Media and the College Media Drive

Media, media everywhere, but where exactly?

The old Media Drive (used to be in the doverstudentfs drive) has been rendered obsolete by a nice new shiny, and most importantly HUGE Media Drive.

Google Drive should still be your first stop for everything, but especially for longer/larger videos, and collections of photos, the Media Drive (while on campus) is a lot faster to access than Google Drive.

This drive is available to all students as well, so ideal if you need to make video resources available for them.

You get to it the same way you do any of the shared drives [Finder > Go > Connect to Server], only the address is smb://collegemedia.unitedworldcollege.net/Media 

AVA will be using this drive to leave media for you this year (such as pupil photos, arts festival videos etc) rather than the old shared drives. You will also no doubt find other material or relevance as the year goes on.

This is not permanent storage, as it will be wiped at the end of each academic year, so for video you want to keep permanently, make sure you back it up to an external drive over the holidays, you can always put it straight back on when you get back.

For more on video and what to use for what and and why, and when, go to this link:

http://doverdlc.blogspot.sg/2013/06/to-youtube-or-not-to-youtube-that-is.html

For more on managing images and conserving drive space by being smarter in how you size images, click here:

http://doverdlc.blogspot.sg/2013/02/google-drive-picasa-pixels.html

You can always find the address to this server, and other college Media resources from the Portal.

UWCSEA Media Centre AKA Asset-bank

You will also find a link here to a great collection of UWCSEA images—a college archive that has been carefully curated by the Communications team over the years, all are searchable and can be filtered by campus/college/school etc. 

Comms also have a small collection of images that are particularly handy for Presentations  which I've placed on a Google Drive here, for ease of access. These can also be found on the asset bank.

Picasa Email Uploads

Picasa is an awesome image sharing tool which just gets better and better.

Upload by email is a great feature, which is perfect if you want to allow an undetermined audience/group to submit images to you simply and easily.

First lets look at two ways to manage this.

If you haven't yet activated your Picasa account you'll need to that first, just Google 'picasa web', or click here, picasaweb.google.com/home to activate it with your school password.

Once in there you have 2 options...

Option 1

This is great if you want to ask a class of students to contribute an image/s to one album, or maybe parents to contribute photos they took on a school trip etc.

Create  an album with a sample image in it, and share that with the students/parents who are participating, and tick the 'Let people I share with contribute photos' box, here:

Now they can just add images to that album themselves. This works better for a specific class, or grade or email group like Parents, not so much for a larger or undetermined audience, for that - you need option 2:

Option 2

This works well if the you don't know who the contributors are, or how many there are.

You can adjust the settings in your Picasa account to enable upload via email, this link explains it well, and I've included the text below to save you the stress of clicking:

Email upload

Use email upload to upload photos to Picasa Web Albums by sending them to a secret email address, especially useful from your mobile device. This allows you to stream and caption photos on-the-go. To get started, follow these steps:

1. Sign in to your acount at http://picasaweb.google.com/.
2. Click the gear icon in the top-right corner and choose Photos settings.
3. On the General tab, in the "Upload photos by email" section, select the "Allow me to upload photos by email." checkbox.
4. Enter a "secret word," 6-15 characters long. As you enter this word, an email address appears.
5. Click the Save changes button.
6. To email upload your photos, just attach them to an email message and send it to the newly-created address.

Use the email "Subject" line to add captions or to include the photos in a specific album. If the email "Subject" line matches an existing online album title, your photos will be uploaded to that album. Otherwise the 'Subject' line will instead be added as a caption and the photos will be placed in the Drop Box album.

You can attach up to 20 MB of photos in JPG, GIF and PNG formats.

IMPORTANT! The participants will need to put their name in the SUBJECT of the email, if you want to know who sent the image... Or if you want the images to automatically go into an existing album.

I've set it up in my account so you can see how it works.

115729468016446857469.smcuwc@picasaweb.com

If you send an image to this email address it will automatically appear inside an album designated for that called 'Drop Box' nothing to do with THAT other web service. Or it will be added to an existing album if the subject matches the name of one of your existing albums.

If you want to move images out of the default 'Drop Box' album to another album, choose 'Organise' then 'Move' to move an image or 10 or so, to another album.

size matters...

Do you know your bytes and pixels from your mega/kilo/giga/tera bytes? If not, read on...

Quite a few teachers have approached me, who are worried about using up their hard drive space, but fret not dear educators, your MacBook has a HUGE hard drive - but how huge? Generally when I excitedly point out that you have maybe 200 to 500 Gigabytes of space (depending on the age of your Mac), I invariably get a look that looks like I have just emitted a noxious fume from my nether-parts. So here goes...

The smallest unit of memory is a bit, then a byte, and they go up in thousands from there, so a thousand bytes in a kilobyte, a thousand kilobytes in a megabytes... and so on.

Here's a simpler way to imagine it...

1 bit (short for binary digit) = teeny tiny, the smallest size you can get, and yes, useless to you.

1 byte (b) = 1 character in the alphabet, eg the letter 'a'. = still useless

1 kilobyte (Kb) = 1000 bytes = 1000 characters, eg, a page of text = now we're getting somewhere...

1 megabyte (Mb) = 1000 Kilobytes = 1000 pages of text = 1 large digital image = 1 minute of music (mp3)


5 megabytes = 5,000 kilobytes = 5,000 pages of text = 1 very large digital image = a 5 minute song (mp3) This is pretty much the upper limit for email attachments.

10 Megabytes = 10,000 KB = 10 large photos = 10 minutes of music = 1 minute of video.


1 gigabyte (Gb) = 1000 megabytes (MBs) = an entire film/movie

1 terabyte (Tb) = 1000 GBs = MASSIVE = Pretty much only relevant for storage, external hard-drives etc.

Yes there are more...
...

In a nutshell

bytes - pretty much useless, like a few peas.

kilobytes (KB) like pages of text (text emails and small images would be measured in kilobytes) the most useful size online, not too small not too big.

megabytes, now we're getting heavy - large photos, music, 10 MBs or more for video

Maybe these analogies can help?

Animals:
ant, mouse, dog, elephant, blue whale

Food:
a grain of rice, a bowl of rice, a bag of rice, a sack of rice, a truck load of rice

Travel
a coin, hand bag/back pack, carry on luggage, suitcase, a plane load of luggage

To confuse things, images use more memory than text, and are measured in pixels, which do relate to size, but are not the same thing. Your MacBook Pro screen is at least 1200-1500 pixels wide, so that gives you an idea...

With the kids it can be helpful to get them to think of pixels in similar ways to mm, but this will lead to confusion later as they're actually smaller, but at least it's in the right ballpark. Like the image above looks about 8 cm wide on my screen, but is actually 400 px wide, not 80mm, but because higher resolution screens have smaller pixels you can't just compare using a ruler against the screen, this is obvious to geeks like me, but to normal people this is the kind of essential information that is rarely obvious.

As a rough guide:

• 10 pixels square = tiny, the size of 1 font character, like the letter 'o' = 1kb 
• 100 pixels square = the size of about 4 desktop icons = 10kb 
• 1000 pixels square = small/standard monitor (screen) size = 1 Mb 
• 10,000 pixels square = large or 'high definition' (size of a window), high resolution image/poster = 10 Mb 

So when Googling images, a pixel size of about 500px is ideal, 50px is too small (blurry) and images in the 1000s are probably too big (takes ages to load, and display).