Web Construction with FrontPage:
General Issues,
Creating/Opening Locally
Opening "Live",
The Editing Environment/Themes,
Fonts and Text Editing,
Whole-page formatting,
Placing Images,
Tables,
Hyperlinks and Menus,
Website Structure, and
Publishing your Site,
Classroom uses
Multimedia on the Web:
The Playing Field
Images
Music and Sound
Video
"Fair Use" and Copyright
Streaming on the Web
Image
Sources
Multimedia and PowerPoint:
PowerPoint Animations
Sound and Music
Video
The Web Applied:
Elsewhere on this site:
General
Instructional Technology
Presentation/Web
Imaging
Sound
Video,
Home
 |
 |
 |
 |
Images,
Music, Movies,
and
the World Wide Web: The Playing Field |
| Standard disclaimer: I have used most of that which is reviewed below, but there are certainly dozens of other solutions/hardware/applications which may be just as good, if not better. If you know of such solutions, email me at jjones@fayette.k12.ky.us and tell me, so I may be enlightened as well, and can include your offering below. If you choose to simply snipe behind my back, I hope all your web site work to be vacuous and ignored! Bah! |
The school website is a resource that is beginning to show it’s potential. It can provide curricular and classroom resources, basic information about your school, and a first-stop for communications between your school and other interested parties. It can also provide a display of the classroom or extra-curricular activities and successes. To provide the full breadth of such information, media beyond the printed word is required.
This document will address the technical side of posting multimedia in its simplest form: ordinary files for examination or download. When someone visits your school web page, you have two needs that we will address here: (1) everything has to work, and (2) it has to work as quickly as possible, with as light an impact as possible to the network.
Obviously, the methods below can be used to digitize and post any sound or video source. In general, web posting of copyright-protected material is not covered under the definition of “fair use” (see Apendix B), and should be avoided.
Making
it work.
It will be presumed you know how to set up a web page, how to place a simple image in a page, and how to create a hyperlink. For the most part, the easiest way to include sound and video files in your website is to use ordinary clickable links - that is, provide an icon, picture, or description and aim an associated hyperlink at the file itself stored within your website file structure. For example, an MP3 sound file named “Soundfile.mp3” could be delivered to a user visiting the Bryan Station website by simply using the hyperlink
http://www.bshs.fayette.k12.ky.us/soundfiles/soundfile.mp3
If done that way, the browser will simply call
on a plug-in (usually Windows Media Player) to do the work of playing the file,
perhaps asking the user whether they want to open it or save it first. This
crude method removes any need to add web server capabilities, or concern over
browser-specific issues. There are
certainly other ways of doing this, but be wary – FrontPage’s menu options
are frequently browser-specific, and hence, if you have parents or students
using other browsers than Internet Explorer, things won’t work for them. Using
the above method sidesteps this.
Making
it quick:
The speed of transfer of your website from the web server to the client workstation is influenced by two things: the size of the pipeline (called bandwidth), and the amount of stuff in the pipe (called traffic). The folks at FCPS has done their best to provide enough bandwidth for us to do our thing, but for our purposes, we must assume that bandwidth is fixed – that is, we can’t increase the size of the pipe.
Hence we have a responsibility – both to maximize our own site’s download speed, and to minimize impact on other traffic at the FCPS web servers - to watch what we do to traffic.