By Trent Shields, Secretary BCFTOA
Information sharing is an integral part of our association and in particular, is my mandate as the secretary and webmaster for the BCFTOA. To that end I’ve written this article to help you share your valuable information with our members. I imagine that many of you have some stuff hiding in you offices that can benefit others, but are unsure about what we want and how to send it. Never fear, I shall explain. This is part one of a two part series, I’ll be posting the other part in the next newsletter and on the site as well.
Every department must have written procedures dealing with almost every task that your department may perform. You can write these guidelines yourself, but often someone else has already written some thing very close to what you are looking for. We are hoping to get a collection of these sample Departmental Operating Guidelines (DOG’s) to help you, our member’s produce these documents for your department.
Lesson plans are essential to effective training, but making new and exciting lesson plans is difficult and time consuming. How better to spruce up your presentation then to use someone else’s plan. The guys will appreciate a different slant on the subject and you’ll enjoy having something different to do. Share your favorite lesson plans and borrow some of the plans that we collect here.
PowerPoint has become an essential tool in the hands of a trainer. We all have some presentations that we use to support our lessons and make the class time a little more enjoyable. If you have a presentation that you are proud of, pass it along.
Knowledge and experience are very easy to lose. Experienced fire fighters move on, they retire and or pass away. Often you have something valuable to share with the rest. From the simple howto on building a training prop to a treatise on strategy and tactics, this knowledge can be collected and disseminated. Send them forth, gain a little immortality by publishing your thoughts.
Experience teaches! Share your fire tales, lessons learned, mistakes made, they all improve our understanding of the beast that we fight. You can send me pictures, word docs, power point slide shows. We all have some war stories out there.
I can read any of the common word processor files that you may send me. Microsoft Word and WordPerfect are two of the most common processors used today.
Most trainers today have power point in their arsenal. If that’s true, then feel free to send me your power point files. However, you must pay attention to the size of the files. Power point files can get exceptionally large and will not go through the e-mail easily. If you can, break presentations up into two or more files of no more that 1 MB each and send them that way. You can also “zip” them up so that transmission will be easier. I’ll get into zipping files a little later in this article.
Most of you have dealt with digital pictures by now, or have had pictures sent to you from friends and colleagues. There are some issues that have to be addressed when sending pictures. First of all, let’s define a few terms for you.
Resolution: refers to the dots per inch (dpi) used to display the image. The higher the dpi, the bigger the file size and the more detail retained.
| JPEG: [J(oint) P(hotographic) E(xperts)
G(roup).]
|
Size: The size of the image, usually expressed in pixels( the smallest discrete element of an image or picture on a CRT screen (usually a single-colored dot); "the greater the number of pixels per inch the greater the resolution"), is how large the image will be when displayed or printed. Most digital cameras now can produce high-resolution pictures expressed in megapixels ie: 3.2MegaPixels, 2MegaPixels, etc… These high-resolution photos will be quite large. A 3MegaPixel image will be 2048 x 1536 pixels (28.4 x 21.3 inches) and will be 1.27MB’s in file size. As you can see in the table below, the quality and the size of the photos cover a wide range. Generally, the jpeg algorithm compresses the file size by removing extra information from an image ( ie reducing the number of colours used) and using a short hand to describe whole blocks of pixels. This leads to a grainy, less detailed picture. We have to balance our need for quality with our bandwidth constraints.
| 3M (2048 x 1536) |
28.4” x 21.3” |
Print quality |
| 2M (1600 x 1200) |
22” x 16” |
Lesser print quality |
| 1M (1280 x 960) |
17” x 13” |
Good e-mail size / quality |
| 0.3M(640 x 120) |
8.9” x 6.7” |
Internet quality |
| Web (350 x 240) |
4.8” x 3.6” |
Web quality |
vt. [primarily MS-DOS] To create a compressed archive from a group of files using PKWare's PKZIP or a compatible archiver. Its use is spreading now that portable implementations of the algorithm have been written. For windows, the best package is winzip found online at http://www.winzip.com. It will handle all of your zip needs.
Now that we know about jpegs, zip files, and others, let’s discuss file size and transmission. Most e-mail servers will choke on files bigger than 1 megabyte in size. Because of this limitation, we need to compress our files as much as possible before we e-mail them. Split groups of pictures up into several zip files under 1 MB in size. These zip files can then be sent in individual emails.
This has been just a primer to get you started. Next issue we’ll discuss article size, excerpts, links and citations. Hope to hear from you.
Trent Shields