I love to build slide shows. Soundslides shows more than most.

I can create slide shows in our Zope Web sites, but Soundslides allows me to integrate ambient sound from an event or location, interview audio or music into the presentation.

The Soundslides programs are available for Mac or PC and are crazy affordable. Check out the site for pricing. The starter program only runs around $40, and the advanced set-up comes in at around $70. The Soundslides Plus option has a few more bells and whistles and is well worth the extra investment. You can download a free trial of the program and give it a test drive.

There are many good tutorials online. If I can figure it out, anyone can. I’m at a pretty low bar when it comes to learning new technology.

We started our Soundslides session with a slide show using AP photos taken after a school shooting. The sound is a lil’ wacky, and not at all appropriate for the story, but you get the idea.

Soundslides is as easy as it gets for producing a slide show. Use the "sound" option, and it’s true multimedia.

A great site to visit is www4.soundslides.com/apps/utilities/. On it you can plug in the link to the folder you place on your server, and it spits out embed code to insert onto a story page. This was news to me. I used it, and it works. Real time, this would save several minutes - and much on server frustration — along the way.

For some reason, the captions are wacked out. A lot of this takes practice. Sometimes, I find, technology conspires against us.

Here's a Soundslides project created during today's afternoon session. It was all AP photos, with free music available online.

Here’s a simple Soundslides project I created in class in about 10 minutes. Doing this for my Web site, I would have listed the roses by variety, been more descriptive, found a gardener to talk a little about their care and looked around for additional info for the captions concerning the garden’s namesake, Merriam A. Brown.

The concept is simple. Create a slide show from a folder of images that tell a compelling story enhanced with sound. The registration of the images in the player is wacked. I'll get with the teach on Thursday and correct it ... I hope.