Tees Valley Community Media

Author Archive

The first session took place today with FORCEM at Laburnam Rd Library. I discussed web 2 with the guys and talked about forcem.co.uk emails and google docs but it was going over their heads. Their focus was clearly the Cemetary and their website so we got right down to it. They created a home page, a news item and two grave records. Two down only 14000 to go! That’s right there are many more recorded graves than there are headstones. Some of it comes into data protection territory but clearly the visible headstones are public and can be recorded on the website without too much fuss. The rest can come later. When I explained to them about global positioning and media scapes to chart the cemetery and they got very excited about that.

View the website here.

Low numbers again for the MyWeb2 workshop. This week we:-

Created a spreadsheet for the Village Halls finances.
Looked at some YouTube videos.
Added a story to the website showing how all the houses narrowly escaped demolition.
Shot some video fottage using a small hand held video camera that gave people the idea of a Margove Park “walkthrough” video.
One new @margrovepark.com email was created to go through the process of new account creation.

All the tasks were recorded as a “screencast” so that participants could refer back to the processes they had learned. These videos are quite large and we are still wondering how best to use them. Too large to get many on a USB stick. Maybe we need to compress and add to the website.

A couple of people expressed and interest in being able to electronically fill in forms that can at present only be filled in on paper. We’ll look at a simple piece of free software to do this.

With the Destinations UK Online centre the hub of ticket sales and information about the internationally renowned Saltburn Folk Festival, the ICT suite was used to continue the musical theme.

Visitors from accross the country surfed the internet to find out more about the bands performing and what esle they could do in Saltburn and the area.

Groups took advantage of the
digital music workshops that were held over the weekend, learning how to record and edit music online and how to find and download Free software that could he;p them.

With some impromtu playing and singing, the centre began to resemble our own little Abbey Road!!

The first MyWeb2 session (web2 for older people) took place in margrove park this week. I know I said there was no plan but the session didn’t even go as NOT planned. Small numbers again but at least different people. The’re still dead keen to add stories to their website.

I had been downloading a widget to resize images and they jumped on the idea of “what’s this downloading malarkey”.

so they went thought the process of

1) downloading a Microsoft powertoy
2) Downloading Picasa
3) Installing both

[name] flapped about her lack of success with image downloading/uploading and we discussed htat the proper terminology had to be “transfer” (from camera to PC) I showed her how to treat the camera as an external drive and forget about the camera software thus taking charge of your own devices.

the END product is this:

http://www.tvcm.co.uk/ecol/index.php/mp_com/2007/08/09/high_veiw

A new series of workshops and delivery sessions began at Margrove Park after the community centres Internet connection was finalised with help from the UK Online SID project.

With help from the team from the University and Destinations, residents got straight into developing an on line identity for the village, downloading the software needed, installing it and working on images of the village to upload to a village webpage.

There will be a further 5 sessions looking at ICT issues that the residents have requested. With First Time Online being made available for those needing to develop or start their ICT journey, others in the groups can concentrate on other areas such as digital photography or web site design and maintenance.