Haugen’s Tech Tips Blog

I think I mentioned VoiceThread before - the marvelous web site that lets you present a slide show and record comments, captions & doodles. The other innovation of VoiceThread is you can invite others to comment as well, creating a visually guided dialog about… well, anything.

One of my favorites:

See also Kenya Escape, the incredibly powerful story of one family’s experience in Kenya, during the election upsets of December 2007.

Every now and then, a new product comes along that takes nothing for granted and comes up with a whole fresh new way of doing things …that actually really works. Enter Scribbles… a delightful new paint program for Mac OS X. Gone are the busy tool bars and obnoxious sound effects. Instead you’ll access 12 beautiful brush styles, infinite colors, multiple layers and quick easy tools for resizing your art. Getting your art where you want it to go is also easy, with menu option to export in a variety of formats, send to email or post to Scribble’s free gallery
Better yet, the individual price is only $20, just $14 for educators, and AteBits has a generous site license agreement for schools in the works. Download it, make a nice cup of tea, and have some fun… Your inner artist will thank you.

Screen shots, left to right: drawing screen, layer chooser, color picker…

Art cyclopedia: The Fine Art Search Engine - Search or browse by artist, work or museum. 8,700 artists, 2,600 art sites, over 100,000 links! Also, Art News, masterpieces and more. This seems like a great resource for students of all ages.

We’ve just had our first of two weekend workshops for students interested in stop motion animation with Legos and other stuff. I worked with 2 students (4th & 5th grade) who helped lead the workshop, and another 5th grader who signed on for tech support. With 14 other 4th and 5th graders as our students, we piled into school on a Saturday to build sets, set up cameras, and snap away as each group of kids patiently moved their Legos and clay one step at a time until their stories were complete. Next weekend, we’ll pop the photos into iPhoto albums and then into iMovie, adjust playback timing, add sound tracks and sound effects, titles and more.

Our goal is to create a DVD with all the movies that we can then copy and give as gifts to friends and family during the holiday season.

When I work with kids in this way, I am always so impressed by their enthusiasm, hard work and creativity, as well as their willingness to work with and help one another.

We have created a wiki for our program, which you can explore at:

edisonanimators.wikispaces.com/

I’ve written about Skitch before, but now that I’ve been using it a while, I have to put it out there again as one of my must-have’s. Why? It’s fun, it’s good looking, it’s easy and above all, it’s several practical tools built into one.

• Screen Capture - grab a window, the whole screen or anything you can frame or drag across. You can even do a ‘timed snap’ which gives you a few seconds to set things up.
• Photo Access - grab images from iPhoto, your iSight camera or drag an image into the Skitch window from anywhere.
• Drawing Tool - have fun with the Skitch drawing tools - freehand (smoothing) lines, straight lines, circles, rectangles, fill, eraser, text and arrows. Choose from available colors or any color from Mac’s built-in color picker. Or, try the very cool shadow or highlight effects. Drawing elements remain selectable so you can change, erase, copy or move them. And why is Skitch so cool? Because you can draw on a blank screen OR on top of any image you choose. And even then, you can choose whether or not to wipe the original image, or wipe your strokes and keep the image.
• Resize it - resizing is an intuitive grab-the-edges process to either crop, expand or shrink the image. How easy is that?
• Drag it out or Upload it - It’s one thing to grab or create a fun or useful image. Another thing to get it where you need it. With Skitch, you either use the drag tab to drag the image to any folder or document you need. You can send it to iPhoto or .Mac or Mail. You can also, after a simple configuration process, click the upload button to automatically post it to mySkitch.com, flickr.com or any other blog or web site you have access to.
• mySkitch for sharing - mySkitch.com is your home base for your ‘Skitched’ images - from there, you can easily grab the link or code you need to post the image anywhere you need it.

So, the whole other side of Skitch is what you do with it. That is up to you. As for me, I find it great for creating quick icons and casual images, for annotating a screen shot to provide a quick and easy how-to, for adding effects to maps, diagrams and other images for use in presentations, and for fun, decorative effects on photos. My kids like to add effects to their stop-frame animations, and none of us are beyond a goofy session with PhotoBooth and Skitch. See my Flickr ‘Skitch’ set for examples of each.