create the printed view - with full color - for students to use. This file was well under 1 MB, just 335 KB!

Easy access to files is one half of the solution, making smaller files is the other half.

Presentations with Audio

2007-08-16T08:45:00.001-07:00

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

2007-08-02T12:59:00.000-07:00

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.

Slide Scanning - Your attention please!

2007-07-26T12:52:00.000-07:00

Camille Salman (Cosmetology-retired) has enjoyed the quiet time of summer to digitize her slides. The Nikon scanner includes the option to scan one-slide-at-a-time, scan a small stack, or to scan film strips. Camille suggests that the bulk scanning of slides needs your attention. Do not plan on walking away from the equipment and returning to a completed stack. Instead, bring something else to work on while the slides are scanned.

It is important that your slide mounts be in good condition and are matched when scanning a stack. The images will be saved to the hard drive in a folder or sub-folders. The image files will be large! Burn them to a DVD to watch on a DVD player or your computer. Watch the Sunday newspaper inserts for sales on blank DVDs and CDs. So far we have successfully used CD-R, DVD-R and DVD+R media in our computers.

Scanning Slides

2007-07-24T14:17:00.000-07:00

Liz Ginzberg, like many instructors, has many 35mm slides that are used during classroom lectures. She was interested in scanning her slide collection and making Powerpoint presentations for classroom and community presentations.

Come by to see our new Nikon Cool Scan can make your slides look good! For your starting point, use these slide scanner process and settings:

Create a folder for your work in My Documents > Faculty Files
Dust off your slide with canned air
Place all slides horizontally in scanner's bulk tray
Use the Nikon Scanner software
Scale to ____ %
Review in Adobe Photoshop
Save As - TIFF for long term archive (files will be very large - MB = megabytes)
Batch process for smaller file sizes

Plan on scanning four slides from start through final Powerpoint placement. It would be best to test seeing your scanned photographs projected in a classroom if you have time. Better now while you can adjust your scanning process steps!