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 Our webste is the convergence of many different software packages and computer platforms.
All students in the CUNY Honors College receive a free Apple iBook G4 computer running Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger with a copy of Microsoft Office 2004 and Macromedia Dreamweaver.
At the beginning of the semester, we created a .Mac e-group in anticipation of the need to regularly collaborate as a group. In addition to regular email communications from the Project Managers and group discussions, the .Mac group enabled us to easily transfer files and function as a virtual disk to store early drafts of our website. We also used Cyberduck, an excellent--and free--FTP utility for Mac OS X, to upload files as needed.
With the large amount of multimedia we gathered on our many trips to El Barrio--photos, videos, audio interviews--we wanted to find a way to fully share our explorations. Apple's iLife software was central to our efforts. using iPhoto, we imported photos and video from our digital cameras and then organized the media into albums that we edited for the website. Using the web export feature of iPhoto, we uploaded the photos to our e-group to allow each article author to use the photos in their articles. We also exported the photos to iMovie for use in our credits movie and to Macromedia Flash, which was used to create our introduction animation and menu. Apple's GarageBand was used to score both the credits and our "fly-in from space" movie from Google Earth for Mac.
When we realized that we had gathered far more multimedia and primary source documentation than we could easily incorporate into our own articles, we decided to create a separate Media Center to share the full experience we had enjoyed. Using Apple's iWeb, we created the entire media center--podcast, photo albums, audio, and video--in approximately 20 minutes with the multimedia we had collected in iLife. With iTunes, we submitted our podcast to Apple.
The CCNY - El Barrio podcast can be found in Apple's official listing in iTunes, available for download to a computer or iPod.
For the main portion of our site, we made extensive use of Dreamweaver's templating features: we were able to make changes to our site design and instantly apply the changes to all of the pages on our site. The individual articles were written in Word and imported into Dreamweaver.
Our site design and banner were created in a brainstorming session at one of our weekly group meetings; as people suggested designs and templates, they were quickly drawn in Macromedia Fireworks and we worked together until we came up with a design that everyone was satisfied with.
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