Wow! Sprout Builder looks neat

Bryan Murley just posted an entry on his Innovation in College Media blog about an interesting new web tool some of us should look at. If you like the ease of use of SoundSlides to add to presentation on your web sites, your students should also look at Sprout Builder at http://sproutbuilder.com.

Sprout Builder is "the quick and easy way for anyone to build, publish, and manage widgets, mini-sites, mashups, banners and more."

Basically, like SoundSlides, it creates a Flash presentation project for you without you having to learn how to use Flash. The difference here is that Sprout Builder's product is a multi-layered widget that can include video, audio, images and newsfeeds and choose from dozens of pre-built components and web services.

Once you create the product through the online site, copy the code and embed it into your web site.

How would you use this? Well, my beady little mind is just starting to turn this over, but the first project that comes to mind would be an interactive multimedia project for those community colleges going through the president hiring stages. Got three finalists? Include photos of them, videos of campus forums, biographies, resumes, etc.

Imagine what kind of package you could put together for a sports team? Photos, video, audio, stats of top athletes. Or build something that tells a bit about every team in an athletic conference.

Oooooo, just let me think a bit more. Nope. Have too many papers to grade first. M-u-s-t grade papers. Must n-o-t take time to be innovative.

Seriously, though, we've been talking about the next step in online publications to post first and publish later. If that is true, the step after that is to create original online content that blows print content out of the water. Tools like Soundslides and Sprout Builder can make you look like a pro without having to be a code junkie. You just have to be a good journalist.

JACC just introduced Team Feature 2.0 at its recent convention. TF2 is a contest that requires photographer and writer to work together to create a multimedia slide show feature story using SoundSlides. There is already talk about TF3: where still photos are replaced by video. With something like Sprout Builder, though, TF3 could instead leap frog into a true interactive online feature.

Soundslides under pressure

JACC completed its annual convention this weekend and one of the big changes was the introduction of our first on-the-spot multimedia contest. Student teams (2-3 per team) from 25 colleges set out on LA's colorful cultural icon Olvera Street to find a feature and develop it under deadline pressure using SoundSlidesPlus software. For about half the teams, this was the first exposure they've had to SoundSlides, much less editing audio. But the excitement for a multimedia challenge among our contests was high.

The students had one day to find a story and collect photos and audio, overnight to edit everything and one hour in a contest lab to assemble the final product. Most teams stayed up all night editing and not all completed the task. Unfortunately, four teams who DID complete a project, had their files corrupted in the save process and judges could not open them. (My mistake for not checking them as we collected them so that students could re-export! I learned something new, too, as I've never seen this kind of corruption before.)

Projects were judged on the spot and winning teams honored during the convention.

A lot of tired folks at the end, but they were stoked.

All completed entries, except for the corrupted ones, can be found on the JACC web site at www.jacconline.org. (Or jump directly to the story with links here.)

We called this contest Team Feature 2.0 as it replaced our earlier contest of a writer and photographer working together to develop a written feature plus photo. For the future we hope to introduce Team Feature 3.0 where the final project is video. We need to work out computing issues though and, quite frankly, I'm not sure we have enough time for good editing to take place even if we find a level playing field with computers.