Google Sites

This week we learned how to use Google Sites.  I had never heard of Google Sites before and was pleased to find out that Google hosts free websites and wikis.  Google sites allow for a collaborative environment and free web-hosting with ease of use.  You don't need to know how to program in HTML to use Google sites, however if you do, you can find ways to take advantage of that knowledge.  

I created a tech support site titled " Handy Tech Stuff " to be used in a work situation where site hosting is not provided by the employer.  There are various Google gadgets included in the page.  Some bring tech-related topical news stories, and the main page has a google map to show where in the world we are located.  

You can view the site here:  https://sites.google.com/site/handytechstuff/

Concept Mapping

This week we learned how to create a concept map with Bubbl.us     Not coming from a teaching background, I had quite a bit of difficulty thinking of a concept, so I had to wing it.  Here it is:

Welcome back from Spring Break !

Welcome back from spring break!  I fully intended to do a bunch of homework in advance of this week, I even started with reading a few things about Jing.  Jing if you don't already know is a screen capture tool that allows you to capture video and audio from your computer desktop.  Jing is useful for creating short how-to videos.  

I used Jing to create a video of how to adjust the camera in the Persistance of Vision Raytracing (POV-Ray) scene language.  POV-Ray is a freeware tool that allows you to create photo realistic 3-D images.  Take a look at the Hall of Fame Gallery on the POV-Ray Website. To get POV-Ray, visit their website at http://www.povray.org/

I will post the video to my blog within  a few days.  It seems the hosting company http://www.screencast.com/ is experiencing technical difficulties with their servers.  Therefore I'm out of luck for posting my video tonight.  I attempted to post it to Photobucket, but they too were crashing.  The video is 68MB in size, so it's fairly large, but not so much that It should create such a difficulty to view on a high-speed connection.

More to come, and thanks for watching.

James

*** UPDATE ***  I've embedded the screencast code below, and I hope it works.  I will apologize in advance, the code in POV-Ray is fairly small, so I used a large screen capture size.  Unfortunately this screen size might not fit nicely into the pretty columns in this Blog.