Guidelines for Submitting Final Semester Projects and Final Semester Project Reports

In addition to completing the final semester project, you should submit a final semester project report. This report should include a summary of the work you completed for the final semester project, including:

• a description of the final project
  

• the major objectives of the project
  

• why you selected this topic
  

• Who the intended audience is for your work
  

• What items in the project changed from the early stages of selecting the topic through completion of the final project
  

• any challenges you faced in creating this project and how you overcame them
  

• What the most significant things you learned from from completing the final project
  

•  any other information you feel would help in describing your work on the final semester project

Submission Information

Final semester projects and project reports should be sent to Dr. Robin by email:
brobin@uh.edu 

Files that are over 10 megabytes will proably exceed the file size limit for College of Education email. So, if you have created a digital story or you have a file larger than 10MB, please send the file with:

YouSendIt
http://www.yousendit.com/  

Discussion Assignment Twelve

Review the EUODS website find at least one place on the site that you feel needs to be updated because the material is either not relevant to our audience, contains inaccurate or outdated information, or does not include information that was discovered this semester that you feel should be included.
 
You may find it helpful to take a look at a page from the EUODS site that was recently updated.
 
 First, take a look at the original page on search engines at:
 http://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu/Copy%20of%20search_engines.html
 
 You will notice that this page includes links to several common search engines. However, this information is not very helpful because many visitors to our website would probably already know about these resources. Also, a rating in numbers of stars is included for each search engine but this is confusing since there is no indication about where this ranking came from, what the stars are based on, whether this ranking was from another website or simply made up by the author of the page (a student in one our earlier IT courses) and it includes ranking of news search capabilities, which probably have less interest to our web visitors than searches for specific content. In addition, there is no actual connection to digital storytelling in any of the text on this page.
 
 Compare that original page to the same page that was recently updated:
 http://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu/search_engines.html
 
When you have completed your exploration, post a message in which you describe the location you feel should be updated and discuss what type of new information might be contained on the page you are writing about.
  

Free Graphics Software & Screen Capture Programs

As we discussed in Saturday's F2F class, here is a link to some free graphics software programs:

http://www.snap2objects.com/2007/07/20/45-best-freeware-design-programs/

And for screen capture, try:

Jing Project
http://www.jingproject.com/

CamStudio
http://camstudio.org/

Reminder: Our Next Face-to-Face Class this Saturday, April 18, 2009

Our next face-to-face class will be held this coming Saturday, April 18, 2009. We will meet in Room 328 in the CITE Lab at UH from 9:00am until 12:00 noon.

Discussion Assignment Eleven

For this week's assignment, we were originally going to explore the use of hardware choices that could be used to support digital storytelling. This would include things like digital cameras, scanners, microphones, video camcorders, etc. However, since this topic was used as a midterm project by a couple of students, much of this information has already been found. If you have already begun conducting research on this topic, you may post a comment about what you have found.
 
 Another option is for you to try exploring some of the following information sources we have not touched on too much this semester--to see what you can find on the topic of "digital storytelling."
 
 The University of Houston Library Encore Library Catalog
 http://encore.lib.uh.edu 
 
 EdITLib Education & Information Technology Library
 http://www.editlib.org/
 
 Questia
 http://www.questia.com/Index.jsp
 
 The Chronicle of Higher Education
 http://chronicle.com/search/
 
 Slideworld
 http://www.slideworld.com/
 
 ERIC -Education Resources Information Center
 http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/Home.portal
 
 The Library of Congress Online Catalog
 http://catalog.loc.gov/
 
 The Free Library
 http://www.thefreelibrary.com/
 
 The Internet Public Library
 http://www.ipl.org/
 
 Fondren Library at Rice University
 http://library.rice.edu/
 
 EDUCAUSE Site Search
 http://www.educause.edu/
 
 Google Book Search
 http://books.google.com/
 
 Kosmix
 http://www.kosmix.com/
 
 Cuil
 http://www.cuil.com/
 
 t10
 http://turbo10.com/
 
 Intute
 http://www.intute.ac.uk/
 
 When you have completed your exploration, post a message in which you describe what you found and please try to add some supporting information about how useful you think this information/tool would be to visitors to our website.

Discussion Assignment Ten

For this week's assignment, you should try to find examples of software applications that have not yet been discussed that might be used for digital storytelling. Finding information about software that can be used in the creation of digital stories can include any of the following:

• articles or websites that deal with specific software applications

• trial download versions

• tutorials that describe how the software works

• reviews that discuss whether it should be purchased/used

• examples projects created with a particular software program

• information about software that can be used in conjunction with digital storytelling, such as DVD authoring programs for putting digital stories on DVDs, graphic editing programs for improving images used in digital stories, programs used to create storyboards, etc.

• plus any other software programs that you think would be of interest to people who visit the EUODS website

Remember that you may discuss traditional software applications (that normally come on a disc or can be downloaded from the web) or Web 2.0 tools, which typically, are web-based and allow the user to use the programs online.

After you have found a resource for this week, post a message in which you describe the resource you selected and try to include all of the information you feel would be helpful to visitors to the EUODS website.

Presentation at the Texas Library Association Conference

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I made a presentation at the Texas Library Associating meeting on April 2 at the George R. Brown Convention Center in downtown Houston.

I created a set of web pages so the audience members could review my presentation materials later and you can find them online at:

http://faculty.coe.uh.edu/brobin/TLA/

The session was supposed to be a panel discussion with 2 other presenters in addition to me, but one of the folks was unable to participate and so the first presenter did her part on writing and then I followed with my presentation on digital storytelling. I would guess that there were somewhere between 100 and 200 people who attended the session, with most being librarians, although there were some teachers also, and many of the attendees were both teachers AND librarians.  I had about an hour for my presentation so I was able to show several digital story examples and I also demonstrated how to use Photo Story 3 to show how easy it is to begin creating your own digital stories.

After my presentation, there were several questions from the audience that surprised me because we don't necessarily cover these topics on our EUODS website, or if we do, perhaps we should make the information easier to find. Here are some of the topics that were brought up:

• I've heard that you can create titles in PowerPoint and bring them into Photo Story 3. Is this better to do than add title in PS3 and if so, how do you do this? (Easy to do and yes, it does give good results, but we don't show how to do this.)
  
  
• My students are already using Photo Story but they want to add animation. Can this be done? (The answer is yes, simple animation can be added to PS3 by adding sequential still images. I've showed this technique in some of my courses, but I don't think there's ever been any information on the website to show how it can be done.)
  
  
• When recording audio narration in Photo Story 3, can you keep recording over more than one slide? (Again, the answer is yes, you click on the next slide button on the screen and keep talking, but this is not obvious to many PS3 users and we don't address this on our site.
  
  
• How was the Pop-Up books video created? (I told the audience that it was created by using both PS3 and Windows Movie Maker. This led to the next question): How do you use both programs to create one project? (Again, this is something we cover in some of my courses, but is not on the website.)

So, the bottom line is that there is definitley some additional material that people are interested in that we don't currently address on the website, but I think we should.

Please post any ideas or suggestions you have about this.