Using Flickr to locate and download Creative Commons licensed images

This post was originally part of a larger post for the PowerPoint Plus series, but I felt that the topic was important enough to warrant a separate post.  I’m not going to write a long post about copyright, fair use, and Creative Commons (yet), but I did want to bring this up. Images are critical to the creation of exceptional PowerPoint presentations, and since folks shouldn’t be going around stealing images, I thought I’d discuss how to use Flickr to locate and download Creative Commons licensed images.  For more information on Creative Commons, visit their website, creativecommons.org.

So, without any further adieu, here’s how you search for Creative Commons licensed content on Flickr…

  1. Go to the Flickr Advanced Search page and enter your search term in the “search for” box at the top.
  2. Scroll down the page and click on the “Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content” checkbox.  (If you’re using the work commercially or will be modifying it in any way, make sure you check the other two boxes as well.)
  3. Click the “Search” button.

    For this example, I searched for “Grand Lido Braco” (a resort in Jamaica).  I didn’t check the bottom two boxes because I’m not using the image commercially or modifying it in any way.  My search yielded 327 results.
  4. Browse the results and locate an image that you want to use.  Click on the image to see a larger version and to access the tools needed to download the image. You can’t just right-click and download these images.

  5. Once you’ve selected an image, you’ll be on a page that looks something like this.
  6. To download the image, click on the image itself.  This will load the image in the full-screen view.  Click on the “View All Sizes” link up the upper right-hand corner of the page.
  7. Click on the link and the image will be loaded again, this time with a download link. Click the link to download the image, save it to your computer and you’re ready to use it in your work.  But be sure to abide by the terms of the license and to provide credit where it is due!

Jamaica 2010 240 by Flickr users Eva and Rodney Hargis Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.0 License

For more information on proper attribution of Creative Commons licensed material, visit this page at newmediarights.org.

PowerPoint Plus – Part One: Themes and Things

Let’s start out with a simple one, shall we?  You may know that PowerPoint comes with lots of preconfigured themes, but did you know that you can customize the themes to better suit your personality and purpose? This post discusses how to select a PowerPoint theme and how to customize the colors and fonts of the selected theme.

Unless you’re presenting to an gathering of infants or aliens, the odds are that your audience members will have seen PowerPoint presentations in the past, so getting flashy with the animations and graphics won’t impress many people.  But that doesn’t mean that you want your presentation to consist of merely a white screen with black Arial font.  On the contrary, you’ll want your presentation to be unique.  This is where themes come into play.

When creating a PowerPoint presentation, the first thing you’ll want to do is select a theme.  Under the Design tab in PowerPoint 2010, there is a  wide variety of pre-configured themes available.  If none of the themes quite suit your needs, you can always visit Microsoft’s website and find a new theme.

Once you’ve selected a theme to work from, you can customize the color scheme by clicking on the “Colors” drop-down which can be found just to the right of the row of themes.

As you can see in the image on the right, there are plenty of preconfigured color schemes which can be applied to your presentation.  To apply a color scheme, just click on the color scheme you want to use and you’re done!

But if none of the pre-configured color schemes meet your needs, you can customize the color scheme by clicking on the “Create New Theme Colors…” link at the bottom of the “Colors” dropdown.

This will load the Create Theme screen where you can customize the colors for your theme.  This will probably involve a bit of trial and error, but once you’ve got your custom colors ready, you can re-use them in future PowerPoint presentations.

A word of caution: Creating your own color scheme can be tricky. Although selecting the colors is simple, it’s critical that you try to use color schemes which won’t distract your audience or which won’t be clearly visible to color blind individuals.

If you want to explore color theory further, there are a wealth of websites devoted to the topic. For a quick introduction to color theory, check out this article from SmashingMagazine.com. There are also a lot of websites which will help you design color schemes using the color wheel.  A couple of the sites I use to assist with the development of color schemes are colorsontheweb and colorschemedesigner.

Selecting Fonts

In addition to creating a custom color palette, PowerPoint also allows for the creation of font themes. While not everyone will want use a custom font theme, they can come in very handy and can add a personal touch to a PowerPoint presentation.  To create a custom font theme, click on the “Fonts” dropdown in the “Design” tab (just beneath the Colors dropbown).  There only two customizable elements (Heading Font and Body Font) each of which are pretty self-explanatory.

The key here is to use fonts which are easy to read and won’t distract the audience. The only “rule” is to NEVER use Comic Sans or other “handwritten” fonts as the heading or body fonts. These fonts may appear cute at first, but they quickly become tiresome and look horribly unprofessional.  For more information on typography and fonts check out this list of  8 Essential Web Typography Resources from Mashable.

I certainly hope I’ve enlightened you a little with this post, and next time I’ll discuss using images in PowerPoint.  When to use them, where to find them, and how they should be added and cited.

As always, any comments, questions, concerns or (gentle) criticisms are welcome.

~Rodney


PowerPoint Plus: Wise Design and Added Value

Welcome to the first post in a series of articles on PowerPoint presentation design strategies.  I was going to call this series “PowerPointers” but that name brings to mind images of a wild gang of needlepoint enthusiasts leaning against lampposts wearing meticulously embroidered leather jackets, twirling needlepoint frames around their fingers as they protect their turf… not exactly my target audience.  Perhaps a more brilliant title for this series will arise as I move forward.  We shall see.  But as this is not a series of articles on the coining of clever monikers, I do hope that you will forgive the lack of creativity in the heading…

So what’s the point??

This series will introduce methods I’ve used to make exciting, engaging PowerPoint presentations. I’ll be using PowerPoint 2010 for these posts, and for advanced PowerPoint creation, I do recommend using PowerPoint 2010 over PowerPoint 2007.  I’ve found that PPT 2010 contains several new functions which are indispensable.   This series isn’t about jazzing up your PowerPoint presentation with frivolous bells and whistles to your PowerPoint presentation.  It’s about using WISE DESIGN and ADDING VALUE.  While bells, whistles, animations, LOLcats, and video clips can be amusing, they are useless if they don’t add some sort of value to the presentation.

Design Wisely

Wise design basically means developing and implementing an economic design strategy.  In a wisely designed presentation, all elements serve a purpose.  Every word and image is in place for a reason.  Unnecessary information, images, and animations should be stripped away, leaving the presentation with only what NEEDS to be there.

But what if I NEED all those words on the slide?  The simple fact is, you don’t NEED them.  If you’re presenting in front of a live audience, your discussion will expand upon the information covered on the slides as you present.  If the slides are overloaded with text, images, and/or animations, the audience will pay more attention to what’s on the screen than to what’s being said, practically eliminating the need for a speaker!    If you’re presenting online or recording a voice-over narration, keeping your audience tuned in to the sound of your voice is even more difficult, and if your PowerPoint slides are too busy, the audience will tune you out as they read your slides.

But what if I want to hand out printed copies of my presentation?  Won’t they need all that text?  If you’d like to provide handouts of your presentation, use the Notes feature of PowerPoint to add all the text you had originally intended to include on your slides and print out the Notes pages so that your audience can walk away with any extra information you may have wanted to provide that wasn’t in the actual slides.   Better yet,  if you’re providing handouts,  don’t give them a copy of the PowerPoint at all!  Give them a single-page handout that ADDS VALUE but doesn’t reproduce the entire presentation.  Typically, there is no legitimate need to provide a slide-by-slide hard copy of your presentation.  You can always make your presentation available on the web so that interested parties may download and review it on their own.

One last thing about hard copies.  If you are providing them, try not to distribute them until AFTER you’ve completed your presentation.  Handouts can be a distraction, and you want your audience to be focused on YOU, not on the papers in their hands.

Adding Value

In order to design better PowerPoint presentations, we must first understand the role of PowerPoint.  Your performance as a presenter/teacher/facilitator should be the primary focus of the audience.  The audience should be engaged, excited, and eager to learn about your topic.  The PowerPoint presentation should not be your presentation, it should add value to your presentation.  Quite often, presenters will use PowerPoint as a crutch rather than a tool and instead of truly presenting on the topic, the presenter merely reads to the audience.  If people are paying to take a class or attend a seminar, they typically want something more exciting than a presenter reading slides.

The remaining posts in this series will discuss ways in which you can add value to your PowerPoint presentation, but perpetually reinforce the fact that the presentation itself should be clean and well-designed from the outset.

If you’re reading this and would like to contribute any ideas or have any requests for future PowerPoint articles, let me know…

As always, any comments, questions, concerns or (gentle) criticisms are welcome.

~Rodney

Finding a Needle in the Digital Haystack Known as YouTube

Finding a good egg on YouTube isn't as hard as you think.

I searched my desk and dug through files hoping to find the perfect idea for my first “real” blog post.  There’s so much I want to write about and it’s really difficult deciding where to start.  Sometimes the best way to move forward is to take a step back, so I’ve decided to revisit a session I presented during the Fall 2011 pre-class week called “YouTube in YourClass” which focused on ways to best use YouTube in the classroom (traditional and online).  The workshop covered establishing an account, creating a channel, configuring playlists, and uploading original content, but the topic that generated the most interest was how to get past the cat videos and find material appropriate to your class.  So, without further adieu, I present to you some of my preferred techniques for finding a needle in the digital haystack known as YouTube…

Check out YouTube EDU. YouTube EDU is a repository of lectures, educational videos, and even entire courses from colleges and universities around the country and the world including (but not even remotely limited to) Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Cambridge, UCLA, Harvard, Yale, and more.  If you’re looking for a “guest lecturer” to shed light on a particular topic, this might be a great place to look!  The best part is that all the videos in YouTube EDU are submitted and maintained by the educational institutions, so you won’t have to wade through scads of unrelated videos to find something that will work in your class.

Subscribe to channels!  If there’s a resource that you know consistently puts out great material, why not subscribe to their channel?   Lots of organizations and individuals maintain some spectacular channels that are constantly updated with high quality videos.  Some of my personal favorites include TED, edutopia, and the Library of Congress, but don’t let my tastes influence you.

Search Smarter.  This is really the big one.  YouTube relies entirely on its users to assign appropriate titles, keywords and categories to the materials they upload, but sometimes this information isn’t exactly descriptive and can sometimes be downright deceptive!  Although these tips won’t help you find materials that aren’t properly titled, indexed, and categorized, they will help you weed out some of the unwanted results.

  1. Use quotation marks to search for exact phrases:
    Searching for “Like a Rolling Stone” will return videos which contain those four words in that order.  So, instead of having every Rolling Stones video and every cover of Muddy Waters’ “Rolling Stone”, you’ll only get videos which have “Like a Rolling Stone” listed in their title or description.
  2. Use + or – to require or prohibit words in the results:
    The + operator tells YouTube that the word MUST be included in the results while the – operator tells YouTube that the term CAN NOT be in the results.  Let’s say I want to look for Bob Dylan videos, but I don’t want to see any videos relating to Dylan Thomas in my results.  A search wherein ALL results contain the word “Bob” but none of the results contain the word “Thomas” would look something like this…
    Dylan +Bob -Thomas

  3. Use intitle: to search through video titles only:
    Here’s a lesser-known trick that can yield some great results.  By default, YouTube searches for matches in both the title and keyword fields.  To eliminate searches through keywords, and to only retrieve videos which contain your search string in the title, simply put intitle: at the start of your search. So, to search only for videos with “Like a Rolling Stone” in the title, I’d do the following search…
    intitle:Like a Rolling Stone  <<<<< ——— NOTE: There is NO SPACE between the colon following intitle and the search string. 
  4. COMBINE 1, 2, and 3 as needed:
    Now it gets really cool!  You can combine these search techniques and get even better results.  If I want to get videos of Bob Dylan singing “Like a Rolling Stone” but don’t want to
    get any cover versions of the song, I could use the following search…
    intitle:+Dylan “Like a Rolling Stone” -cover

Give these techniques a shot the next time you’re digging through YouTube for a video clip to use in your course.

As always, any comments, questions, concerns or (gentle) criticisms are welcome.

~Rodney

Welcome to Rodney’s Corner

Greetings and welcome to my little corner of the Interwebs.

In the event that we haven’t met, my name is Rodney Hargis and I’m an Analyst with the Virtual College at Mercer County Community College in West Windsor, NJ.  I created this blog so that I might share some my enthusiasm for technology and online learning with the rest of the world.

When I can be pried away from the computer (which is less often than I care to admit), I like to relax by playing guitar, singing, and writing songs. I’ve been playing for about 15 years or so, and when I started out, I was little more than a (very) bad Bob Dylan impersonator.  I soon discovered that if I wanted to sing my song, I needed to find my voice.  It took a long time, but I did finally find a voice that worked for me, and now, more often than not, folks don’t evacuate the room when I pick up the guitar.

Blogging is similar to songwriting in that my goal is to my convey ideas in a distinct voice, but not let the voice get in the way of  the message.  I hope that my quest for a blogging voice won’t be as long (or as painful on the ears) as my search for a singing voice.  But I do beg your patience and compassion as I embark upon this journey.

So again, I welcome you to my little corner of the Interwebs and I do hope that you find something here that helps you in some way, or at least gets you to thinking….

Questions, comments, concerns, and (gentle) criticisms are always welcome.

~Rodney

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