video

7 Enlightening TED Talk Videos Every College Student Should Watch

Summer’s almost over and it’s time to get yourself into school-mode. But with the last few reserved for back- to-school shopping and last minute registration issues, you may be too swamped to think of anything else outside of school supplies and dorm room arrangements.

And we aren’t talking about the usual back-to-school preparations. We’re talking about your life as a student. Are you emotionally and mentally prepared? Can you juggle your schedule effectively, go beyond your comfort zone, adjust to different learning styles? How do you plan on staying inspired?

Because there’s no way you can buy the help and advice you’ll need at a sale, we put together a small round up of 7 timeless and highly relevant TED Talks you’ll definitely want to check out.

These will provide you with some enlightening and trustworthy guidance in your personal development as a student.

Explore Different Things And Try Something New 

College is the place to try new clubs and sports, but getting out there might have you avoiding the sign up lines. If you need a little push, look no further than this TED Talk by Google Engineer, Matt Cutts. He shares his experience on trying something new for 30 days including writing a novel, taking a picture each day, and even hiking up Mount Kilimanjaro! What will you try?

Be Prepared For The Future Job Market

As a student, you may be worrying about economic challenges waiting for you when you’re academic career is over. What will the job market have in store for you? Watch economist Andrew McAffee as he explores what future jobs will look like and offers insight on how to prepare for a highly technical job market.

Learn How To Beat Procrastination

Procrastination. It’s inevitable. The good news is that you can overcome it. Vik Nithy, co-founder of 3 companies at age 20, offers a highly motivating TEDxYouth Talk on mentally beating procrastination with a few actionable steps you can easily put into play.

Improve The Way You Communicate With Others

From speaking up in class to delivering a presentation, most of us dread talking out loud and attracting the spotlight. However, sound consultant, Julian Treasure, makes it less scary with his break down on how and by what means we use our voice to talk to each other. Watch and get some pointers on how to feel at ease before you speak.

How Will You Make Important Decisions?

In college, you’ll be faced with choices that will have an impact on your future, and whether you like it or not, the sole responsibility of those decisions will lie on you. So how do you know what the right decisions are? There’s no definite answer, but Dan Gilbert, Harvard psychologist and Happiness Expert, offers an insightful discussion on the reasons why and how we make the choices we do.

Get The 411 Behind Online Learning

Before you join up for an online class, you’ll want to hear what Peter Norvig, director of research at Google Inc., has to say. He shares his experience on approaching and implementing effective online teaching strategies that are aimed at engaging students and enhancing the way they’re being educated. This is a great talk you’ll want to keep in mind when you’re in an online class with a thousand other students.

Stay Passionate About What You Love To Do

Amidst assignments and the daily study grind, it’s easy to lose sight of your passions. Whether you’re at school for sports, music, science, or writing, you’re there because it’s what you want to do with your life.  When you forget that, listen to some words of inspiration from the author of Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert. She discusses her successes and failures, giving viewers advice on how to continue doing what they love to do.

4 Digitally Creative Ways To Share Your Thanksgiving Memories

Thanksgiving is coming up fast and you probably have a long to-do list to get your dinner menu just right. In addition, you probably also have to oversee other important things like the guest list,  seating chart,  table setting, and making sure that your guests are well accommodated, among other things. It’s no wonder that holidays are always the most stressful.

However, this holiday in particular is all about slowing things down and taking the time to appreciate the people and things around you.  And no Thanksgiving is complete without being able to share it with family and friends.

Social networks and online tools have made it easy to instantly post photos online and make updates statuses on the spot. But everyone does that. A quick post here and there won’t do your precious memories—and all the hard work and preparation, justice at all.

To help put some life into your Thanksgiving posts and shares, here are four simple ideas that can make your Thanksgiving memories stand out forever.

Create A Thanksgiving PDF Album

Although the first place you’ll post your pictures up is on Facebook, consider creating a PDF album. It will offer you a lot more options, and with Able2Extract PDF Creator you can easily customize it with all of your digitized photos and mementos.

Sonic Thanksgiving PDF Album

For instance, on top of converting your images to PDF, you can merge other pages to it with text that has been put into PDF format. This means you can add a list of what family members were grateful for, extra pages of family quotes or scanned files of the Thanksgiving dinner speech. You even attach files like digitized recipes you used for the dinner. Polish it off afterwards with things like bookmarks and customized headers.  If you collaborate with other members, you can get a scrapbook album full of great Thanksgiving memories.

Generate A GIF Movie Of Your Snapshots

We covered GIF tools last time on our blog and as you saw, GIFs can be a fun way of getting all your photos and video together.  Well, a new trend spotted on popular social network, Reddit, is all about getting full length movies into GIFs.  Why not use that same creative approach and generate a mini GIF movie of your Thanksgiving celebration?

Take play-by-play family snapshots throughout the evening and after selecting the most memorable, upload them to a GIF generator. Then customize and create your GIF to showcase them in one long sequence.  Depending on the images you have, you can come up with some awesome GIFs capturing the entire evening in less than a minute!

Use A Twitter Account & Hashtag

As much as everyone loves getting together for Thanksgiving, it might not always be possible.  But you can still share the holiday with absentee family members on Twitter, the perfect tool for keeping them updated.  For this, consider creating a dedicated account. With a long string of short updates, you’ll have an accurate time capsule of what happened specifically during your Thanksgiving event.

Twitter Thanksgiving Hashtags

Furthermore, you’ll want to use a hashtag. This will allow your family members to zero in on the stream and easily start up a twitter chat. However, be sure to use hashtags that are short and unique like your family’s last name. If not, your stream could get lost among other Thanksgiving tweets.  And don’t forget to be visual! Tweeting back and forth with snapshots and videos will add a personal, warm touch to your stream.

Get Creative With Thanksgiving Videos

Sometimes all you ever want to do during a holiday get together is film the special moments in a meaningful way. Even though you can always find some handy tips on shooting the perfect Vine and Instagram video, take the editing process up a notch before you post and share.

Instead of using standard filters, try mobile apps that can do something fun with your recordings. Try apps like PicPlayPost, which creates a video collage out of your movie clips (see demo example above), or Timelapseit that lets you create a time lapse video out of your movie.  If you film things like the dinner prepping process, the turkey carving ceremony, or family members having fun, these apps can turn them into quick shareable videos for the entire family to enjoy.

The best part of these tips is that you can use these ideas for any holiday occasion. So get creative and make the most out of your Thanksgiving posts.  Try these out and send in your posts to let us know how they turned out!

6 Awesome Examples of Multimedia PDFs

From cave paintings to paper documents, we’ve communicated ideas with static words and basic images. Yet thanks to the power of the PDF format, this is no longer the case.

Why should you limit your documents to archaic standards when you could have interactive, multimedia versions?

Learn what you can do with the PDF format. With the help of 6 awesome examples of multimedia PDFs and handy links, you can learn how to turn your boring, static documents into multimedia wonders.

1. Multimedia Portfolio

When you need to quickly show off a vast array of what you can accomplish with the PDF, there’s no easier way than in a PDF portfolio. They’re a great way to combine a number of multimedia elements into a single format.

Here’s one creative multimedia portfolio from the Washington Post and Slate Magazine that was recently published on the Adobe Acrobat Users Community (AAUC) gallery. It showcases a profile of current US President, Barack Obama, while on the campaign trail to the White House. This PDF portfolio puts campaigning on a different and more creative level.

Obama Navigation

If you’re a photographer, sound engineer or composer, you can use the AAUC to give your PDF portfolios some exposure and even get some tips on how to get it into top form. It’s a great place to browse tutorials on PDF Portfolios, find general tutorial articles or check into the forums for tips and tricks.

2.Video Elements

Movement attracts the human eye, so why not attract more eyes with videos embedded directly into your PDF files. Here’s a great PDF that puts the embedded video element center stage.

Created by Harry Hermus from dividi projects, this amazing PDF shows Pink Floyd musician David Gilmour’slive performance of “A Great Day For Freedom” embedded right into the PDF.

David Gilmour Logo

Embedding video in PDF files is not as hard you might think. You can even embed YouTube videos by downloading them and converting them to whatever compatible format you desire.

3. 3D Elements

Make that information leap off the page with 3D elements and highlights in your PDFs. With the right tools and some patience, you can even make them interactive.

In addition to a PDF Portfolio gallery, the AAUC also maintains a 3D PDF gallery for the PDF user community. Straight from the AAUC, this  showcase gives you a first hand look at how complex a PDF graphic can get. Learn how to manipulate, rotate and view a 3D graphic right in the PDF file itself.

AUC3D Gallery

For more information on creating a 3D PDF, check out the AAUC where you can find a number of handy 3D resources.

4. Interactive Flash

Flash can be implemented through a variety of ways, though many of them will require another application or tool to help create the Flash items. Adding a Flash movie is just like adding a video (see above). Take a look at these e-brochures from PDFpictures.com. You can find a number of ways to incorporate Flash videos for different projects with different goals.

PDF Pictures logo

The AAUC gives you links to add not only a splash of action to your PDF but some interactivity as well thanks to these handy tips.

5. Audio Elements

Some information is best transferred via sound. So why not hook some audio into your PDF? Find out how to effectively integrate sound with your content in this e-brochure from Uniquely Merit that showcases group vacations to a number of different countries. Cultural music specific to each country plays in the background as you turn through the pages.

eBrochures

Creating an effective atmosphere with music is a quick and simple task and only requires a few steps. Simply click Acrobat> Tools> Advanced Editing or you can attach the file via Acrobat > Document >Attach a file.

You can also do it another way where you’ll be able to add comments to the PDF as you go. This means that even if you’re not present when someone is reading your PDF you can incorporate your thoughts and voice into it. By selecting Acrobat > Tools > Commenting (or Acrobat > Comments > Commenting Tools [version dependent]) you can get access to the tools you need to record and embed your comments where and when you need to.

6. PDF as a website

Another cool use of PDFs is to use them as an entirely interactive and portable website to promote yourself and your products. Take for example dividiprojects, a PDF website geared towards “Delivering sales, marketing and communications information…effectively. They specialize in creating interactive PDFs, e-brochures and presentations.

DividiPDF navigation

With interactive buttons, videos and sound you could be saving yourself time and money by simply forgoing a standard web presence and present your potential clients and business partners with one multimedia experience that they can even view offline if need be.

Discover real world examples of awesome multimedia PDFs by checking out the ebook, Dynamic Media: Music, Video, Animation, and the Web in Adobe PDF. In this book, author Bob Connolly puts together 11 case studies illustrating the nearly limitless potential of rich media in the PDF format.

Dynamic Media Logo

Here’s the summary of the ebook to get a sneak peek.

With these tips and some practice you’ll be making some of the most mundane documents into extraordinary multimedia experiences your readers will love!