Writing a slideshow program

I have spent much time lately writing JavaScript and JQuery code with a JQuery plugin called cross-slide to make a slideshow on my class wiki. I looked at many other slideshows including some I had used before like PowerPoint and decide they were not right. I wanted a solution that was easy to add photos and captions to, I did not want students to be uploading photos, just cut and paste from the web. I also wanted the Ken Burns effect. When I saw it, it makes the show more Attention grabbing by it's movement. I also wanted scrolling captions. I have these now. However the students still are not doing their best work.
I can also print out a strip of photos I have loaded myself so the students can write cations or correct theirs.

I am getting quicker at preparing resources for making a slideshow but need to make the resources easier for the students to use.
I need to focus now on getting students to self-assess and correct their work.

On the cloud, but not yet cloud 9

Last week I solved the problem of the student's difficulty with sharing and accessing the digital stories they wrote by getting them to work in the cloud. I wrote some JavaScript in a wiki page that allowed them, when editing the page, to copy photos from the net to a table then to write captions for each slide. Then, when they viewed the page they saw a slide show with captions. They had no trouble doing this.
This weekend I spent a lot of time improving the look of the slideshow using jQuery and crossslide plugin to produce a Ken Burns effect and a continuous running show that looked like a YouTube. I can't wait to see if the students relate better to this than the PowerPoint like show they had last week. JQuery is a very clever JavaScript library that makes JavaScript work on all browsers and gives special effects like animation. I did something like this years ago using DHTML, but this was so much easier. It was easier to understand jQuery because I had learnt about object literals last year in finding out about JSON.


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