The Educational Technology Blog

If you’re looking for an inexpensive way to record and podcast lectures or other audio presentations for class or personal use, you would do well to consider using Audacity, an easy-to-use, free audio recorder. There are two ways faculty can download this application: PC clients may download it directly from the university’s AppCenter or through SourceForge’s web site. Until the AppCenter is compatible with Macintosh clients, however, the only way for Mac users to download Audacity is through SourceForge.

Since the mp3 file format is the preferred format for podcasting, you will definitely want to install the Lame MP3 Encoder so you can export your recorded material as an mp3. Audacity comes preinstalled with this plugin when downloaded from the AppCenter, but you’ll have to install it yourself if you download Audacity from SourceForge.

Once you’ve purchased in inexpensive microphone–but you may use your computer’s built in mic, if necessary, even if the output quality isn’t as good–using Audacity to produce files for podcasting in Blackboard is as easy as clicking a record button and saving your file as an mp3.

We’ve created a Tech Directory to help you navigate the ever-growing list of free–or nearly free–online tools and services that can help you save time when doing class work or personal projects. Included in this list are systems that are supported here at Baylor. Where possible, we provide descriptions of these tools (provided by the web site itself or a description from Wikipedia) and organize them by the kinds of tasks they can help you with. The idea of the directory is to keep adding to it, so please let us know if you can suggest any additions.

As time permits, the Electronic Library staff will blog about how each of these applications work and provide examples of how they might be used for academic purposes. Until then, enjoy!

If you came to our first “7 Things You Should Know … ” seminar on Google Apps and would like to review the presentation again, please view our online version of the presentation.

If you occasionally need to organize, edit, or distribute photos for a class or professional project and don’t have the expertise or resources to do the job on your own, you might consider using some of the following free (or nearly free) online services:

Picasa. This Google’s free desktop application for organizing photos and adding photo effects, but the really nice thing it does is allow you to send photo galleries to the web easily. Every user gets 1GB of space for free. For more information, visit http://picasa.google.com/.

Picnik. If you don’t have access to an image editing application like Photoshop–or if you just don’t have time to learn how to use one–then check out http://www.picnik.com for some free image editing tools.

Dumpr. If you’re looking for an easy way to apply interesting effects to your photos, take a look at http://www.dumpr.net/.

Stock photos in the public domain. If you need to use copyright-free stock photos for a project, check out http://www.publicdomainpictures.net.

The expectation to provide information in an accessible, interactive way on the Internet is taken for granted these days, particularly among our current generation of students, who have never known life without the web. Not surprisingly, many faculty are searching for solutions to help them distribute their PowerPoint presentations to the web. Until recently, however, there weren’t many good methods for doing this–and the ones that did exist weren’t very effective. [Read more →]

We recently had a request from a faculty member who wanted to know how he could download a YouTube video and insert it into a PowerPoint presentation. To embed a YouTube video into PowerPoint 2007, it’s not necessary to download the video at all. You can simply link to the video’s URL and reference it as a Shockwave Flash (.swf) object in PowerPoint. [Read more →]

We often get asked how one should go about downloading videos from YouTube. There are several ways to do this, and the process is usually two-fold: One, the video must be downloaded; and two, it may have to be converted to a different file format depending on how it will be used. [Read more →]