Lesson 9: Innovative and creative use of digital technology (First Day)

 March 17th, 2021

During this class, we talked about the different types of digital multimedia such as, text, images, graphics, videos, animations and sounds. There is also interactive multimedia for user interaction such as test, social networks, etc. We also looked into the types of images one of them being Bitmap (raster). It is a rectangular grid of pixels (points of colour), which depends of resolution. For example: 5x2 px image -> 5 columns and 2 rows = 10 pixels. For the Bitmap there are compressed versions such as gid (web), jpeg / jpg (print), png, tiff, etc. and uncompressed versions such as bmp, raw and psd. The next type of image that we talked about is vector images. Vector images form shapes (bézier curves, polygons, which have different associated attributes) defined mathematically, they are independent of the resolution. Some examples are PDF, PS and EPS. 

There are also sound file formats that are without loss thus, high quality, such as WAV and AIFF, FLAC - free, ALAC and APE. Other examples such as MP3, AAC, OGG vorbis - free or WMA are sound files but they loose more quality. The video file formats are MPEG, H.264, MPEG-4, DIVX, FLVo SWF, AVI, WMV, and many more. And finally, we talked about podcasts and where we could access them such as the online platform of iVoox. 

Later on in class, we discovered myApps as we have a lot of softwares that are available to us through the university platform. We learned how to access these apps through using our username and password and how to download it on our computers. 

To use one specific software one needs to: 

1. Search the software in MyApps 
2. Click on the software icon 
3. Go to the downloads folder and double click on the icon of the downloaded software, if it asks you which program to open it with, choose ”vWorkspace” 
4. If you choose GIMP (ESP) or Hotpotatoes/Jclick in Spanish will be opened a new desktop with all the software for the subject ICT in education.

For the individual assignment we had to use MyApps to access GIMP and edit some images in the app to learn how to access all of the possibilities in that specific app. First, we had to download the folder with the images from aula virtual. We had to open the image in GIMP. Add a title, move it and zoom in/out. We had to paint, change color pencil and apply a filter to the image. Afterwards, we had to save it and export the image in the GIMP file format (xcf) and in jpg. XCF is a file extension for an image file native to GIMP, and so it only can be opened by this software. And a JPG image can be opened by any software or by different software editors such as PowerPoint, word, etc. and by web pages, etc. JPG stores the resulting image, while XCF stores all the GIMP project information (filters, part images, titles, drawings, filters, etc). If we wanted to change a text or a filter from the XCF file we could, but not from the JPG file.

Below we can observe the first image that I edited:

Furthermore, we had to do something else with the other two images we had downloaded. We had to open image 2 and 3. Cut image using the free selection tool, selection and cut it. Go to the previous image and create new layer, paste selection, change the size of the new image and finally, when it was how I wanted it, save and export the image. Below we can observe the finally product of the second and third image together and the documents that were exported and downloaded:

Overall, throughout this lesson I learnt a lot about the use of myApps and how to edit on GIMP. I also, got to know different ways of downloading the images and the use of each format. This way we can make use of such apps and platforms to explain our didactic unit. We can use GIMP and other apps to create digital images and edits and make them more visually appealing.