Christina Heikkila

this is a test to see if I can set the post to publish in the future via cron

this is a test to see if I can expire a post

Have you ever created a PowerPoint or Word file that was so huge, that you couldn’t upload it to a website, or email it to someone because it exceeded a file size limit (Or you could, but it took forever)?

Did you know that with just a couple of clicks, you can drastically reduce the size of your file without any noticeable difference in quality?

Why does this happen?
One of the most common reasons that these file sizes get out of control is that you have huge photos which haven’t been resized appropriately. You just drop images onto the page, and drag a corner to resize them, right? Well the Office application apparently keeps the entire image around in case you want to make it bigger again. (The same thing applies to websites – if you upload a humongous photo, and just tell the page to display it small, it is still loading that humongous photo!)

What can you do to fix it?
Fortunately Word and PowerPoint have a nifty feature to compress all the images in the document.

Click on any picture in the file. Then click the “Format” tab near the top right of the menu. With the Format menu displayed, click on “Compress Pictures”.

the MS picture format menu

You’ll get the Compress Pictures popup box. You will want to keep the “Apply to selected pictures only” UNCHECKED, so that you only have to do this once! You can just click OK to start the compression, or you can click the Options button to choose your options.

The Compress Pictures popup box

The options allow you to choose how much to compress the images – whether for print, screen, or email (smallest size). I’d suggest starting with Email, and if you notice an unacceptable quality of the final file, then you can undo and choose to compress for print or screen.

The Compression Settings popup box

Before you save it, take a look at the size of the file. Then save, and look at the size of the file again – it should be much smaller, depending on the number of photos and how big they were to start with. I’ve seen reductions of 80-90% quite often.

This technique addresses only one potential cause of huge files – read this article to find out about several other causes and what to do about them: [Reduce the size of your PowerPoint files].

While Blackboard and CampusCruiser both have spaces where you can upload and share files, there are limitations, both on total space, and on the size of each file. Here are a couple of sites you might want to try if you need to share larger files:

http://www.mediamax.com/ – 25 GB free space, each file limited to 10MB (update – this site is gone)
http://flyupload.com/ – unlimited space, each file limited to 2GB, file stays available for 60 days
http://in.solit.us/ – unlimited space, unlimited files, indefinitely (blocked on campus by Barracuda)

Edit 2/23/09:

Actually, you might want to just check out Technology Magazine’s list at http://techmagazine.ws/free-online-file-storage/ — scroll down to the section called “Storage/Sharing Services”.

Karl Fisch created this powerpoint (now video) for the Arapahoe High School teachers staff development, to talk about technology, education, and the changing global dynamic. Even if you don’t agree with all the ideas, it is worth watching and thinking about!

Karl Fisch’s blog about this presentation is at http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/2006/08/did-you-know.html

and his collaborator’s is at: http://scottmcleod.typepad.com/dangerouslyirrelevant/2007/01/gone_fischin.html

There is a second version of this presentation, linked on both the blogs above, but I still like this original one better.

Adding video to your online course is an easy way to make your content more engaging. You can make videos yourself, or you can use videos that others have shared. In this example, I’ll show how to embed video from the popular Google Video site. In another post, I’ll show how to do it with video from YouTube.

Firs, find the video you want to show your students. Go to the website video.google.com and enter keywords in the search box.

NOTE: many of the videos you will find on Google Video are actually on other sites such as YouTube. In that case, please follow the directions for embedding YouTube video in another post on this site. Only continue with these directions below if the source of the video is ‘video.google.com’.

Once you have selected a video that you want to share with your students, look for and click the “Email-Embed” button to the right of the video playback window. (If it just says Email and not Email-Embed, then the video’s author doesn’t want the video to be embedded on other websites.) Click the Embed HTML link, and a box will appear with HTML code:

In your Blackboard course, create a new item (course document, assignment, announcement, whatever), type whatever explanatory text you’d like to appear with the video, and then select the <> icon on the editing toolbar to switch into code view:

Back in Google Video, select all the code in the box:

and paste it into your Blackboard item:

Now save, and you’re done! Here is the finished view from the student’s perspective:

Adding video to your online course is an easy way to make your content more engaging. You can make videos yourself, or you can use videos that others have shared. In this example, I’ll show how to embed video from the popular YouTube site. In another post, I’ll show how to do it with video from Google Video.

(NOTE: see the warning at the bottom of this tutorial about problems with editing Blackboard posts with embedded YouTube videos. You may wish to use videos from Google Video instead.)

First, find the video you want to show your students. Go to the website www.youtube.com and enter keywords in the Search box.

Once you have selected a video that you want to share with your students, look to the right of the video, in the gray box. You will see two sections, one called URL, and one called Embed. (NOTE: The embed area may say “Embedding disabled by request” – this means that the author of the video doesn’t want their content embedded in other webpages. In this case, you can still use the video by linking to it with the URL, but it will not appear like it is part of your Blackboard course.)

There is also a small link near the Embed section that says “customize”, which you can use to change how the embedded video will appear – you can change the colors and select whether to show a full border around the video, for instance.

In your Blackboard course, create a new item (course document, assignment, announcement, whatever), type whatever explanatory text you’d like to appear with the video, and then select the “<>” icon on the editing toolbar to switch into code view:

Back in YouTube, click in the Embed textbox to highlight all the code inside that box:

and paste it into your Blackboard item:

Now save, and you’re done! Here is the finished view from the student’s perspective:

NOTE: One word of caution – if you ever need to go back and edit the Blackboard item (change wording, available dates, etc), Blackboard will break the embed code and the video will no longer work. So if you are going to edit an item with an embedded YouTube video, you should be prepared to recreate the embed code by re-copying it from the YouTube site or recopying it if you have saved it somewhere (like in a Word document). This problem does not happen with Google Video, so you may wish to use video from that source instead.