The bigger problem, however, is our mental limitations in both teaching and thinking visually. Most classes that “teach” PowerPoint gloss over the narrative changes that it imposes on us through its transition from a linear textual narrative to a nonlinear visual one. They also fail to examine the information transfer capacities of various media. PowerPoint is software that complements a performance and often fails as a container for information. It needs to be augmented by more persistent visual and textual media. I’ve worked around this by creating websites as a mechanism to gloss my presentation; provide background linkages; and to create a persistent, living complement to what happens live. Slideshare fails to do this because it only gives you half of the presentation, the visual part, which may or may not stand on its own. Part of visual literacy is understanding how visual media complements other media, such as audio and text.
Finally, we need to start embedding design thinking into our processes. Design thinking is, by its very nature, closely tied to the visual.
IFTTT gives you creative control over the products and apps you love.
it is as important as a concept, as it is a real, pragmatic approach to information and hardware.
It shows clearly, how programming becomes prevalent (even for no programmers) and why coding needs to be taught at school from a very early age
it provides a glimpse of what the Internet of Things will look like: Unique hardware with software triggers/actions is great for controlling your home: UP by Jawbone, Withings, SmartThings, the WeMo devices, and Harmony remotes from Belkin, Netatmo Weather Station, Philips Hue lightbulbs, and Google Glass have all been around a while. New hardware includes Amazon Echo, Automatic car connectors, Whistle Activity Monitors, Fitbit, GE Appliances, and the Nest Leaning Thermostat and Nest Protect $99.00 at Nest smoke detectors. (PC Magazine)
now engaging, interactive material for tablets and touch screens become even more engaging by adding now inteaction via mobile devices and moving the students off their desktops and laptops.
Project Syria, a virtual reality experience built by a team of students at USC.
“I sometimes call virtual reality an empathy generator,” she says. “It’s astonishing to me. People all of a sudden connect to the characters in a way that they don’t when they’ve read about it in the newspaper or watched it on TV.”
What Peña’s doing — using virtual reality in combination with reporting — is part of a wider landscape of video games being created to explore the news. And they’re called, appropriately enough, “newsgames.”
“There’s an argument to be made that games are perfect at getting at the systemic problems and challenges in the world,” says Ian Bogost, a professor at Georgia Tech.
Take a game that he helped make called Oil God. In the game, the player controls an oil-rich region, waging wars and inciting coupes. The player learns that oil prices are contingent on all sorts of factors rarely mentioned in a story about the price of a gallon of gas.
creating games to bring awareness to social issues for over a decade. The game to create the biggest waves was arguably MTV’s “Darfur is Dying” released online in 2006, in which players took up the role of a family displaced by conflict in Darfur.
PowToon is Web-based animation software that allows users to create animated presentations by manipulating pre-created objects, imported images, provided music and user created voice-overs.[4] Powtoon uses an Adobe Flex engine to generate an XML file that can be played in the Powtoon online viewer, exported to YouTube or downloaded as an MP4 file.[2]
Videomaker, Presentation tool, storytelling tool.
templates versus starting from scratch
having a plan (or a story, or a screenplay)
narrate with voice over your video. can’t edit recording, but can re-record