Unimedia: Merging Text, Image, and Audio

One can also combine all three, so that one could create a class blog site where each posting displayed student work such as photographs, paintings and drawings which could each have a button for the student's voice talking about the picture. Text annotations could just as easily be included if students are able. That single Internet connected computer in most of American's classrooms could serve as the loading station for a class web site collection of rich media, easily and quickly generated by students, almost irrespective of reading ability. (These free resources for information sharing are the best gift the wealth of global corporations has ever indirectly given to public schools. Now how do we get the digital hardware onto the digital desert of student desktops so that all can use this free gift?)

If net innovators would now merge audio blogs and photo blogs, a compelling and never-seen-before form of communication, photo-radio, could emerge. But wait, blogger.com offers this capacity for free today. For a very basic media- merger example, see my iThink Blog for a unifying of text, photos and cell phone audio. Automated tools made available through blogger.com automatically inserted the media into the posting. As each media posting whether image or audio drops into its own separate posting. My role was to make a quick copy and paste of the HTML media code that Google creates with each photo or audio posting and paste it into its matching blog posting with its other media elements.

In time, such unimedia designs will include video. Because of the huge files sizes required for quality video, this development is in its early stages of problem solving.