Tag Archives: plugins

Of Formatting & Media

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ITF ed. note: This resource guide was originally crafted by ITF Maggie Galvan for use in Professor Paul Moses’s 2015 Seminar 2 course as students were building their website, The Peopling of Flatbush. Read the original post here.

In class today, we kickstarted the process of putting our research about Flatbush onto the course website as I demonstrated how to upload text and images. Then, each group met to discuss their specific content and action plan both for putting & formatting existing content online and for gathering & creating additional content (e.g. text, images, interactive media). To this end, this informational post introduces a few plugins that I, your Instructional Technology Fellow, have activated to help you format your text and also shares information for those of you who wish to create timelines.

If there are other functions that are important for your group, be in contact. The next time we spend class time working on the website, we will definitely cover how to create excerpts, how to create galleries, and how to create menus to organize our content. I can cover other relevant materials, but it is imperative that I am aware of these needs as soon as possible so that I can research and prepare. Continue reading →

Audio Resources

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Note: This post was originally composed for use in Professor Sharman’s Seminar 2 class in Spring 2013.

During our audio workshop, we’ll be discussing how to construct an audio narrative about a specific neighborhood. We’ll be drawing on resources from This American Life, a popular weekly radio show that thematically reflects on contemporary society.

In an episode from 1996 entitled “New Year,” host Ira Glass and teenager Claudia Perez introduce the listeners to 26th Street in the Little Village neighborhood of Chicago. We’ll listen to a clip from this episode to think through how Perez and Glass include details to build their location-based narrative. I encourage you to listen to the entire clip when you have the time. It runs from approximately 5:35 to 22:00 in the episode.

We will also watch and discuss the first part of “Ira Glass on Storytelling” where Glass introduces the two elements that he believes are essential when creating an audio narrative.

 

I encourage you to listen to the other three parts (roughly five minutes each) of “Ira Glass on Storytelling.” In Part 2, he reflects on the importance of giving yourself time to find your story and editing out the boring parts. In Part 3, he talks how it’s hard to get an adequate reflection of your good taste in your early work, and he analyzes the problems in one of his earlier recordings. In Part 4, he details two common pitfalls of audio recording and how to avoid them.

More:

Uploading Audio Projects & A Note About Plugins

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Uploading your audio project from Garageband to the course blog is a fairly painless process, which will allow you to share your work in a public-facing manner. I’ll describe the process below and provide some take-away points applicable to further instructional technology work you’ll likely do in the future.

1. To convert your audio into a format that you can access outside of Garageband, you will need to go to the Share menu (pictured) and select the “Export Podcast to Disk” option. This option will compress the file into m4a format, which you can use outside of Garageband, and it will make the file easily findable in whatever location you have saved it in. When working with the Brooklyn Museum audio earlier in the semester, you may have used the “Send Podcast to iTunes” option, which works well when you’re planning to continue to use the audio with iLife suite software (like iMovie), but it’s potentially less helpful here because it makes the file more difficult to locate to upload to the web.

2. Login to the WordPress site and create a new post where you will want to post this project. Select the category “Audio Project” from the Categories list in the right-hand column.

3. Click “Upload/Insert” media, which you will see in the space right above where you write your posts. When the pop-up window comes up, locate and upload your file. Basic information about your file will appear in the pop-up box (pictured at right, click to enlarge). Scroll down to where the Link URL is listed. Copy the URL and close the media uploader. (Note: Do not insert the file into the post. Doing this will simply put a link to the file rather than embedding the audio, which I will walk you through.)

4. To embed the file in the post, you will use the podPress plugin. Plugins (basic info here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins) allow you to extend the in-built functionality of WordPress, and you’ll likely encounter and interact with them more as you start to build your own sites and take on more advanced roles in further course sites. Different plugins, based on their functionality, live and are controlled from different spaces within the WordPress Dashboard. Sometimes they’ll get their own special menu, sometimes they’ll be  listed under Settings, sometimes they’ll be in the Widgets area (Appearance>Widgets), sometimes they’ll be in the page/post editor, and sometimes they’ll be manipulable in a combination of those areas.

5. The part of the podPress plugin that’s important to you for this assignment lives directly in the page/post editor, under the area where you write your post (pictured at right). You’ll want to click “Add Media File.” Doing so will open up a set of fields (pictured in second image at right here) where you can give the information about your file. You will paste your file location (that you copied in step #3) into the Location field. You can give your file a title, as well, here. Type/file size/duration should be auto-detected by podPress.

6. Once you have all of that information filled in, you just need to take the line of code [display_podcast] and paste it wherever in the post you want the audio player to appear. You can also put whatever contextualizing information necessary to situate your audio project.

Mapping, timelines, video, audio, plugins, etc.

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Here’s a list of resources particularly useful for Seminar 2, but likely useful for other courses, as well.

Making Radio
This American Life has a page of extensive resources about how to structure/write engaging audio.

Mapping Software Other than Google Maps
Google Maps, linked above, is often the go-to for map-making on the web, but it is not ideal for every use. Here’s a list of some other options that you can also edit and embed on your site. (If you want to extensively use maps on your site, you should activate the UMapper plugin that supports easy embedding of certain online map formats.)
ArcGIS Online
GeoCommons
Social Explorer
UMapper

Timelines
To make timelines, you might request a class version of Tiki-Toki that will allow for the creation of 5 embeddable timelines for the class under one account. For some basic information on how to use different media in Tiki-Toki, visit the FAQ page.

Audio
For those of you looking to use audio clips on the website, you should activate the podPress plugin.

Images
NextGEN Gallery is the one of the best plugins to use when presenting images. There are capabilities within this plugin to create the pop-up style image viewing you’re familiar with on Facebook.

Flash
If you want to have a Flash portion of your website, Wix is likely your best bet. You can create a page on there that can be embedded in the class site. You can see Wix in action on the main page of a past Seminar 2 East Harlem site.

For those of you who wanted to make a recipe book, this might be the best way to achieve that. Check out this book-like template on Wix. To access those kind of pages, once in Wix, you go to Add > Page Parts > Page Groups > More > Sketchbook. More information about Page Groups in Wix can be found here.