![]() ![]() They learn that Chinese opera can be more circus-like than they would have guessed by watching the spectacular scene of the acrobatic battle in the temple from Baishezhuan. My students read a scene from Sophocles' Antigone and then watch it come to life as the same scene performed in the BBC production. Architecture particularly lends itself to this technique, since a walk-through of a building like the Parthenon gives a much more dynamic sense of its structure and volume than a set of stills. I often like to show short video clips to illustrate points in class. I can control the volume, pause, rewind, and do everything I want with the music from the laptop's trackpad. It's a good deal of work to create the presentation the first time around, but then it's simplicity itself to go from showing a still image to playing a troubadour lyric while the students follow the words displayed on the screen, all with a couple of clicks in the Web browser. Now I rip the tracks I want to my hard disk using iTunes, and, using the "embed" command, insert them into pages of my HTML frameset, with associated text (titles, lyrics, etc.) displayed below them. I'm not good at talking and making sense while handling equipment. But if I want to play a number of short selections in a row, loading and unloading the CDs becomes cumbersome. Over the course of a long career I've moved from presenting music on open-reel tape, to cassettes, to CD's. ![]() For many students, seeing is believing, and giving abundant visual evidence of a point can help override ingrained preconceptions. I like showing students over the course of a semester a dozen different slides of women laboring in the fields or performing on musical instruments at court to combat the pervasive myth that in ancient cultures "women stayed in the home." But given the lack of cultural literacy in American high schools, it's as important to expose students to traditional images like the Venus de Milo and the Mona Lisa as well as the revisionist ones like a couple of dozen images from Medieval illuminations showing women at work. Many people prefer the ease of use and seamlessness of PowerPoint, but that program has one fatal flaw for my taste: it makes it cumbersome to jump around in a presentation, to skip ahead when the bell is about to ring, or go back five slides in answer to a student question. I began by displaying scanned slides and illustrations as JPEGs inside an HTML frameset that displays a scrolling menu of image titles on the right-hand edge of the screen. I used to carry around trays of slides, CDs and videotape cartridges, but for some years I've been moving toward delivering all the media for my lectures from my PowerBook (Apple computers make the integration of media particularly easy, but all of this can be accomplished in the Windows environment too). ![]() I always tell the students in my World Civilizations class that there are two main questions we ask about the past: "What happened?" and "What lasts?" As a humanist, I am especially interested in the latter, and I want to expose my students to a wide range of cultural artifacts: architecture, art, poetry, dance, song, and instrumental music and theater. This has always sounded intriguing to me, but is very far from the way I teach. There's a type of world history teacher who describes the ideal media presentation as throwing a single image up on the screen and then having students discuss it intensely for fifty minutes. IDVD is a great DVD authoring tool for Macs for amateurs although it can be frustrating at times and won't fulfil professional needs.Multimedia Made Simple, The Hard Way Paul Brians Be warned that rendering a disc can take hours for a large project and at the end, it's quite annoying if to receive an error message. You can preview your creations before you burn them, which saves a lot of wasted discs but invariably you will find that some discs simply don't burn properly until you've tweaked or removed a few things so make sure you have a lot of DVD-R discs or a DVD-RW disc, which you can re-write as many times as you want. It can also be a bit inflexible when it comes to adding components to your menu but on the whole, it's a great tool. If you're burning a big project in particular, it can be very fussy with large video files and not burn DVD discs properly. IDVD makes DVD authoring fairly easy, although it can be frustrating at times. ![]()
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