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Using Images – Good, Better, Best.

When creating materials and News items for your online classrooms, consider using images to draw attention to your postings.  A natural “chunking” of information can be achieved with strategic placement of a few key images within lengthy sections of text.
sun Good: A simple piece of clip art or a photo related to the season or holiday will add interest to your announcements and will provide an updated, current feeling to the classroom.  Images of students participating in the learning process can impart a sense of academic community and engagement.  Pictures of the campus will encourage familiarity with various buildings, and can foster a greater sense of belonging.

 

spanish cafe Better:You can increase the value of adding graphics by having images relate directly to the field of study. For example, a course in Spanish could utilize images from various aspects of Spanish cultures: city streets, homes, market places, etc.  Courses in the College of Nursing could integrate images of medical personnel performing various tasks or using innovative equipment.

 

Mold aspergillus

Mold aspergillus

Best: The ideal use of images is to enhance the learning process by providing actual examples with a narrative, description, or explanation.  A microbiology course could provide full color enhancements of various bacteria, fungi, protozoans, or viruses.   These electronic images viewed within an online classroom offer greater detail and clarity than those displayed on a screen at the front of a lecture hall and can be used for review by students.

 

Optimizing Images: Images used for web-viewing do not need to be extremely high resolution, nor should they be.  Cropping and resizing them in PowerPoint or a Word document does not reduce the file size. Images have to be edited in a specialized program (such as Adobe Photoshop), and then placed into the file. For example, an image that is 200 x 150 will cover about one-fourth of your screen.  Images to be used in News posting can be much smaller.

Consider that a 12 megapixel digital camera produces images approximately 4272 x 2848 pixels.  Images used in your course Content should not exceed 1024 x 768 pixels.  In comparison, PowerPoint slides are set to 1000 x 750.  As you can see, there may be a need to optimize many of the images you would like to use.

For free image-editing online, go to   http://www.picnik.com/

Regards,  Dr. Jill
Jonnie “Jill” Phipps, Ph.D.
Curriculum Designer

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Swimming Lessons

Swimming in the same pool – community sites flourishing

The Springboard team has created numerous sites for different groups that wanted to have their own online space to conduct their business and share resources. Here are a few examples: