Another ANTLC seminar was
held on Friday 11.04.2014 in the Library Training Room 1, DIT Aungier
St. Dublin 2. The Course title was Using Multimedia Tools and the presenter was Phil Bradley.
Phil Bradley is an information and internet consultant, a webpage writer and designer and has authored several books. He also runs courses on various aspects of the internet.
The programme
included tips and guidelines on graphics, screen-casting, presentation
software, podcasts, and many other tools, all of which are free online.
The workshop
started at 09.30 and attendees were taken on a roller coaster ride through the
free online tools that can be used to enhance presentations, manipulate photos,
create tag clouds, make personalised calendars, and develop pod casts and so on.
Prior knowledge of
the subject was “not required or expected”. It was a day of discovery and by
16.00, we felt a bit overwhelmed by the vast amount of information we had
absorbed. Phil’s enthusiasm for his
subject was evident from the start and didn’t flag much even towards the end of
an action-packed day.
Phil began by
introducing us to Pearltrees an
organisational tool that allows users to curate and share URLs.
It is a powerful
tool for gathering all your information on one site and allows “graceful”
movement from one topic to the next. All of his relevant links and webpages are
stored here and throughout the day we hopped, “gracefully” from branch to
branch of the Phil Bradley Pearltree as
we explored resources.
We had some fun
with BigHugeLabs where
you can be creative with photos by making Jigsaws, CD covers, Calendars,
Posters, and Badges etc. It works with Flickr images or images stored on your
computer.
Library staff might be interested in making a
customised Calendar featuring photos of the library. However, this site is perhaps of more use to
the Public or School library and definitely a good one for personal use.
We were shown some
photographic manipulation software such as Aviary and
PicMonkey This lets you resize, sharpen, crop and add colour to and photo and if
you want to add captions then Wigflip is an easy tool to use.
Here’s a photo I
took of a bike shop in Cork, enhanced using Picmonkey and caption added using Wigflip
WORD CLOUD CREATORS
I never realised it
was so easy to create word clouds but it is. Turn your words, text, news
articles, slogans etc. into a visual
word cloud in a shape of your choosing. Each word is individually sized to
highlight the frequency of occurrence within the body of the text.
There are a lot
available but the two most highly regarded, according to Phil, are Wordle and Tagzedo
The word cloud here
was created using Tagxedo. I simply copied and pasted a URL from our library
website and picked a shape to suit.
We explored lots of
other resources on the day, screen-casting, presentation, Sticky note and
podcast software but that’s for another blog.
Posts
Great post Teresa and good to reflect again on the huge variety of free resources that Phil shared with us on that particular day. I’ve used Animoto (http://animoto.com/) which Phil also recommended and was very impressed with it. I wonder what other free web tools are being used by Libraries to promote their services and facilities.
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