Blogging

WordPress Tutorials: There are many great tutorials available online to help learn the ins and outs of WordPress. This page covers the basics and is a great place to start.

WordPress Apps: Students can access their WordPress blogs online at WordPress.com or they can download an app to their smartphone or tablet.

Images

Creative Commons best practices for attribution: This page provides examples and explanations of how to give credit to Creative Commons images.

Finding Images

Creative Commons: This site provides information about the CC movement and has a helpful search tool.

Flickr: not everything on Flickr is Creative Commons, but you can set your search parameters to only bring in CC images.

Google Image Search: Google Image Search is a great tool for finding images— just be sure to set the Usage Rights drop-down menu (at the bottom of the page) to find material that is free to use and share.

Image Editing

Pixlr Express: Basic editing, including adding filters, cropping, or creating a collage. Web-based, so it’s multi-platform.

Pixlr Editor: More advanced than Express, the editor resembles a slimmed-down version of photoshop. If you’re new to image editing, this one has a higher learning curve, but if you’ve edited before, the tools will be familiar. If you’re interested, there are tutorial videos available.

Audio

Audacity : Audacity is a free, multi-platform (PC, Mac, Linux) audio editor with professional-level recording tools.

• Noel Studio Audacity tutorial: An overview of the basic features of Audacity
• Adding Intro/Outro Music: Explains how to add segments of music before and after your voice track, fading them in an out.
• Ducking audio behind a voice track: Explains how to edit the volume of music that plays at the same time as your voice track, so that the music doesn’t drown out your voice.

ccMixter: Great resource for Creative Commons license music. For our video and audio projects, we require our students to only use Creative Commons, public domain, or other free to use music.

Youtube audio library: Youtube also maintains a great library of free-to-use music that’s great for audio and video projects.

Video

Powtoon: Simple, web-based video animation. Since it runs on your internet browser, it is multi-platform.

iMovie: included on Mac and iOS devices

NCDAE instructions for captioning Youtube videos: Youtube automatically adds captions to most video, but those auto-generated captions often include errors and they lack punctuation. This video shows how to upload a transcript of a video to ensure that the captions are accurate.