5110+reflection

For this mid-term assignment I used quite a few new tools I have never used before. I tried Vuvox, a collaging program that I learned about from Laurie King, a keynote speaker at a recent conference that I attended the first week in June. I really like the user-friendly options it gives you. You can start from scratch or use a template to get started. I found out that it is really important to create a story board of some sort before playing with the technology. I didn't quite know what kind of content I wanted to put in there and a story board might have allowed for better planning of content. I wasn't quite sure of how the Vuvox would work as a book/movie trailer so I really was just experimenting to see what I could come up with. I like the final look of the project, but wish there was some way I could make it scroll down rather than across so that it would fit on my wiki a little better. I also wish I could control the speed. It just jumps ahead to the next spot so as you read it, you have to scroll back to get all of the text. I can see students using Vuvox instead of creating interactive posters for class. I like that Vuvox is an interactive site that allows you to easily attach links to video and sound or other sources of media outside of the program. For the audio, I thought I would be able to create a hotspot of audio in this program, but it really only allows for background audio that is streamed for the duration of the collage. This was perhaps the most frustrating elements of this project. After discovering that I couldn't work with the hot spots, I decided to just make one streaming audio file to work as background music. I thought that a viewer could simply pause the collage and then the audio would pause as well. This is essential as the viewer must link outside of the presentation for the youtube trailers of the movies. It wasn't until I had the whole presentation together that I discovered the incapabilities of the pause audio. I pieced together all of the audio using Audacity. This is also a program that I have never used before. It was pretty simple to cut out what I needed, but had a hard time pinpointing this exact moment I paused or put in an umm so I left those in. The audio is not perfect by any means but I think it does add an extra element to the presentation. It will be easy to continue to add to this collage and can just add to the audacity file as well. I learned how to embed widgits and media files. This one was a new one to me. It worked fairly well, except, as you can see from my survey, I couldn't figure out how to enlarge the file so that you can see all of the document. Any suggestions on how to fix this? The survey was pretty easy to do using google docs and the file form template. I like that viewers can see the results and then I can open up a spreadsheet that compiles all of the data. I learned how to do this also at the tech conference in early June. While this presentation is far from perfect I definitely did stretch my technology skills, as the mid-term assignment says to do. I learned a lot and look forward to finding out ways to make this work a little more as I had intended.