Still it was good to have a review of these fundamental skills. When I first took HTML courses many years I built a lot of webpages with teaching resources and hosted them on an institutional server. I adopted blogging fairly early around 1999 and I quickly adopted blogging and wikis as a very practical alternative to the proprietary web servers. I mostly had to work around the IT guys who didn't really think that computers should be used as educational tools, so I was pleased to use Blogger by Pyralabs which very soon after was acquired by Google. After that point I really didn't bother building web pages from scratch. When Dreamweaver came on stream I used it for a while but quickly realized that blogs and wikis worked every bit as well for what I was doing.
Any time I need a review I head to W3Schools and usually end up using a module or snippet of pre-made code.
While I don't need to build web sites I still occasionally need to tweak the HTML code of the objects I work on, even if it is just re-sizing or modifying embed codes. I work quite a lot with the other applications that we worked on in the course, in fact, I teach many of the resources to the various ICT classes I teach. Audacity is an old standby and hosting audio files on podcasting platforms is old hat. Same for manipulating digital images and video.
One of the first web tools I ever used was Irfanview and I have used it ever since, I still does as good a job as any unless you are looking for a more powerful application with Photoshop capabilities. I use open source GIMP if I need a more powerful tool but most of my image editing needs are pretty basic.
For simple video, I am usually well served by YouTube particularly now that they have included some editing tools. I usually try to use (and teach) free stuff but I do own versions of TechSmith's products, Snagit and Camatasia Studio. I use those for an more advanced video editing I do, but again my need are pretty basic. I
've been using a great product called Brainshark which is a glorified podcasting tool. You can upload a PPT and create a narrated presentation and then edit the whole thing slide by slide.
I wanted to add a little challenge to the course so I decided to follow up on one of my themes for the week, cryptography. I figured out how to use OpenPuff, a steganographic/digtial watermarking application. I hid a text file in a .jpg file with the password edsnowden. Download the OpenPuff application (quick and easy) and then use it to open this file. It will find the hidden file and ask you for the password. Fill it in an you will see the secret message.
For the project I teamed up with a group to prepare a video and offered to organize things with a concept map. I don't thing the others in the group were keen on collaborating so everyone did their own thing and then cobbled together a video at the end. My stuff didn't get included which was fine. I circulated the Concept map I created on Twitter and it got a few hits but no big traffic. One woman in particular was very reluctant to use live web pages or social media so the end product, I felt, fell short of the type of thing you would expect of an advance group like this. Even more problematic, the instructors of the course did not provide any web hosting or delve into the administrative and technical issues of making a web page live. Serious short coming for the course.
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