Assignment for Monday, Feb. 6

Great job on the "What a Wonderful World" project yesterday. I love to see creative minds at work. It's going to be a great semester.

Now let's transfer Monday's experience to a fully digital experience. In this assignment you will individually listen to another song and assemble a folder of maybe 30 digital photos from various sources. On Monday we'll start with Soundslides software and turn those photos into a slideshow with a musical background.

For now, all you have to do is listen to the song a few times and take some notes about the visuals that pop into your head as you listen. Then collect 30 photographs, or more if you like, from which to construct a Soundslides project. Just remember that the photos need to be JPEGS, and you should save them as at least medium size. You can use your own photos. More likely, you will want to go to sites like Google images, Bing images, etc. or all the  over places you can find free images on the Web. Then just collect them in a digital folder. Put that on a thumb drive or upload it to somewhere like Dropbox or another free storage service. The photos don't need to be in any particular order -- we'll do that Monday.

The music: "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" by Israel Kamakawiwo'ole, the ukelele version that I'm sure you've heard. I bought mine on iTunes.  No doubt you guys know how to pick one up for free. Put the MP3 file in the digital folder with the JPEGs. If you buy it on iTunes, you will need to convert it to MP3. Just Google the instructions. Very easy.

Also, please go to the Soundslides website to familiarize yourself with the program. You do not need to download the software.

Also for Monday, please spend some time exploring multimedia websites and looking at multimedia journalism. You will find a bunch or sources on the right-hand rail of this blog. Of course you could also Google something like "multimedia journalism" and find lots more. After you have finished exploring, pick one story that really knocked your socks off. Be prepared to talk about that site in class in Monday. And please send me the URL (web address, as in www.whatever) by Sunday at 5 p.m. so I can net a sneak preview.

That's it. Have a great week.