Chris Betcher

It’s that time of year when I start to get a lot of teachers at school asking me for assistance with creating an end of year slideshow of photographs of their classes, often with an intention to create a DVD that can be sent home as a memento of the year. It’s a lovely idea, and I encourage it.  The kids love it, and it’s a lovely way to finish the year. To assist with this, I thought I’d offer a few tips and suggestions on making slideshows... Start by gathering all the photos you intend to include into a single folder.  It’s much easier if all your assets are already gathered in one place before you begin working with them. Use a piece of software well suited to the task.  Although PowerPoint is often suggested, it’s a bit of a dog when it comes to putting these types of presentations together.  PowerPoint is the right tool for slideware presentations, but it’s actually not very good at doing “slideshows” with music.  The end product of PowerPoint is, well...

It seems so easy to make global connections these days. Tools like Twitter , Skype , podcasts, blogs and even good old fashioned email make it easy to build connections with others. But they also make it easy to overlook the fact that behind each tweet, IM or email there are real people. Although the online world has made us the most connected we have ever been, at the same time the sometimes faceless, disembodied nature of it can also allow us to be quite disconnected if we let it. One of the things I've really enjoyed doing over the last couple of years is to take every opportunity to make real connections with the people behind the avatars. I remember the first time I bumped into Judy O'Connell at a meeting in Sydney... although I knew of HeyJude and had read her blog for a while there was still this sense of "wow... so you ARE real!" when I finally met her. Since then, I try to make a point of meeting other members of my online world in the real world wheneve...