Tools for Multimedia (Excepting Video)
Content Development
The type of content to be considered in this segment includes text, hypertext, audio, and graphics, composed together into a coherent presentation which can be streamed to student locations at approximately 28.8 Kbps throughput, with good quality reception of presentation by students including reasonably large image. Streamable video does not yet allow student reception of reasonably large and smooth transitioning image at 28.8 Kbps or less throughput.
Voice over slide presentations are reasonably easy to develop using MS-PowerPoint with a RealPresenter plug-in (from RealNetworks) installed. The process of doing this involves creating the slides in PowerPoint, voice annotating the slides using RealPresenter, and converting the presentation into a streamable form using RealPresenter. This streamable presentation can then be sent to technical experts who can put the presentation on a streaming server for online delivery.
Some training may be desirable relative to the use of RealPresenter in this process, and relative to transfer of the finished presentation which will likely contain many files that will have to be transferred to technical experts for streaming; this transfer can be accomplished, by zipping the files together for e-mail attachment and sending, or by FTPing the files.
Another significant matter in this process has to do with how audio (voice) segments can be edited. The only way to edit audio segments in the process is to redo each segment to be edited entirely; this may be appropriate for short audio segments, but probably not long ones. Editing the internals of an audio segment without rerecording the entire segment can be done with a sound editor such as SoundForge, but also requires getting into the internal SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) code of some of the files in the presentation which is rather technical and will likely require very special training or special technical support personnel.
Another kind of tool which can be used to create presentations of this type is a SMIL editor such as GRINS, which can be used to interrelate and synchronize PowerPoint slide graphic (.jpg) files and .wav files from a tool such as SoundForge. GRINS is quite a powerful tool for creating this type or other types of streaming presentations including animation and video, but is rather difficult to use without special training or special support personnel.