Haugen’s Tech Tips Blog

In preparing for a podcasting workshop this week, I’ve been collecting new podcasting tutorials.  Some helpful finds:

• How to Podcast: Four Basic Steps – Plan, produce, publish, promote…
• How to Podcast – from Podcasting Tools
• Howstuffworks “How to Create Your Own Podcast”
• Make Your First Podcast
• How to Create Your Own Podcast – A Step-by-Step Tutorial on Podcasting

Most of these tutorials rely on Audacity and the LAME encoder. The workshop I’m leading will use Garage Band and iTunes (part of iLife ‘08), since those tools are the focus of a yearlong series of trainings for the teachers I’m working with.  I’ll post links to those materials at a later date!

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.

Okay, so now I’m blending Google Doc’s new online presentation software with Plasq’s cool and easy screenshot/annotating/uploading tool called Skitch. I think this has potential. The image is everything, because you write your step-by-step instructions right on it. Both students and teachers could use Skitch to create, snap or import images, then write and draw on them to give instructions, create maps or diagrams, indicate key features of a photo or painting, and so much more… In Google Docs, you can import images (created in Skitch or elsewhere) into your presentation. Then, collaborate on your documents online with anyone you choose to invite.

You can also invite people or groups to view your presentation and comment in a chat area. This changes the game of providing online presentations. Very cool.

I just stumbled across this web site and have GOT to make the time to figure it out.  Looks like a cool drag-and-drop animation/programming tool in web 2.0. As they say,

Snap together blocks… to create stories, games and animations… and share your creations on the web.

Very cool.
http://scratch.mit.edu/

Okay, I’m in it for the looks, and maybe I don’t like inconvenience and bulk, and maybe it’s the fun I have with iLife… In any case, if everything else is in chaos, my Mac is always nice and neat!

PS – image from Apple’s new iMac site, comparing an iMac with a Dell