Week 4 Final Video Option 1

I work in a technology department and part of my job is promoting technology integration into curriculum. One of the biggest hurdles that I encounter all the time is tendency for teachers to refuse to embrace technology, either out of fear or the desire to keep the status quo. There is always a struggle in our district to get teachers to embrace technology and see the need for training and the effort to stay current. This video addresses that problem.

PE9_Creaza

After you have created the bulk of your characters and added text or thought and speech bubbles, you can move on to manipulate your cartoon or add extra things like props. The props tab contains random items like a stool, a pizza, a barn, or a mushroom cloud. These props can be added to move your story along. Props are added just like the characters and actions, by simply dragging and dropping a desired prop onto your slide. You can resize the prop just like the other elements by dragging the handles inward or outward. You may notice that your slide is getting rather crowded and you might wish to rearrange your elements in layers. You can do this by clicking on your item so it is selected and then going to the arrange tool in the tool bar. When you click on arrange an drop down list of options appears and you can choose to move your item to the back or the front of the layers of items on your slide. Another feature effect you can use is to change your slide from a day scene into a night scene by clicking on the background mood tab in the tool bar. You can also change the mood of your character by selecting the character and then choosing from the character moods tool out of a list of happy, sad, normal, or angry. You can also change the opacity of any object or character by selecting that object and clicking on the opacity tool in the objects palette. You can set the opacity to various levels ranging from ten percent to one hundred percent.    

PE8_Creaza

The Next step in making your cartoon with Creaza is to add and manipulate characters. You can choose from characters portrayed in different positions, actions, or directions. Just like choosing backgrounds you must click, drag and drop your characters on to your slide. Once your character is placed on the slide you will see that a box with handle spots appears around your character. Those handles allow you to resize your character by dragging it outward or inward to make it larger or smaller. You can also change the direction of your character by pulling the handles all the way to the opposite side which will flip the character horizontally. After you have added a character you can click on the creatures tab and add an animal or a non-descript creature to your slide. Creatures are manipulated in the same way that characters are. You can add text boxes to your slide to offer the storyline of your cartoon, or you can add thought bubbles to your characters to allow them to “think” out your story, or a “speech” bubble to have your characters talk with text. You can change the font, size, and color of your text by clicking in the formatting palette. You can also change the background color of your text boxes and thought bubbles. You can also draw your own objects with the line tools, rectangle tools, elipse tool, and the free hand pen tool.  You can also add cartoonist effects by clicking on the cartoonist effects tab and dragging and dropping actions so to speak onto your slide. An example of this would be the puff of smoke behind a character to portray the character running away.  

PE7_Creaza

I chose to work with Creaza. Creaza is a media creation tool that provides the user with tools to make movies, cartoons, audio projects, or mind maps. I chose to use the cartoon creating tool. The cartoon tool allows the user to choose from pre-made backgrounds, characters actions, and objects to tell a story. Creaza is a web based tool that enables the user to accomplish creative story telling anywhere that they can find an internet connection. This tool combines professionally made content with the user generated content to produce a unique piece aimed at telling a story. The user has a lot of choices when it comes to the desired style of the cartoon. There are themes varied from historic, classic, crazy or manga. Creaza reguires signing up for an account with a username or password. Once you have created an account you can choose your theme and begin creating your cartoon. After you have chosen your theme you will see that the cartoon editor window has a tool bar at the top and content choices on the right. I started by clicking on the backgrounds tab and dragging and dropping a back ground on the empty slide in the center of the editor. If you change your mind about the background choice you can simply drag and drop another background over top of your current background and the new one will replace it. Once you have chosen a background you can click on the characters tab and add a character to your cartoon. 

PE6_Garageband

This is an example of a podcast that has narration, music, photos, a chapter marker, a url title, and hyper linked text that will take the audience to web content based on my topic. The only problem I have is that I tried for hours to upload my original podcast, but blogger kept timing out and would not process my podcast. I finally decided to post it to viddler and then embed it here. Unfortunately that means that my linked url will not work since the video has been put in a wrapper by viddler.

PE5_Garageband

After going through the tutorials, another feature of podcasting that I have learned in keeping with the information in the track editor, is the concept of adding urls within the podcast. In addition to chapter markers, pictures can have a hyperlinked text added to them that take the listener to a particular webpage. This can be useful to give your listener more to explore beyond what you are talking about. Your listener can click on your links and look at other photos, information or they can simply research your topic in more depth on their own time. It is fairly simple to add linked text. First you must click on the picture represented in the track editor that you would like to ad a link to. If you scroll to the right of the chapter markers section you will see a section called "url title." To the right of that box is the "url" box. You can use the title box to give your link a name. You might want to name it something to inform your listener that they can click on the title to bring them to a web page. After you have given your link a name, click enter to finalize your title. Then scroll to the right and click inside the "url" box. In this box you can paste your copied web link or simply type the link into the box and click enter. Now when you export your podcast, your listener will see your url title at the bottom of the picture you have attached it to. Your listener can then click on the url title and navigate to the web content you have decided to add to your podcast. 

PE4_Garageband

One of the things that I learned about garageband and making podcasts is the concept of making chapter markers. If you plan to use garageband to record a lecture for example, you may want to add chapter markers to let your listener know what topics you will be talking about in different sections of the podcast. Chapter markers allows you to notate sections of your podcast and label them so the listener may jump from one topic to another through your podcast. Adding a chapter marker is pretty simple to do. Chapter titles are linked to the images that you place in your podcast. Because of this fact you may want to choose a different image for each chapter so it will be quick and simple to identify the beginnings of new chapters. To add a chapter marker simply click on your photo in the podcast track. You will see that in the track editor below your media tracks the information for your pictures and the podcast track will appear. You will see that there are sections labeled "time", "artwork" and "chapter title." In the "chapter title" section you can click on the "chaper title" text and type your own unique title that corresponds with the image you have selected. Hit enter when you are finished and now that section of your podcast has its own title. You can continue the process with as many or few chapter titles as your would like. After you export your podcast your listener will be able to identify your chapter markers in iTunes.