Beth's Blog: Nonprofits and Social Media

Flickr As Presentation Tool: Screencast #2

View the Screencast here

As a follow up to last week's screencast on how to use flickr as a visual resource, here is a post about how to share your wonderfully visual powerpoints with others via your blog or flickr.    This is a powerpoint that Cheryl Hanback and I used to lead an N-TEN Affnity Group of technology trainers at last year's Nonprofit Technology Conference.  We used some of the ideas presented here as a jumping off point for small group sharing on how to make trainings more interactive.   The flickr set has notes and pointers to other resources if you are interested in the content.

After seeing Nancy White's experiment and discovering Amit Agarwal's excellent instructions for Embed Powerpoint Slides as Flash Presentations in your Blog without Spending a Dime, I just had to try it.

I thought it might be really easy, but there were some nuances I didn't understand and it ended up taking me longer than I thought.  Since I already invested a bit of time, I figured what the hell, I'll make a screencast.

The instructions from Digital Inspiration were fantastic, but I made a few newbie mistakes that took me more time and were a little frustrating:

1.)  I exported the slides a jpg because I didn't have enough bandwidth to upload the pngs as batch without the upload bombing.   

2.)  I wasn't careful how I placed the photos into my flickr uploader and as a result they didn't appear in the right order in my flickr account and it messed up the slide show order.  I took me several bombed uploads to discover how to do it right. So, you have to be careful and put the last in first, second to last second, and so on.

3.)  I didn't know how to correctly add the height and width tags - so I needed it spelled out for me.  So, I had to google the tag to find an example.

4.) I found the editing of the code to add my specific ID numbers and tags confusing.  So, I did it in a way that might be less confusing for someone who isn't experienced with HTML code.

To make matters worse, my five year-old cable modem just couldn't handle recent changes to Comcast's network that allow for more bandwidth.    After a few phone calls back and forth between my video host tech support and the cable company and a visit by the cable man with a new modem, I was finally able to get this sreencast uploaded today.  However, Liquid Steam's tech support is excellent!  (And, now I'm not sure where my upload bombs of png files were due to that problem or not)

Some reflections on my screencast creation process: -I need to learn how to edit out a word in my over and replace it with the correct word.  In this case, I described the IFRAME tag as javascript.     My heart sank when I realized my mistake (just when I was ready to produce!).    Humor always comes in handy!

-I originaly produced this at 800x600 as a SWF with highest quality audio/video and the resulting file was a whooping 72,000 KB.   So, decided to invest more time playing around with the production settings on Saturday.   I rendered ten different versions (6 in SWF with different audio sampling and video frame rates and sizes) and 2 in Quicktime and 2 in WMF.)   In the end, I decided to produce as a SWF at 640x480 size with second to highest audio/video quality.  It works.   I'm wondering if it took a frustratingly long time for you to download?

-My work flow.   I created a storyboard with small scenes.  I found that I don't like reading a script word for word, so what works for me is bullet points.   So, I set up each scene.  Capture my rehearsal.  Listen to it.  And then tape it again if needed.   Then I do a rough edit of the scene (take out the ums, put in markers for captions or zooms to be added later).   When the movie is done, I got back and do fine tuning:

-edit out ums - not all of them
-add close ups
-add captions if I forgot to mention something important
-cut out sliences
-add titles and overs -Then production. 
Questions for further exploration ... 

-Will the file size be smaller if I set up the shoot/record for a smaller portion versus zoom in editing?

Misc. find from CogDog - Flickr As Screencast Tool

How Use Creative Commons Licensing and Flickr To Find Powerful Visuals for Your Presentations

This screencast focuses on how nonprofits can use flickr and creative commons licensing to search for powerful visuals to use in their presentations without violating copyright laws.

But first, I'd like to say a few words about crafting good powerpoint presentations.  There a huge debate about whether powerpoint is your friend or foe.  (See here , here , and here ).  I think the issue is not so much with the tool, but with terrible presentation design.  The problem is that many people use the text bullet points templates to communicate their information, rather than the power of visuals to tell their organization's story. 

So, before we go further, I suggest that you obtain a copy of Andy Goodman's Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes.  It is the single best resource for nonprofits staff members (well anyone, really) who want to improve their presentation design and delivery skills.

So, let's get back to the challenge of finding powerful visuals to illustrate a point or a story in your presentation.  Where can you find photos that aren't outrageously expensive or under copyright protection?  Certainly, if your organization owns a decent digital camera and uses it creatively to document programs, you might already have most of what you need.   But not all.  You could pay for banal photo stock, but  there is another option.  Flickr.

Flickr is a web application that allows anyone to share and organize photographs online.  It's touted as one of the Web's best examples of social media software.  While your nonprofit can also use Flickr to reach new people who may interested in your cause, it can also be a  terrific photo resource.  And, depending on the license, you are free to use many of them.

To get started using Flickr to share and search for photos, you'll need to register for an account.  The good news is that it is free for a basic account (you can upgrade to a professional account later if you find the need to upload more photos than the basic alotment and the upgrade is cheap, $25 per year.)

Flickr is fairly easy to use, the basics can be found here.  You'll be uploading, sharing, and searching for  photos in no time.   

It's great to enhance your presentations with photos found in flickr, but you may be wondering about copyright laws.  A nonprofit organized  named Creative Commons has made it easy for flickr photographers to share or protect their photos by developing flexible and voluntary "some rights reserved" copyright licenses for creative works.  Not all photos in flickr are available under a Creative Commons license and  there are different types of licenses that have different types of restrictions.  But flickr has an excellent information page  that will keep you from breaking any laws and the Creative Commons site offers more detailed information.

My screencast focuses on how to use the search by full text and tag features, search by creative commons licenses, how to give photographer proper attribution, and how to download.   

Additional Resources

Andy Goodman's N-TEN Webinar

Edward Tufte's PowerPoint Is Evil

Presentation Zen: Tips for Effective Presentations

Beyond Bullet Points by Cliff Atkinson

How To Use Flickr

Additional Resources in my delicious account
Powerpoint
Flickr
Presentations

and blog
Flickr
Powerpoint

Creative Commons Licenses

See Amy Gahran's advice:

I also started an affinity group (listserv) over at N-TEN called Flickr for Nonprofits.   If you're interested in discussing flickr in nonprofits, come on and join!

The Power of the Newbie

Cool Cat Teacher Blog"Teaching content with new tools, enthusiasm, and belief that teaching is a high calling." bring attention to a post "The Power of the Newbie."   

She suggests that Newbies (bloggers, vloggers, etc) should:

Here is what you should do when you are a newbie:

1. Keep a notepad handy and write down the steps to accomplish your task including any "glitches" or nuances. (Include commentary on what is confusing to you and what you think.)
2. Take screen shots by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Print Scrn and copying them into your photo program.  Save it as a jpeg, label it if necessary, and upload it as part of your blog post. I like people to draw me maps when I travel...screen shots are maps for online learners and should be used!
3. Immediately blog while it is fresh on your mind.  Make your target audience - "Myself just prior to attempting this" and make sure you list steps and nuances clearly.
4. Following the Ten Blogging Habits that Win discussed last Friday when you post.

It's one way that blogs can be very valuable.  I've decided to blog about my forays into videoblogging and whatever else challenges me.   

At one point I thought to myself, why am I wasting my time documenting?  (Well, my memory isn't a good as it used to be).  But just the other day, someone left me this comment on my flickr set of compression settings.   And in a recent email from a reader told me, "good luck!  and fyi - I do love  your blog.  I am the director of communications for agros international, and will soon be launching a media rich blog for our org... your site has been a great resource during my planning stages." best to you,

So, I guess it isn't a waste of time.   However, it raises a question in my mind how we can collectively harness the power of blogs/vlogs/screencasts to share tacit knowledge with our connected colleagues and peers?

Screencasting of Tacit Knowledge

John Udell articulates a reason why screencasting is really cool:

In my talk I suggested that this kind of unconscious transmission of tacit knowledge may be a key rationale for the practice of pair programming. Two programmers, working side by side, exchange tacit knowledge by osmosis.

To generalize from programming to all use of software-based tools, the equivalent of pair programming -- that is, direct observation of one another's use of such tools -- is ideal. But that's not always possible, in which case live screensharing or asynchronous screencasting is the next best thing to being there.


To translate into nonprofit tech language - screencasting creates shoulder-to-shoulder training in a social networking way ...

Chris Brogan - New Media School

Chris mentioned this fabulous screencast about how to technorati ego surf - check it out.

Flickr Has Integrated Geotagging!

Flickr has added a new feature to its organizer - the ability to add geotags to your photos.  And best of all it is done visually.   There is now a map tab where you can navigate to a location and then automatically add the geotags to that location to a flickr photo or batch of photos.   The feature also includes privacy controls so you can make the geotag private independently of the friends/family privacy codes.

But it gets better:  flickr is now using screencasts!

Here's the how-to information in the FAQ
Here's the screencast: Geotags

Next thing I did was geotag some of the photos from our vacation.  So for example, if you were looking at my photo set of Lucy of the Elephant and clicked on the map you will see where the photo was taken!

You can also use the geotags and the map in flickr to explore photos. Here's a screencast that explains how. This has some wonderful potential for educational projects, think 4th grade geography.