We’re going to be looking at Wikis over coming weeks.

Click Here for Wikis Guide

Our collection of Wikis is at the Learning Landscape

Some other collaborative wikis you may want to get involved with

The Digital River

Writers For Animation

http://tvcm.wikispaces.com/004+Wikis

After a break we wil take a look at other Digital Village websites and our participants will speak to them.

www.skinngongrove.tv

www.carlinhow.org.uk

http://marske.org.uk/winkies/

www.learninglandscape.co.uk

www.ecol.org.uk/loftus

We’re going to go back over stuff from the first three weeks and make sure we’re comfortable with everything. Particularly last weeks Posterous blogging excercise. Then we’ll move on to something really fun – Stumble Upon.

Posterous

1. Open your e-mail account
2. Create a new email
3. Give it a title eg “Hello World”
4. Write a short message.
5. Attach an image if you have one handy.
6. Address it to post@posterous.com
7. SEND IT
That’s all there is to it. In a few minutes you will get an email back with details of your blog. You can continue to add to your blog in this way and you can edit the blog or share it with others. You don’t even have to create a password as it is all based on the recognition of your email address.

You can go to your blog and create a password and customise it. It’s easy and intuitive.

• Follow the link in the email to “your new post” that will have been sent to you a few minutes after you sent your message
• You will see your new posting and a button saying “CLAIM THIS SITE” – Click on It.
• You will then be invited to “name this site” which will be something line yourname.posterous.com – choose it wisely – it needs to be fairly unique as “John Smith” will be taken. However something really unusual will be hard to remember or give out to friends.
• Choose a password, and choose it wisely.
• Click on Signup.
• That’s all you need to do and you could continue blogging in this way from your email.

You can do more stuff on your blog such as collaboration and sharing and you can even link it with your facebook, twitter, flickr and other social media accounts. This way one e-mail can publish your words on multiple outlets.

Click on Edit Sessions to see the screen below: (descriptions are below the image)

A – The name that will be shown at the top of your webpage.

B – A subtitle to your webpage “to boldly go etc etc …”

C – Contributors can post or Anyone can post (you moderate) – Contributors can only post if you name some contributors.

D – Who can comment – you can have no comments at all.

E – You can tick to make your blog private

F – Save your settings

G – This is where you would add contributors

H – You can change the look and feel of the site

I – You can change your sites  address (URL)

This workshop is not about learning Photoshop (or PS Elements) although moving on to Photoshop (the industry standard image editing sofware) could be a progression route. The things people largely want to do with images are

• Resize (physical size and File Size)
• Crop
• Adjust brightness/contrast

Using Picasa

Picasa is a free picture management and editing tool from Google. You can download it here http://picasa.google.com/

The first time you run Picassa it will want to catalogue either your entire hard drive or just your MyDocuments folder. It takes a little time but it’s a once only process and well worth doing.

Picasa does a lot of useful stuff besides cataloguing your picture collection including:

• Simple picture retouching and optimising including re-sizing.
• Burn DVD’s
• Make Slideshows including audio
• Make Screensavers
• Online picture galleries
• Assist with scanning and importing from a camera.
• Making posters (useful for animation backdrops)