I hate MS like pure poison, but....

[Rat]

Is this something different from opening all the files in tabs in Editpad, then doing a "search and replace" on all open files? That little facility saved my bacon lots of times.

Rolfe.

Yes and no. I was surprised when I realized I couldn't do it in N++, but I'm not sure you can do it in EditPad either. I was editing lots of email signatures, and I did do a universal find and replace when editing the strapline (find "See our building awards", replace with "See our new office"). But the latter stage was to change the character encoding across all documents, so I'm not exactly finding anything (except the whole document) in the first place.

 

[Soapy Sam]

Now THAT I agree with in spades. I get these emails that just say "see attached" and I think, well tell me why I want to click on that, anyway. Or maybe you could put something in the email subject line that might give me a clue what this email is actually about?

Attachments should be for documents that are required in the format of the attachment, not for the basic text of the body of the email.

A nicely laid-out letter without unnecessary frills always makes a good impression though, and a decent word processor makes that much easier to achieve. Talking about something you're going to print out and put a stamp on, that is.

Rolfe.

Whenever possible, I still like to do those by hand.
I know. I know.

 

[Rolfe]

Have you even met Harlan Ellison?

Rolfe.

 

[psionl0]

Yes, I saw that, and I'm at the "tell me more!" stage. I haven't followed your link, as of yet.

Sorry, I missed this.

Video capture works by setting a region of the screen (the region where your powerpoint is playing) and pressing record. Everything that happens in that region will be recorded. Krut also allows you to record audio at the same time so you can chat away while playing the powerpoint at your pace. The finished product is saved in a file called, movie.mov.

I have used krut for such things as recording a poker game I played on facebook etc.

 

[psionl0]

It's not just in teaching - no one in business seems able to give a presentation about anything without copious slides (often animated!!) repeating what they are saying. I've often interrupted such presentations by asking will they be covering anything not on their slides and if not just email me the file and stop wasting their and mine time as I can read. A slide presentation should add something to a presentation that talking can't it should not be the presentation!

Power point has gotten a poor reputation because of practices like this.

However, used properly, it is a powerful educational aid. A few choice diagrams/animations and a pointer make teaching more effective than ever. Powerpoint even has the option to print slides in note form where each slide includes space for students to write their own notes.

It's all good.

 

[Rolfe]

It was our college policy to provide students with three-slides-to-the-page handouts like that for their own notes. For a small class, with pathology photos on the slides, I'd splash out on colour copies. For that reason, I tried to make sure that the major take-home points of the lecture were included in the slides. (I also use these handout pages myself to make reminder notes to myself for use during the lecture - and then never look at them.)

Now, though, we've quit that because they can just download them on to their own computers, and see the pictures even better. And if they want hard-copy printouts, they can make them themselves. And pay for them themselves. It's all good!

Put PowerPoint together with Google Images, and it's a lecturer's dream. Almost anything I want to illustrate, and I can find a picture or a diagram online. It's fantastic. I just imagine what I want, google it, and copy/paste. Much of it is material posted online by other educational institutions. I've seen the situation where I had the luxury of choosing from four or five different schematics of the life cycle of a particular parasite, and picking the one I liked best.

Once, I happened to be the one to find the first-ever case in the country of a disease we'd never seen before. It was at the end of a long day and at the time I had no idea what it was. The last thing I was doing was stopping to take photos. Then a colleague from England told me what it was, when I described it to him. I had to do a presentation to the other vets in the Scottish disease surveillance service to tell them about it. It was lavishly illustrated - because a number of people who had already encountered the disease had posted material about it.

It took me about half an hour to put the PowerPoint together. It was a cracking good way of disseminating the material. And after I'd done the presentation, it was put on our own internal server for reference. There's no way I could have produced anything so effective without PowerPoint.

And do take a look at the first few slides of the Lockerbie presentation that started all this. It's not even pathology, or science, but seven of the first ten slides have images. How do you get that sort of thing over just standing there with a blackboard and a piece of chalk?

Rolfe.