Office applications » DigGeog

Audio labels on photographs using PowerPoint

Office applications, Photographs 2 Responses »

Jan 112006

It’s an old technique – but fun nevertheless. Take a photograph, for example this picture of a high rise block in West London.

Now copy the picture into PowerPoint. Plug a microphone into your PC and get students to add their voice annotations using the Insert / Movies and Sounds / Record Sound path. The results can be interesting.

Download a Powerpoint file
View the slideshow and click the audio icons to hear the student’s impressions of life in the Trellick Tower.
This file was made by a group of Year 7 students studying the topic of settlement. The students themselves are from a small rural town in Somerset, UK.

Spreadsheets using web queries

Office applications 2 Responses »

Dec 282005

This was recently mentioned in an SLN thread. I have put together a simple spreadsheet to plot wave buoy data at the Sevenstones lightship. Using a spreadsheet to harvest the latest data in this way is a compelling prospect, however at present I can’t think of a practical application!

Open the spreadsheet and select “enable macros”. After a few seconds the graph will change automatically to reflect the current readings from the lightship.
Click on chart to download spreadsheet
wave chart