using smil in online professional learningIn June 2013 I gave a talk on how a W3C standard called Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) is being used by a number of my clients, mainly teaching associations in Victoria. For these clients I've been turning PowerPoint slides into SMIL presentations that includes the recorded audio from the session, and the PowerPoint slides as images. My talk also touched on how SMIL presentations like this can be used in Joomla!, in conjunction with Community Builder and CB Subs, to set up a system that allows you to grant access to particular subscribers, for a particular amount of time.

Although I demonstrated this on a Mac, and used Joomla! as the content management system, this could easily be created on a PC, and uploaded to a static website, or into another content management system.

I recorded this talk, and now I've edited it and turned it into a SMIL presentation, using the process referred to in the talk, which can be played in Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Internet Explorer 10. View the SMIL presentation here. If you are using an earlier verison of Internet Explorer there is a Flash video version of the presentation available. As mentioned in the presentation, this is only a very small part of what you can do using SMIL it is intended to demonstrate a quick process that can be used to turn a face to face presentation into an online resource.

As promised at the end of the session, I have compressed all of the associated files into a single file which you can use as a template for your own presentations. Download the files here. Alternate version of the presentation View an abbreviated version of the presentation here. You can download the associated files here.

Resources

My presentations use timesheets.js. Download the javascript and demonstration files at http://tyrex.inria.fr/timesheets/. Take some time to browse through this site. Be sure to check out the examples on the Slideshow Engine tab - they show much more of the capabilities of SMIL than my presentation does. For information on which audio formats are used by different browsers and devices  see http://html5doctor.com/html5-audio-the-state-of-play/ See http://fortuito.us/diveintohtml5/video.html for information about browser support for video formats. There are lots of free, or low cost, resources for converting audio and video into the necessary formats for SMIL presentations. These are some of the resources I use: