Using college photocopiers to podcast lecture notes and other documents
About:
This technique allows you to make copies of lecture notes and other documents, and podcast the resulting PDFs simultaneously, saving you the effort of doing these operations separately. After you've completed Stage 5 below, anyone who has subscribed to your blog will receive a PDF podcast a few moments after you have copied the documents.
| Creating the Podcast | Subscribing to the Podcast |
|---|---|
| Screencast demo | Screencast demo |
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Where do I start?
Before we have fun with the photocopiers, you will need to make some configuration changes in your Ravensbourne blog control panel:
- Add application/pdf to the list of accepted attachment MIME types, see Stage 3 of the Moblog Plugin tutorial.
- Add the photocopier's email address to the list of accepted email addresses, see Stage 4 of the Moblog Plugin tutorial.
For a list of photocopier e-mail address, see below:
Now for fun with photocopiers:
- Stage 1 - the send menu on the Canon photocopiers
- Stage 2 - email addresses with Network Add.Book
- Stage 3 - choosing a file format
- Stage 4 - send settings
- Stage 5 - send your PDF podcast
- Tips
Stage 1 - the send menu on the Canon photocopiers
Let's take a look at the main Send menu on the Canon photocopier and review what options we'll need to use with in this menu.
- Network Add.Book (Location: off centre to the left)
- File Format (Location: right hand side)
- Send Settings (Location: bottom right hand corner)
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Stage 2 - email addresses with Network Add.Book
Both the black and white and the colour copiers support emailing PDFs to your blog.
black and white copiers
By pressing on the icon illustrated below on the photocopier you can find your email address.
After pressing the Network Add.Book button on the touchscreen of the photocopier you will see a new window pop up. The best way to find your email address is to press the Name button and then type in the first few letters of your name, eg. John Smi, on the onscreen keypad. You will be presented with your address, so press on the little grey box beside your address to confirm your selection and you're done. The search function by name starts with your first name as listed in your college record. It won't search surnames alone or nicknames.
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colour copiers
The process for finding your email address on the colour copiers is a little different from the black and white ones.
Once you have pressed the Address Book/Server, you'll be presented with a new window. In the new window, press the All menu button under Address Book/Server, and at the bottom of the list press Search on Server.
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You should now see a similar window to the one described above for black and white copiers. The best way to find your email address is to press the Name button, and type in part of your name, eg. John Smi. You will be presented with your address. Press on the little grey box beside your address to confirm your selection and you're done. The search function by name starts with your first name as listed in your college record. It won't search surnames alone or nicknames.
Click on image below to enlarge:
Stage 3 - choosing a file format
Next, select a file format for your PDF podcast. On the right hand side of the Send menu select and press the File Format button. You'll see a drop down menu. For text material, you should choose PDF(OCR) as this will use optical character recognition to make your PDF readable. You can select another PDF format if your document is images rather than text.
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Stage 4 - send settings
You can find the Send Settings at the bottom right hand corner of the Send menu.
This is the last stage before sending the document to your blog as a PDF podcast. It's important to get this stage right - be careful of making typos.
- Send Doc. Name: Name PDF podcast file. It helps to pick a meaningful name - otherwise the copier will send the file with a serial number.
- Subject: Make sure you use your secret word, eg. bl3g, at the start of the subject line. See Stage 3 of the Moblog Plugin tutoral.
- Message: Anything you type in here will appear on your blog as the body of the blog entry for your podcast. It's probably best to keep it short, as typing on the on-screen keyboards isn't the fastest thing in the world! You can always edit your blog later.
Example:
| Send Doc. Name: | Final Cut Pro 101 notes |
| Subject: | bl3g Final Cut Pro 101 notes on colour settings |
| Message: | These notes are about 3 way colour correction in Final Cut Pro. |
Once you're happy with what you've typed in press the Done button.
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Stage 5 - send your PDF podcast
Press the big green button on the copier!
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After you tap the green button you'll see the screen illustrated below pop up, just press the Done button and wait a few minutes for the document to appear on your blog as a podcast. Sometimes the ORC process can take a bit of time. You can check the Send logs to make sure that your email went through. Tap the System monitor button (bottom right), the Send (middle to the left), then Log (at the top). Check that the last entry at the top has a status of '--'. This means it went through okay. Anything else, and it may have failed. If this happens, give it another go. Multiple failures might mean something is wrong, so in that case contact ICT via the service desk
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Subscribe to your blog to download your PDF podcast. For more info on how to subscribe to your blog, see subscribing to your podcast.
Tips
Here's a few things that you might find handy:
- If you you have more than one page that you want to photocopy for PDF podcast, why not make use of the automatic document feeder unit on top of the copier? It will collate all the pages that are placed on top and send out the job as a multi page PDF document. Make sure your pages are face up.
- If you have two-sided pages, you can also set the copier to scan double-sided.
- If you choose OCR for your text it allows people to cut and paste parts out into other documents.
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- If your content is image-based rather than text, you don't need to OCR the source material. Choose one of the other options under the File Format menu.
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