JACC Converge

Day one of the 2007 JACC annual convention is in the books. Some 600-plus students and advisers from 51 California community colleges are meeting in Sacramento for the 52nd annual event.

Multimedia is a big theme of this year's convention. The Sacramento Bee's Manny Crisotomo opened the convention with a keynote presentation on a series called "The Weight" that he worked on about America's first (and only) residential high school for obese teens (located in my hometown of Reedley; I may have been the only Reedleyite in the room). Well done and inspiring. I saw some of my students analyzing what was shown and thinking about how we could use some of the techniques for our own publication. Ahhh, the next step, one of the things I love about teaching.

Also interesting to note is that a group of students and one faculty adviser is working on a multimedia project covering the convention. Take a look at JACC: Converge. To say I'm especially proud that the students come from Cerritos College and are being advised by adjunct Cerritos instructor Amara Aguilar (a former student of mine) would be an understatement.

My successful SoundSlides project

Once again, thanks to the folks at SoundSlides for helping me get my editor recognition project back on track. I've now successfully completed the project. See it at here. When it works, it is really slick.

My failed SoundSlides project

UPDATE:Kudos to the folks at SoundSlides. They got back to me (see comment below) and we worked it out. I was working with an older version of SoundSlides. But after updating, running a couple of tests, discovering an anomaly with one of the images, etc. we got it to work. Now I've just got to find time to do the tweaking for the final version.

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Soundslides is a great program for creating slide shows for the web. I have been training my students and encouraging them to use it at talonmarks.com.

And while I have practiced with the program so that I could teach it, I didn't have an opportunity to create a project of my own until this weekend. And I failed.

Twice each year the Journalism Association of Community Colleges honors California community college student publication editors for their leadership by presenting them with certificates of merit. Many schools change editors every semester, that's why we do it twice a year. The students work long hours and are the backbones of our publications. And in most cases, the editorships are non-paid positions, though most receive academic credit. (Credit that does not transfer to the major if they transfer to a four-year university.) It seems the least we can do.

At this year's JACC state convention --next weekend in Sacramento-- we thought we'd do something else a little different and put together a visual salute to the editors, too. A PERFECT PROJECT FOR SOUNDSLIDES! For the last four weeks I've been collecting images for the project and sat down this weekend to put it together.

For sound I thought I'd play some music. I thought this would be the hard part because I needed to merge the three pieces (two-plus, actually) into one file. Apple's iTunes and GarageBand made that amazingly simple.

So I was ready for Soundslides. I imported the audio. Then I imported the jpeg images: 62 of them! It seemed to go quickly and then the tumbling boxes did their thing with a message indicated that it was still importing Image No. 62. I waited. It took a while. "Not a problem," I thought. "It's got to resize all those images." So I waited some more. I waited one hour, two hours, four hours, eight hours! The boxes kept churning away. I went to bed. When I woke up in the morning it was still churning away on the last image. So I cancelled.

"Must be too many images for it to handle at once," I thought. So I removed half the images and tried again, thinking that I could add the rest of the images one by one later. After two hours of churning on Image No. 31, I cancelled. I tried again with 10 images. Same thing. So I gave up.

But I had worked so hard to collect the images. I turned to iMovie and within a couple of hours had put together the video for the JACC web site. I also imported a larger version for the presentation.

If anyone can help me figure out why the program couldn't close out the last image let me know. I don't know if I'll have time to redo it for next weekend, but I'd sure like to try. The upside? While waiting for all those images I kept taking walks. Instead of the normal 3.5 miles I try to get in each day, I clocked 11!