Welcome to Doc's Power Bytes

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Power Bytes are a series of little tutorials to do little technology "things."  They have been developed in response to a need - whether someone asks me repeatedly how to do something and I decide show-and-tell is easier or I have assigned a project for class and need to provide some background about how to complete the project.

Some have turned into rather large tutorials - like how to use Photo Story 3; others are very short - like how to convert a PowerPoint presentation into JPGs for use in a digital story.

The list of tutorials and Power Point presentations is below, by topic. They are all licensed under the Creative Commons license and can be freely used and modified as long as you include attribution for the original work - (that would be me).

The list is added to as I complete a new tutorial - which is fairly frequently. So, check back often. You can also request a tutorial be developed by sending me an email (address below). If I find that it will be useful and I have time, I will be happy to develop a tutorial for you.  In the meantime, I hope you find these useful.

Elluminate Tutorials

Viewing Archives in Elluminate - Brief rough draft of movie to find archived sessions.

Using Features in Elluminate Live Classroom - An introduction ppt (2003)  pptx (2007)

How to set up Elluminate in BlackBoard.

MTT Tutorials

Adding Formulas to Spreadsheets - This brief tutorial will show you two different ways to add simple multiplication to the cells in your spreadsheet.

FACTS of Design - How to use the FACTS of Design web tool.

Editing Images

Optimizing images - How to crop, resize and optimize images for Internet using free PhotoFiltre.

Digital Storytelling

Visual Literacy - PowerPoint presentation that discusses the power of visual literacy.

Wavepad - Introduction to Wavepad, a free (and extremely easy to use) audio editing program; links to download as well as a detailed tutorial are provided. While not as full-featured as Audacity, Wavepad will allow you to edit songs, mix audio tracks, fade-in, fade-out, add sound effects and more. Small enough to be loaded onto your flash drive and used anywhere.

Photo Story 3 Manual

Photo Story 3 - Step by step guide to creating a digital story using Photo Story 3.

Saving PowerPoint slides as JPGs - How to convert PowerPoint slides into JPGs to use in Photo Story 3, Movie Maker or photo editing programs.

Click here for more on digital storytelling.

PowerPoint Design, Effective - PowerPoint presentation that covers specifics on creating a professional and attractive PowerPoint presentation.

Finding and Using Scholarly Resources - PowerPoint presentation discussing scholarly resources and how to use library resources to locate scholarly resources.

Searching for Scholarly Resources - By Kathy Carter and Janice Butler.  A PowerPoint that will guide you through finding the scholarly resources in the online databases.

Open Source Resources - Presentation presenting URLs and descriptions of open source programs that can be used in the Windows operating system environment.

Uploading to Komodo - Step-by-step directions on uploading to the Komodo server using desktop drag and drop feature in Explorer 7.

PB Wiki Tutorials

Reformatting to get consistent fonts in PBworks wiki - How to get around the bugginess of different font sizes and faces in PBworks

Uploading to PBWiki - How to upload a photo and biogrpahical sketch to course PB wiki.

Uploading Video to PBWiki - How to upload your video into the course PB wiki.

Power Bytes are tutorials provided for the MTT program and students at the University of Texas at Brownsville.
© 2007 Janice Wilson Butler

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.