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////Happy New Year!
//As we begin the new year, let’s pause for just a moment for “Auld Lang Syne.” Just in case you’ve forgotten, lest “old acquaintance be forgot …” here’s a quick video to remind us of how far we’ve come, technologically speaking. Most of us can remember what they’re talking about … and if you can’t, you fell out of the sky yesterday! We’ll take a walk down memory lane this week, then move into the present in the next post. Happy New Year!
LUNA
//Today’s blog entry will introduce you to a resource right here at Furman. In the basement of the library is an office called the Digicenter which can, quite literally, work miracles for you. The Digicenter can digitize that enormous slide collection you’ve had for years or gather together in one place images you’ve collected for a course and make those images available to you and your students on the web through an interface called Luna. The brief video below will introduce the basic features of Luna and what it can do for you. Stay tuned for Luna Part Deux next week for more advanced features. If, after viewing the video, you are anxious to get started on digitizing your image collection, the person to contact in the Digicenter is Jen Haldaman (x3733).
Photo Editing is a Picnik
//Today’s entry in the “make-your-life-easier” tech sweepstakes is an online resource called Picnik. I use it all the time for my quick and dirty photo editing/image improvement needs. When I don’t feel like loading up Adobe Photoshop and jumping through all the technical hurdles a professional image editing package can throw up, I jump online and reach for Picnik. I can quickly improve an image and move on to actually using it for something useful. It’s quick, it’s easy, it’s online and it’s free. Watch the brief video to see what Picnik can do for you.
Audacity
//With the emphasis on oral communication in language teaching, it is surprising to me that instructors have not yet taken full advantage of the technology tools available to them for communicative practice. Today’s blog entry is an introduction to Audacity, a piece of software you may already be familiar with. It is installed on all the computers in the LRC and, because it is FREE and CROSS-PLATFORM, it is software you can download and install on your own computers (PC or Mac). The video will show you how easy it is to record sound and then export it to .mp3 format so that it can be emailed, posted to a blog, uploaded to Moodle, used on an iPod or iPad, put in a podcast, or whatever! If you need a microphone, you can check one out from the LRC.
When you download Audacity, you will also need to download and install the LAME encoder. This is another small piece of free software which, when used along with Audacity, will allow you to export your sound files as .mp3 files. The two go together, so watch the video to see how easy it is, then go get Audacity for your computer if you don’t already have it.
P.S. I have been informed that for some reason, the server that this blog resides on is having issues with displaying video in Internet Explorer. If you are having trouble viewing the videos, please switch to a different browser (it works just fine in Foxfire or Safari) until our esteemed servermeister gets the IE glitch fixed. My apologies for the inconvenience.
Welcome to LRC Live!
//Welcome to the launch of the Language Resource Center’s blog. In the weeks and months to come, we hope to provide MLL faculty and students with a visual reference to what’s new, what’s cool, what’s hot and what’s not in academic computing. We welcome your comments and suggestions and hope you will subscribe to the RSS feed (just click on the icon to subscribe). Our podcasts will be brief (3 minutes or so) introductions to new tools and techniques, not long tutorials. To get a better idea of what to expect in the weeks to come, please watch the video below. I talk fast, so it won’t take long!