Building Your Digital Storytelling Toolkit

As the semester progresses, you'll find yourself creating accounts on various Web sites/services as well as downloading and installing some open-source software. This page serves to aggregate in one location the sites, services, and software that you're likely to explore for the course. Feel free to start working with any of these before we encounter them on the syllabus. Feel free to also write up additional help/instructions/tutorials as you work with these resources yourself:

Sites Where You Should Get an Account

 * Delicious is a social bookmarking site that you will have to use in order to contribute to the DigStoUMW Collective. If you have a Yahoo! account, you can use it to access Delicious. Otherwise you'll need to set up an account.
 * More about Delicious
 * Twitter is a micro-blogging site that allows you easily stay in touch with friends and followers. There are tons of Twitter clients that you can install so that you can update your Twitter status from, literally, and device.
 * UMW Blogs is the University's Wordpress-based publishing platform. While you'll be setting up your own blog for the course (on your own Web-space with your own domain), I still recommend you get a UMW Blogs account. For one thing, you will need it in order to edit any wiki-based assignments that we'll be doing. (The UMW Blogs Wiki using UMW Blogs accounts.)
 * Flickr is an image sharing service that allows you upload a fair amount of photos/images for free on a monthly basis. Flickr has a number of cool features built right into it: editing with a toolkit called Piknic, geotagging, collections and sets, bulk editing, multiple sizes for download, etc.
 * YouTube is a video sharing services that allows you to upload a fair amount of video for free. Once you upload videos onto YouTube you can easily embed them on any page (including pages on your blog). Recently, YouTube also added services so that you annotate/caption videos.
 * More about YouTube


 * Aviary is a suite of online software applications for creating just about anything. Aviary let's you create/edit images, music/audio, vector graphics, and video. The software lives in the "cloud" so you don't need to install (or buy) anything -- you work right in the browser.

Software You May Want to Install

 * Firefox is a free Web browser that you should become familiar with. Not only is it very stable and standards-compliant, it allows you to extend its functionality thorough the addition of addons.
 * More about Firefox
 * Chrome is another free Web browser that is also very stable and standards-compliant. It also allows you to use extensions to add functionality.
 * More about Chrome
 * Audacity is an open-source audio editing application. It's pretty easy to use and has a fairly robust feature set. Please note that if you want to be able to open/export audio in MP3 format from Audacity, you'll need to install an additional (free) add-on called LAME.
 * Jing is free software that you can use to capture still images or video of your computer screen. It's great for easily creating screencaptures or screencasts (up to five minutes).
 * HandBrake is a free, open-source program that will take files from an unencrypted DVD, as well as other high quality video sources, and convert them into mpeg4 videos.
 * More about Handbrake
 * VLC Media Player is a program to play a wide array of video file formats as well as act as a video streaming server.
 * More about VLC
 * GIMP is a free image editing program that works on Mac, PC, and Linux. It allows you to do image retouching, editing, and composition much like Adobe Photoshop. You can also use it to make animated gifs.