Planning Your Interactive Media Resources and Available Technology
Mind Mapping - Freemind
FreeMind is an open source mind mapping tool that enables you to visualize ideas, projects,
concepts, brainstorming, internet research or any other task that can benefit from a structured
overview.
You can create nodes with child and sibling nodes and add icons, clouds, notes and custom
formatting for better presentation. The nodes can be expanded or collapsed, or interactively
linked to local files, other maps, online resources and more. You can also insert encrypted nodes
or create encrypted maps for sesitive projects. The finished maps can be exported to HTML,
clickable XHTML, Open Office document, image file and other formats.
So in short, with FreeMind you can organize and store text information in tree structures, making
it a lot simpler to see your thoughts! When planning how you are going to create your interactive
media resources you could use this. Not only that, but you could show your students how to use it,
as it is great for helping them to brainstorm too!
Available Technology
Think about what technology is available to you. For example, Mac users have software such as
iPhoto, iMovie, iCanAnimate and Garageband for creating slideshows, films, music and podcasts,
whereas Windows users will have MovieMaker and Audacity to create these. Both platforms will
be able to run the Adobe software, such as Flash, After Effects and Premiere.
Software and what it can be used for:
iPhoto -slideshows
iMovie/MovieMaker/Adobe Premiere -films
iCanAnimate/ProAnimate/Flash/AfterEffects -animations
Garageband/Audacity -music
Scanners are useful for scanning in images when a soft copy is not readily available and of course
digital cameras are great for taking your own images, when copyright may be an issue. You can
also create your own images from scratch without the aid of cameras and scanners -Photoshop,
Illustrator or Fireworks are great tools for drawing straight onto computer. And then of course there
are hand-drawn images too!
File Formats
Images
Most photos will be in the format of a jpeg, but other images could be in the format of a GIF,
especially if retreived from the internet.
The name “JPEG” stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group, the name of the committee that
created the standard. In computing, JPEG is a commonly used method of compression for
photographic images. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff
between storage size and image quality.
The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) is a bitmap image format that was introduced by
CompuServe in 1987 and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to
its wide support and portability.
The format supports up to 8 bits per pixel, allowing a single image to reference a palette of up to
256 distinct colours chosen from the 24-bit RGB colour space. It also supports animations and
allows a separate palette of 256 colours for each frame. The colour limitation makes the GIF
format unsuitable for reproducing colour photographs and other images with continuous colour, but
it is well-suited for more simple images such as graphics or logos with solid areas of colour.
Movies
One of the most popular movie file formats is a MOV file, which is a Quicktime movie. QuickTime
is a standard created by Apple Computers for integrating full-motion video and digitised sound.
Although the format was originally developed for the Macintosh platform, the abundance of highquality QuickTime movies has made it popular with PC users. QuickTime is a highly flexible
format capable of storing a wide variety of data: from multiple videos and audio tracks to single
photographs.
Here are some other popular movie file formats:
.3g2
.3gp
.asf
.asx
.avi
.flv
.mov
.mp4
.mpg
.rm
.swf
.vob
.wmv
3GPP2 Multimedia File
3GPP Multimedia File
Advanced Systems Format File
Microsoft ASF Redirector File
Audio Video Interleave File
Flash Video File
Apple QuickTime Movie
MPEG-4 Video File
MPEG Video File
Real Media File
Flash Movie
DVD Video Object File
Windows Media Video File
Here are the supported formats for saving movies in Windows Movie Maker:
* Windows Media video files: .wmv
* Windows Media audio files: .wma
* DV/AVI format for video: .avi
I would recommend saving as an avi or dv as wmv and wma will not go into all other software.
Sound
Here is a list of sound files, aif, wav and mp3 being three of the most popular:
.aac
.aif
.iff
.m3u
.mid
.midi
.mp3
.mpa
.ra
Advanced Audio Coding File
Audio Interchange File Format
Interchange File Format
Media Playlist File
MIDI File
MIDI File
MP3 Audio File
MPEG-2 Audio File
Real Audio File
.wav WAVE Audio File
.wma Windows Media Audio File.