Slideshare

I have just finished my first slideshare. I adapted my comprehensive presentation to fit a different style- trying to eliminate bullet points and incorporate creative commons photos, Gimp edited photos and giving image to all the photos taken from the Web.

I uploaded the slideshow to Slideshare.com and I will be using this same presentation for the next couple projects where we will add music editing and sound so when I am done I will hopefully have some awesome music edited to fit my lecture complete with a plethora of different images from the web, from others and from pictures I have edited.

I uploaded the slideshow on Slideshare and it can be found under the title "Fandom: A Look at Fan Participation in the Current Media." The presentation is available to be seen by the public.
The slideshow is available at this link.
I have also embedded it if you would like to view it in this blog.

Fandom: A Look at Fan Participation in the Current Media 2

View more presentations from reiste01.

I had a fun time editing the pictures to fit into the presentation, especially playing around with photos I have taken. I really love working with Gimp. I always find that making a mindmap helps a little bit, but I always end up with a different project than what I was planning on. It does help because I get a look at the whole picture before I start.
The link to my flow chart for this project is my blog post is here.

On the other hand, it was really hard to edit my powerpoint and not use bullet points because I am so used to bullet pointing information into my presentation. I hope that this presentation helps me design my presentations in a more creative way and find new ways to design power points after this.

Flowchart for Slideshow

After doing the flowchart for my slideshow, I've been reworking my comprehensive presentation to fit the requirements of the web comm project. I am trying to make my slide show stand alone, but at the same time leave plenty of room to add voice to the slideshow. Right now the original slideshow is bullet-pointed so I am working toward establishing a different style of presentation for this project and use some of the new techniques of online slideshare, voice editing and others in the upcoming projects.

FATP
Form: Slideshow with audio and visual components

Audience: Communication Studies majors, minors, potential employers, classmates

Topic: “Fandom: A look at fan participation in the current media.” I really want to see if I can take my senior comp presentation and add to my PowerPoint with audio and enhance the graphs and visual that I had for that presentation. I gave that presentation 5-7 minutes to the Communication faculty and want to see if I can make the presentation better and accessible to other students that are looking for information about fandom and how it pertains to our communication today.

Purpose: I want to show my comp project through SlideShare and see how I can expand upon the visual I made for the PowerPoint slide while showing the idea of fandom in the media today and expanding on the idea of my comp.

SlideShare and PowerPoints

Resumes, Cover Letters, and Interview Tips

View more presentations from Vince Ricci.

I thought this SlideShare titled "Resumes and Interview Techniques (North American Style)" was interesting and enlightening. While the instructor was giving good techniques and ideas for resume building, he also included great pictures and diagrams to help stimulate the audience. I think he really agreed with the slogan, "If you can't say it with words, use a picture." But also lightened his slide show with pictures to make the audience more perceptive to his message and presentation.

What I didn't like about this presentation is it seemed the author was trying to market his speech toward a professional audience at a conference, but he used interesting pictures and sometimes eluded to college humor and pictures and expressions that didn't seem to fit with his intended audience.

I found some interesting tips for presentations here that may be helpful in making my presentation for class.
Here were five tips I thought were interesting and this blogger explains them in great detail to make sure the presentation is great.
1. Know your audience well.
2. Learn to study the body language of your audience.
3. Ask friends for honest/frank feedback.
4. Prepare a map of land-mines (or topics to stay away from).
5. Learn the subject you are going to be presenting thoroughly.

With this, I'm going to start on my presentation and brainstorm some ideas for a great topic to cover and get to know SlideShare more in depth.

Photo Editing and Flickr Fun

lemans-pic
Originally uploaded by r.eisterhold

With this picture of Holy Spirit Chapel in LeMans hall, I experimented a bit with Gimp- a photo manipulation tool available for download. This freeware helped me edit my original picture to become the picture below. With Gimp I was able to blur the photo, rotate the image, add color as a blend into the photo, change the lighting, change the perspective and add a caption on the photo itself. The Gimp program itself was very user-friendly and I had fun making a new image out of an already-beautiful picture. Flickr was used to upload the pictures to the internet and from there I sent them straight from my Flickr account to my blog because both are linked through Google sites. I wish I would have worked with cropping the new photo, so the edited picture would be square, but I left me edits at this and have a new image that is very different from what I s tarted out with. I want to keep using Gimp and become familiar with the ins and outs of photo editing to make all of my photos better-looking and more professional. It's a great freeware available to all through a simpledownload and I worked with the program for my video screencast project last week and loved it.

gimp-picOriginally uploaded by r.eisterhold

Screenshot and Screencast Reflections

I just finished with the screen shot and screen cast project and I guess my first thoughts upon finishing were: That was so much easier than I would imagine!

I chose to do the screen shots by Ctrl + Prnt Scrn option and pasting them to edit in PowerPoint. I had some issues at first because I was adding text boxes that were off the slide in the PowerPoint. But it was simple to save them as a JPEG and open that file when adding a picture to my blog. Flickr was fairly straight forward and easy to showcase some of the different features of the freeware.

I blogged about my webware review here.

I loved doing the tutorial- more than I thought I would. It was so much simpler than I imagined when I finally figured out ScreenToaster. I love that this application has a shortcut (Alt + S) to start and stop the video so you don't have to minimize the screen you are working in and manually stop the video. I was editing a photo in Gimp (an incredible tool that I'm glad I have discovered) and found that Alt +S is a shortcut within this program too, so it was difficult using this shortcut for ScreenToaster when it could be used to save the picture in the application I was working in. Other than that minor detail, I was just surprised at how much easier it was that I initially thought it would be.

There is my blog about the freeware demo here.

I hope my tutorial will be useful to others and maybe I will make some more to show my sister some of this material, it is definitely going to be helpful to her because she is a great photo lover and picture taker. Gimp will definitely be a tool that could help her edit her photos.

Freeware Demo- Gimp

I chose to demo Gimp2.6 for the screencasting assignment. Gimp is a GNU Image Manipulation Program- very similar to Photoshop. Simply put, Gimp is a free downloadable photo editor.

My video is on Youtube now and can be viewed here.

I ran through basic tools of the application because to start this project I knew nothing of this webware. I talked (and showed) where the webware downloaded to on my desktop, opened the application, opened a picture to edit, and showed how to undo actions within the program. I flipped and blurred the picture, used different sized brushes, showed different perspectives of the picture, added text, changed that text to a different color, cropped the photo and saved it to my picture file on my computer.

This application was interesting to use because there is so much to it and I didn't know that it was going to be so easy to use! You can hold your mouse over the icons within the webware to see what task each icon does when clicked and there are shortcuts within the application, similar to Microsoft Office. If I want to flip the picture, I can either hit the flip button on the toolbox or hit Ctrl + F. I think I've discovered something awesome and I hope my video may be helpful in showing people the easy use and incredible tasks you can perform on your photos with Gimp.

Webware Review- Flickr

I picked www.flickr.com to analyze, with screenshots, this photo-sharing website available free on the web. The webware logo can be found in the screenshot on the left. This website is focused on uploading pictures of your own, sharing pictures with friends on Flickr and creating your own pictures on the website. Different privacy settings are available for uploaded pictures and this is mostly used as a website to upload pictures to easily share with others. We just talked about Copyleft in class and this website has different options to set your privacy settings from totally limited to totally open for others to take, recreate, remix and use for different purposes.

I love that you can group pictures within your personal profile as well as join groups through flickr to share photos among friends and family. You can organize your photos and designate on a flickr map where in the world you took them. Another interesting thing you can do with Flickr is edit individual photos and add tags to them as a type of categorization within your photos. This could help you and others when looking for specific images.

It is also really convenient because Flickr has printing services so if you go on a family vacation and want to print out a photo on regular photo paper or on a coffee mug for your grandma, you can customize your own pictures and make products that Flickr sells to individuals looking for customized gifts.


I haven't found anything on Flickr that I don't like yet. It is a really straight-forward website with many different features and I have looked into using it for my photos so I can share them with others. I think the screenshots speak for themselves about the basics of Flickr and why it is used by many photo-lovers because it is easy to navigate and simply helps organize, edit and categorize pictures.