Technology and Learning Colleagues,
The purpose of this thread is for members to get some help in the Technology and Learning Community to answer their software technical questions. Although there is no guarantee that our members have the knowledge and experience with the particular software that you have a "how-to" question about, there's a good chance we do. You can post your question here or, if you are feeling shy, you can email it to me and I'll post it for you anonymously if you wish. (Sending it to me might not be as effective, however, if the T & L member responding has clarifying questions, and some back and forth is needed.) Of course, LINCS and I cannot take responsibility for the accuracy or quality of the responses, but my guess is that most will be helpful.
Here's what spurred this new "How-to Qs & As feature. In the LINCS Reading and Writing CoP there has been this terrific dialogue about some excellent free Google tools that included some questions (that I have made bold) that I would also like to post here:
Ed Latham recommended a free tool, Google Presentation for making comics.
I asked: "Can you tell us more about what tools and assists Google Presentation might offer a teacher or student comic strip builder?"
Ed replied: "Presentation has speech bubbles, thought bubbles and many of the characteristic boxes, symbols and layout items that are included in the 'comic' tools."
He provided this example linked here, of a comic he had made with Google Presentation. To understand the rest of this conversation, please take a quick look at the comic.
Ed also wrote: "I used Google Presentation, Google Image Search, and Pixlr (Google's web-based graphic editor). I would suggest that learners that are novices with technology would need to have basic technology skills bolstered before attempting comics like this. There are many comic programs out there that do a great job at getting learners creating comics. Getting learners to create in Presentation would develop skills that could be powerful in the digital workforce.?
I replied: "Thanks, too, for mentioning the Google Pixlr graphic editor tool. It's great -- especially since it is versatile, easy-to-use, and free!"
Bob Wessel replied: (about Presentation skills being useful for students in the digital workforce): "This is true. I’ve used Apache OpenOffice/Libre Office Impress and SoftMaker Presentations a lot. On occasions when I’ve had to use PowerPoint, my familiarity with these tools enabled me to be fully functional with PowerPoint after taking a few minutes to figure out the interface. I’ve used Google Presentation a little bit too. My impression is that although it is not as full featured as the offline tools, it has the all the functionality most people will ever need without all the bloat. What this means for learners is one year of experience with Google Presentations translates into one year minus less than one week of experience with PowerPoint, the less than one week needed to learn the different interface."
Bob added: "I took a quick look at Pixlr. It has a lot of similarities to office suite drawing tools that are integrated with their presentation software, offline graphics software such as Inkscape, photo editing software, and even desktop publishing software. Again, familiarity with Pixlr also provides a learner familiarity with a number of other tools an employer might be using."
Ed replied: (and asked some questions, made bold by me, that I hope others here might be able to answer) "Inkscape is a another one of those free tools that is a "go to" in my toolbox because of how easy it is to use and yet how powerfully robust the options! Are people familiar with Inkscape? Should we have a Wednesday Google Hangout session exploring that tool's options?"
Ed continued: "One further note on Pixlr. It may be helpful to know the most useful aspect of Pixlr has been for my learners. There are many images online that are in Jpeg format. For those of you not aware of what that format is, think of it as a format that is great for photo quality images and it is a format in which all the many layers of an image are combined together to be one single layer. Although these images are nice to look at, it is often very difficult to get rid of the white backgrounds on many images. For example, the turtle in my example post had a white background as did the balloons used. In both cases I simply loaded the image into Pixlr, I was able to click on one tool and simply "erase" the white background to have a transparent background instead. The learner discovers the difference between jpeg and png formats when they go to save their work. Basically, the transparent background needs to be saved in png format because the jpeg process will flatten all the layers and it does not like transparent layer in that process. The transparent layers allow me to move my image around my scene without a white box surrounding it. I have seen learners using programs like MS Paint to "erase" that background, but that process always seemed to take much more time and not have as good results in the finished product. Do others have a quick and easy way to get rid of white backgrounds from images that have been saved as jpegs?"
If you can, please answer Ed's questions.
If you have other questions for Ed or Bob about what they wrote, please ask them.
If you like, please post here, or email me, your technical software questions for the "How-to Qs & As" feature of the Technology and Learning CoP.
David J. Rosen, Moderator
Technology and Learnbing CoP
djrosen123@gmail.com