The die is cast. Though I am not entering my home country at the head of an army, I am experiencing a bit of a rush. My personal Rubicon is my long absence from presenting at conferences. Earlier in my teaching career, I presented and even organized conferences. Today, I filled out the session proposal for MassCUE 2012. Perhaps nothing will come of it; perhaps it will be accepted. Regardless, I have taken the mental steps across this particular boundary. If not this conference, then soon.
Today my new thing is actually an old thing with which I never experimented. Well, old as the Internet goes, I guess. As I have been preparing my Livebinder for my Internet safety talk in two weeks, I needed to embed an example of a slideshow prepared by a company that sells Internet security solutions to parents. These slideshows can very obviously or very subtlety create a sense of fear in order to sway people toward purchasing the service. As a parent of two young children, I am very tired of fear-driven advertising. It seems that if I don’t do x, y, or z, my children will be horribly mutilated, have severely stunted emotional and intellectual development, and just be bad people. I find similar issue with the advertising surrounding Internet safety products, and these free educational materials fall squarely under the banner of advertising.
I selected one to embed, but how to do it? I first turned to Google Docs and tried to upload my file as a Google Presentation. It was too large, so I just created a link to the download page. Today, however, I used Slideshare to upload this file and directly embed it in my Livebinder presentation.
Still trying to learn a new ed tech thing every day, and on most days I succeed at least exposing myself to something new.
Today, I decided to investigate Prezi for the intro to my parent Internet safety talk coming up next month. It has been around for a while, but I never got around to giving it a spin. With this blog as a constant motivator to try new things, I bit the bullet and got started. I don’t think I will use the prezi to conduct my talk, but it will be the intro piece to give an overview.
I really like the zooming and panning features that are a break from standard slideshows. There are pretty big limitations on what you can do layout and image editing wise within prezi, so most background images I will use will have to be generated outside and brought in.