Week 5 Tech Tip: slideshow to gif

 So I figured out how to turn my slideshow into a gif without too much trouble! Google Slides does not have an export-as-images option, but Powerpoint does, so I exported the Slides as a ppt file, opened that in Powerpoint, exported as slides (it did it very nicely, the slides all numbered in their own folder), and then I used EZgif to convert those images into a gif, setting it to delay one second between each slide. The film is kind of ridiculously large (over 1MB just for a simple story), but that's okay: it works!

The slideshow gives people more control, but it was fun figuring out how to do this! You can see the slideshow version here: Anansi and His Grandmother.

Week 5 Microfictions: Two Anansi Stories... animated

One of the things about a 100-word story is that it can fit in a small space. Like a Google Slide! And you can set Google Slides to autoplay... so I decided to use a combination of bolding and repeated slides to create a kind of animation! I've embedded the slideshows here and set them to autoplay, but you can stop the play, restart, pause, etc. using the controls at the bottom of each slideshow. You can also advance the show manually at your own speed. :-)

Here's one story: Anansi and the Coconut (text and more about the story). You can also watch a full-screen version.

Here's another story: Anansi and His Grandmother (text and more about the story). You can also watch a full-screen version.

I'm going to publish this post now to make sure the embedding works, and go make another slideshow! :-)

Meanwhile, here's my evolving Anansi project. 

Week 5 Famous Last Words... just counting the weeks

I basically finished all the Week 5 stuff this morning, so that felt good; the next couple of weeks are really busy with all the projects coming in (good busy, for sure, but still busy), so being ahead like this helps. I do classwork on the weekends, so I should be okay... but it feels good to be ahead no matter what.

And I put up the first stories for my Indian Epics Storybook; that was really fun. I included the weird legends about Vedavati, Princess Padma, and the even more weird stories about Sita being connected to Mandodari and Ravana; here's the page: Little Known Legends about Sita. And I also used this great story about Ravana falling in love with Sita's cooking! Larger view.

Then for the microfiction this week, I did a version of The Blue Jackal. I needed to find a better fake social media generator for the Tech Tip instructions, so I found Zeoob and used that to make the image for that story; I like how that generator worked. It's definitely an improvement on the (VERY) old generator that was on the page. Here's what the Zeoob editing screen looks like:

There was so much depressing stuff in the news this week that I don't even want to think about it (like Ruth Bader Ginsburg dying... I mean, it was a miracle she as able to keep going as long as she did, but still: heartbreaking). Although there was a good thing too: I got an invitation to do a course as part of the Digital Pedagogy Lab this summer, which I am very excited about. I hope they will like the proposal I submitted for a microfiction workshop. I also had a great talk with Dr. Chuck about the LMS data privacy thing we are supposed to do for Educause in October which, gulp, just a month from now. I probably need to work on that today to figure out what we'll do next, and also get #UngradingSlowChat ready for October too.

Which is why it is good to be ahead in this class. The next few weeks are going to be busy. Too busy. Let's just hope they are also not full of tragic news and contemptible politics........

For something happy to smile at: I learned about skateboarding dogs from this tweet; I couldn't find this exact same video to put at the Padlet but I found lots of other dogs on skateboards. All so adorable! Here's the one I saw at Twitter:

It’s Friday. Trust trial and error. We move. pic.twitter.com/DwF23tkJIU

— Archiebald Browne ッ (@archiebaldmoses) September 18, 2020

Storybook Plan: Anansi in the Caribbean

For this project, I'll definitely need to write an Introduction, so that will leave time for 3 story pages, and I'll group them by topic, using stories from Anansi.LauraGibbs.net.

I'll start with Anansi and Tiger stories, and then Anansi and his family stories, and then maybe a cycle with the fish stories...? Or supernatural Anansi stories with Dry-Head and the witch...? Anyway, I'll start with Anansi and Tiger, and then see what happens next.

There is not a lot of Anansi art, but I will use some of the Pamela Colman Smith illustrations for sure! So I need to use the yams story:

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