Apple’s iTunes U(niversity)

Apple iTunes U “puts the power of the iTunes Store to work for colleges, universities, and other education organizations, so users can easily search, download, and play education content just like they do music, movies, and TV shows.”

This is Apple’s service for faculty to provide content for computers and portable devices.  Something to look into for podcasts and other online video/audio/PDF delivery services for classes.

10+ things to check when your presentation runs into technical problems

Oops. Everyone is waiting but you can’t get the show on the big screen….

TechRepublic has 10+ things to check when your presentation runs into technical problems.

TemplatesWise has Free PowerPoint Templates

TemplatesWise.com has Free PowerPoint Templates and Backgrounds.

Procaster: Broadcast Your Desktop

MakeUseOf has a post on Procaster, which lets you Broadcast Your Desktop Over The Web.

Procaster “is a free tool which lets you broadcast your desktop live over the internet. It currently runs on Windows and has got a simple and easy to understand user interface. You can broadcast using your webcam or digicam, chat in real time, broadcast high quality 3D games, promote your stream on Twitter and much more. You could even mix multiple inputs in real time and produce great effects.”

Features

• Broadcast your desktop live.
• Record & play service available.
• Use any camera or webcam to broadcast.
• Broadcast your screen or a game.
• Fully moderated real-time chat.
• High quality broadcast available.
• Promote your stream on twitter.
• Free and easy to use.

CamStudio is Free Screen Recording Software

CamStudio is freeware and “able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using its built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs).”

This is a sort of open-source alternative to commercial software such as Camtasia or Captivate.

“Here are just a few ways you can use this software:

• You can use it to create demonstration videos for any software program
• Or how about creating a set of videos answering your most frequently asked questions?
• You can create video tutorials for school or college class
• You can use it to record a recurring problem with your computer so you can show technical support people
• You can use it to create video-based information products you can sell
• You can even use it to record new tricks and techniques you discover on your favourite software program, before you forget them”

Jing videos from your screen or presentation

Jing is freeware from the people at TechSmith who also make the commercial Camtasia.

Jing is a sort of “lite” version of Camtasia (without some of Camtasia’s features), that still lets you create useful/entertaining videos.

Freeware, for Windows or Macs. Bear in mind that video software needs a lot of RAM to run well — check the requirements against your computer.

280Slides : Powerpoint Viewer and Builder

MakeUseOf has a post on 280Slides, the Powerpoint Viewer and Builder.

“280Slides is a dead-simple online Powerpoint viewer and builder tool. Using 280Slides you can create Powerpoint presentations online, download presentations to your PC, upload and view existing presentations online, and share them with friends. The cool thing about it, the presentations that you create with 280Slides can be easily downloaded and edited using Microsoft Powerpoint. No download required, the only thing you need is a web browser and an internet connection. The app has pretty much all the features necessary to create simple presentations online.”

So create a presentation (on your computer and upload, or directly at 280Slides) and have it available anyplace you have an Internet connection, no matter whose computer you’re using or what software they do or don’t have (as long as they have a standard web browser).

PresentationsETC: Free Presentation Templates

MakeUseOf has a post about PresentationsETC where you can Download Free Presentation Templates.

“PresentationsETC is a free presentations resource where you can select and download free presentation templates, backgrounds, and themes from over 20,000 slides. Most of the background images available in different sizes, variety of designs with transparent cutouts.

You can either download slides one by one or download them as ready made PowerPoint Templates and Keynote themes.”

This is intended for faculty and students.  Free!

Impressive: display PDF’s & images as PowerPoint-style presentations

Freeware Genius has a post about Impressive which allows you to display PDF’s and images as (stylish) PowerPoint-style presentations.

Impressive “is a free multi-platform app that can display any PDF file or folder containing image files (JPEG, PNG, TIFF and BMP) as a slideshow presentation. It can be used to present PDFs or images as full-screen PowerPoint-style presentations or it can function as a full-screen reader. “Impressive” also offers a combination of sophisticated slide transition effects and a number of practical presentation tools, including spotlight effects, box highlighting, zooming in, and an overview screen that displays slides as thumbnails and allows for quick navigation.”

WebSiteZip Packer packs it in

WebSiteZip Packer is a free HTML to Executable file, Ebook Compiler, E-book Publisher, Ebook Creator/Generator Software “which will help you to turn a single HTML page or a group of pages into a solid executable file (.exe) with an integrated HTML browser. Ideal for e-books, product catalogs, site demos, manuals, and searchable information distribution.”

These are possible uses of WebSiteZip Packer:

• Use it to produce and distribute e-books;

• Let the visitors of your web site download the identical exe-version of the site for offline work;

• Create convenient offline presentations and catalogs;

• Create guides and manuals for your software products;

• Use it for any purpose where you need a solid executable file with an integrated HTML browser instead of piles of separate files and folders which are usual attributes of HTML pages.
  

How to Embed Almost Anything in your Website

How to Embed Almost Anything in your Website is a Digital Inspiration post with practical instructions on how to handle RSS feeds, videos, audio, photos and slideshows, web albums, events from Google Calendar, very large photos, charts and graphs, animated gifs and screencasts, chat functions, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, spreadsheet data, PDF files, Flash (SWF or FLV files), LinkedIn profile, Google Maps, another webpage, Windows Media or QuickTime movies, other fonts, and FriendFeed lifestreams.

Whew!

Make Beautiful Online Presentations With SlideRocket

MakeUseOf.com has a review of SlideRocket, an online service for presentations.

You can start from scratch or base it on an existing PowerPoint presentation.

“SlideRocket allows you to track your presentations and gives you access to some extensive metrics. These metrics allow you to see who is viewing your presentation, where they viewed it, who they’ve shared it with, which slides they looked at and for how long.”

Free online service.

Powerbullet Presenter is freeware for Flash

“Powerbullet Presenter is a small, simple and free program for creating presentations in the Flash™ format. You don’t need any experience to create slick animated presentations by simply typing, clicking and dragging.”

“Powerbullet Presenter is specifically designed for creating multi-page presentations that are commonly used in electronic sales brochures and catalogues, splash screens, slideshows and student projects.”

“You can also create a self-running show, specifying delays on each page, or you can link the timing to the sound attached to each page.”

“Your presentations can be exported as an HTML page with an embedded SWF (Flash) file or as an executable file which you can run on any Windows PC.”

Entirely freeware.  Use at your own risk, as usual.

Zamzar goes for the conversion

Zamzar will convert a number of formats to other formats, for free, and email you a link to the new format’s file.

Zamzar does documents, images (graphics), music (audio/sound), video, and compressed formats — far too many to list. Check the list for all the current files.

While you do have to wait for the email to get the link to your converted file, it’s free and will convert things like Real Player files to mp3, and Windows .wma to mp3, and so on.

It will also convert YouTube videos to formats that work in PowerPoint.

Recommended by Tech Support Alert newsletter.

OpenOffice and OxygenOffice freeware

[last updated May 11, 2008]

Microsoft sells its software, so the University is not able to provide free copies of Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) to anyone. The University has to pay for licenses to use that software on campus computers.Student discounts are available from Microsoft and through many distributors.
However, a FREE substitute is OpenOffice, which can save documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint formats. This would allow you to work in OpenOffice at home, for example, and save in a Microsoft Office format to bring to use on campus.
The software is free, but requires very large downloads (93MB for version 2.0.3, for example). You can also get a version from the Library Software CD-ROM which can be checked out overnight from the Library. For an enhanced version of this with more extras, try OxygenOffice Professional.

OxygenOffice has all the simple extras including everything from a rich clip art gallery to variety of standard document templates (CV, greeting cards, etc.), plus over 90 text fonts, OOOWikipedia (an integrated Wikipedia Search Tools), ability to run Visual Basic for Applications from Calc (the OpenOffice alternative to “Excel”), ability to import Office Open XML (Microsoft Office 2007), and option to export (save as) documents to PDF, LaTex and MediWiki. To top it all off, OOOP has been able to integrate importing of Works and WordPerfect documents.

Note: there’s a lot of file names listed at the site, but the one to select for English is usually the shortest: OOo_2.3.1_071211_Win32Intel_install.exe (for example) the ones with “install_” and more letters (such as “install_de.exe” are non-English language versions. This is for 32-bit Windows. If installing on a Linux system, the shortest file name is usually the English version, again.

Note: 64 bit Linux version are avaliable from these sites:

• http://ftp.fsn.hu/pub/oxygenoffice/
• ftp://ftp.devall.hu/oxygenoffice/
• http://mirror.nedudu.hu/ooop/

There are also versions of OpenOffice which can be run from a USB Flash drive. Click here for links.