Another follow-up to previous posts on Prezi. Rishi had asked if there was a way to embed his essay on photography within the Prezi holding his photographs. You can!

The trick is to first save your Word document or blog post as a .pdf file. In MS Word for Mac, this option is available under File > Save As… > Format.

Then just insert the .pdf using the Media button (from file), just as you would a picture or video. And enjoy!

Note that you can also crop the pdf image, zoom in on particular lines using hidden frames, or even highlight particular passages. If you don’t want the pages to take up a lot of space, just shrink them way down — e.g. you could hide the whole thing within the vertical bar of the “h” in “click here to read my essay.”

Feel free to leave a comment here with any questions, or just letting us know how it works!

Hi, all! Earlier in the semester, I posted a Prezi about using Prezi, and embedded it directly on our blog. If you want to do the same, e.g. for your Street Photography projects, it’s pretty simple:

1. While logged into the Prezi website, view (but don’t edit) your presentation. Underneath the viewing frame, you should see a Share button. Click it.
2. You’ll get three tabs, one of which is Embed. Go there and click the blue button to “Copy code to clipboard.”
3. Head back to our blog, and edit the post where you’ll embed the Prezi.
4. Click on the HTML tab, and paste in the code.

That’s it!

Hope you all enjoyed Thanksgiving weekend! I’ve noticed that a few of you are using PowerPoint to present your street photography projects, but in at least a couple of places the files aren’t displaying properly. In this email (which I’ll also post to the ITF corner on the site), I want to share a few options and optimizations.

1. Save as ppt instead of pptx.

By default, MS Office files will be displayed by the Google Doc Embedder plugin. (That’s what generates the little “gview” shortcode you see in your post.) Unfortunately, that plugin can’t handle the default filetypes produced by the most recent versions of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, all of which end in x. The first line of defense is to instead save your file as one of the older types. Use the menus to find File > Save As… > PowerPoint 97-2004 Presentation (.ppt). Upload again, and see if that fixes the problem.

2. Shrink the sizes of your images.

In this day and age, megapixels are so easy to come by that even your phone probably makes huge files, far bigger than you’ll need for web display. You can shrink down the size of jpeg files using a program called JPEGmini Lite, available in the iTunes store.

3. Don’t use Google Doc Embedder.

You can also use other options to post your images: for PowerPoint presentations, one option is SlideShare (slideshare.net), which allows you to upload and embed presentations in the same way you’d embed youtube videos. To see what it’ll look like, check out the ITF corner; it’s what I used to post the Podcasting presentation. Just make sure that you’re happy with your default sharing and permissions options, which could authorize others to use your photos… or not. SlideShare does give you control over this.

Alternately, you can just upload and insert the images the same way you’ve always done for Cultural Encounters posts. Nothin wrong with that.

There are also more advanced gallery tools, such as NextGen, but they can be a little tricksy, so ask me if you’re interested!

Hope this helps,
Ben

In-class presentation, Tuesday, November 20, 2012. Includes the following sections: What is a podcast? Why podcast and not blog? How do I make a podcast? How do I post a podcast to our course site?

Hi, all! Ben here. This is a page on which I’ll post links, tips, and news about tech tools for learning and research. New posts will be announced in the sidebar.