para el sitio en espanol, haz clic aqui.
very important: click the combination of "ctrl +" to increase the size of your computer's display (or "ctrl - to decrease it) as many times as necessary in order to fill out the entire screen. you of course don't have to do this, but the text will probably be inconvieniently small if you do not.
Hello all. Most of this site's lessons will be in Microsoft Powerpoint presentation format, so it is a must to have on your computer either the Powerpoint program or the free Powerpoint viewer. The Powerpoint files here are of the 2010 variety, which in practice means they can only be opened with Powerpoint 2007 or later. If you don't happen to have one of these versions, you can just download the free Powerpoint 2010 viewer from this link. Installing it is straightforward, but there is a short demonstration video here in case you'd find that helpful.
Once you have opened up a lesson and are inside Powerpoint, you'll see there are various audio and/or video links accompanying most slides. AV files of small size generally get embedded within the Powerpoint presentation and will therefore open right inside the program. Their stop/pause/rewind/forward control panel - along with the cursor - disappears after a few seconds (a really annoying feature that cannot be overridden), so to get it to reappear you have to shake the mouse (or your finger on the trackpad) back and forth - a lot! - to get them both to reappear. Once they reappear, you can hit the pause button to pause; hover over the volume button to see and then adjust the volume slider; and slide the progress indicator forward or backward to advance or rewind the file.
Larger AV files will not be embedded within the Powerpoint file, since to do so would cause the file to be too large for convenient downloading. Due to the vagaries of Powerpoint, when you click on an audio file link, it will force the link to trigger Internet Explorer, which will then open the file in its Quicktime plug-in, within the browser window itself. When opening a video file, however, it will trigger whatever your default player is that for that particular type of video, which on this site will almost always be .mp4. (Sorry, both my Macs are temporarily out of order - they both fry any MagSafe power supply you connect to them; I've gone through four! - so I'm not sure what happens under OS X.) When you open a video file, you just watch it - simple as that. But when you open an audio file, it is meant to accompany the visual of the presentation slide, so you need to size the audio-playing window (i.e., the Internet Explorer window) to be maximally thin from top to bottom and then move it to the top pf the screen. Then size the Powerpoint window to fill all the space below thae Explorer window. This way, you can control the audio while still viewing the slide content (rewinding and pausing the audio is something you'll often want to do). The image below illustrates this, as does this video. Sorry for the hassle -- it's a Microsoft thing! Once you do it, however, it's pretty painless from then on. Lastly, if you have other windows open, it's not a bad idea either to minimize or to close them, simply because the view is less cluttered that way.
example of audio player window made thin and placed at top of screen, with powerpoint window sized to fill what's left
