The Magic of Saving PowerPoints as JPEGs for Collage

One of the greatest challenges with the incorporation of digital technology into the 21st century classroom is how much time it can take to do so. The exploratory, experimental, and collaborative nature or simply the learning curve students need to climb to use tech in an English language arts classroom can be a real threat to delivery and mastery of content. That's why I'm always looking for ways that tech can either save time, deepen learning, or at least come out even with traditional ways of teaching and learning.

One of my best successes in this regard is using PowerPoint for collage.  Especially the 2007 (2008 for Mac) version, PowerPoint can be "a poor man's PhotoShop." The application's editing ribbon boasts oodles of options to reformat text, shapes, and images.  With transparency, reflection, rotation, size, and color you can combine images in ways to create meaningful and poignant ways.  It takes students a class period to play once they find their images, which brings me to the time-saving aspect of PowerPoint for collage.

For such project I ask the students for one slide to be saved not as a PowerPoint, but as a JPEG. (Yes, you can do that!--just click the format option when you Save As, and the application will let you make every slide a separate image.)  To garner copyright-friendly images, they visit Creative Commons Search or Compfight and mark "non-commercial use."  Since both sites offer search engines, they find what they are looking for with method rather than madness.  Instead of searching blindly through magazines for an image that might do, they consider how what they are looking for might be tagged. My 12th graders found the one, two, or three images they needed in the first class period.  A few students did some further searching as homework to find just what they needed.

The particular project for which I used PowerPoint collage last month asked students to identify an instance of magical realism in Laura Esquivel's novel Like Water for Chocolate.  The fantastical, archetypal, and mythical aspects of magical realism called for images that were more likely "created" by collage and combination of images, rather than a singular one simply "found." Students were assigned to quote the line, and represent the instance with image (collage encouraged but not required), and of course, credit the source(s) of images.  Students spent three class periods in total on the project before submitting their JPEGs to me via our class wiki. (A color printer would work for a classroom display, or you could collect them on a flashdrive, but that might take another period.)

Once I had each JPEG file, I spent an evening casting them into one single PowerPoint and then posting to Slideshare. The next day students could view their individual work amid that of their peers to see the combined effect of the many instances of magical realism in the novel. You can see the results here.

Glad that the project showed students a new way to use a familiar technology, I accomplished both some digital as well as traditional literacy lessons in a timely manner. That's real magic!

The Marvel of a Hand-Held Gadget

With the iPad introduced this week, I'm urged to publish about a strong competitor in the hand-held device market.

I'm in love with my alternative. Having an amazing ability to store and index information, it is not only user-friendly for reading but also great at catching my thoughts for when I want to jot and save short short notes, questions, musings and other marginalia. It also will store nicely small add-ins like sticky notes. I've tabbed the most commonly used information for future reference. One feature I really like is random access; I can bring up any topic, literally at my fingertips.

Green devices like this are all the rage these days. It's not great in the dark, but it's reading surface actually uses available light or solar to make text and visuals pop out in full color, so it never needs to be recharged. There are no cords to get tangled or that need to be toted about with it.

My model comes in a durable shell and I've found (by accident) it can withstand dropping from heights from as great at ten feet or more without damage to its core data. In fact, I think the data is likely to last for years and years . The information stays organized and never requires defragging.

Snazzy skins are available from the manufacturer, or you can make your own to personalize and for some added protection and style. Currently there are no known viruses and only some extremely rare worms that trouble the hardware, so I'm don't waste money on expensive security subscriptions.

These gadgets come in so many versions. There's one for just about every need. And the omnivore can also find ones that are have encyclopedic data. While such versions are bundled with a variety of data, most come customized to fulfill a particular need, so you needn't carry along a bunch of important data that you don't need.

Perhaps the greatest thing compared to similar data technologies is the price. I like it so much I've got shelves of them. Yes, there's nothing like a good book.

Image:  "The Sun in My Hand 1." By Whatever. 29 Jan. 2009. Flickr.  Used by permission via Creative Commons License: BY, NC, SA.

Re-Captcha-ring Old Texts One Word at a Time

Frustrated by typing captchas--those distorted, blotched, wiggly, struck-through words to prove you are a human user of a website?  They do help keep sites from spammers and their automated emails.

And I've noticed I'm recognizing real words more than I used to.  Perhaps this has something to do with a hidden task at our fingertips that we are performing without knowing it.  The new captchas--called re-captchas--are actually words from archival texts that computers have difficulty transcribing digitally.

At a rate of 20 million-a-day, according to ScienCentral News, Internet users are solving the mysteries by picking out the letters from noisy speckles, blotches, and lines.  Captcha inventor, Luis von Ahn of Carnegie Mellon University, here in Pittsburgh, notes in this video how much time per day is used by humanity while sorting out these digital keys, part of the motivation for turning this task into something doubly useful.




So where the ink is bleeding through, where the bookworm has had its lunch, where mold had left its mark, or air had darkened the page, re-captcha is sorting the wheat from the chaff with my help. It's nice to know that next time I work out a captcha riddle I may be doing my part to save an ancient text.

Don't Stop Reading!

Whew! Howard Gardner, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, writing in the Feb. 17 Washington Post, reassures us English teachers and bibliophiles (we happy few) that the burgeoning new literacies will not eradicate the book.

I've often marveled at its portability and solarpowered independence, say nothing of its ability to house data in print along with my marginalia, sticky notes, and an occassional post card, train ticket, or clipping.

Despite Gardner's seeing that the book will hold its own among pods, laptops, and cellphones, he's not as confident about length of plots and complexity of story. He alludes to a scenario that thanks to social networking finds the readers of the future not alone long enough to find themselves lost in a novel for an hour or two, say nothing of three or four.

So perhaps plots will be chunked, serialized, or mini.