Visiting Union and Doin’ Some Googlin’

Today, I get to spend the day at Union University with Dr. Anna Clifford’s classes. Anna is always so generous and invites me to come visit with her students and share a little of my knowledge with them. For the past few times, we’ve been concentrating on Google Docs. But I think I’m going to throw in a little Wordle this time, too.

Below are the links and resources we’ll be using from my Resource Wiki hosted at PBWorks.

1. Using Google Docs word processor
2. Using Google Docs presentations
3. Using Google Docs spreadsheet
4. Creating forms and quizzes with Google Docs forms

And hopefully, we’ll have time to do a little Wordle, too, to see how we might use Wordle during class.

Trusting your school with the technology may become the issue

Big Brother is watching … only it’s your vice principal.  If you thought that getting technology into schools was the primary issue or even getting teachers to integrate was bigger.  This might change your mind.  By way of Mashable, I heard about this story:

BoingBoing reports that a recent case filing in Robbins vs. Lower Merion School District, a Pennsylvania school, is a class action suit on behalf of students with school-issued laptops whose webcams have been used to watch the students and their families at home.

It was discovered that the laptops issued by the high school contained software allowing administrators to covertly activate the on-board webcam. The plaintiff, Blake J. Robbins, was disciplined by the school for “improper behavior in his home.” The evidence of said impropriety was brought forth by the school vice principal, who displayed a photo of Robbins taken by the laptop’s webcam.

This was also reported on HLN this morning as well.  The level of weird and creepy in this is enough to require a shower.  This is oddly reminiscent of an episode of Criminal Minds minus the serial killer, FBI, and quirky characters.  Who knows?  Maybe we’ll see the quirky characters unfold in this story?  But I don’t believe we’ll like them as much as Garcia, Hotch, and Reid.

5 questions for Tungle

Recently, I started testing out Tungle, a calendaring system that syncs, schedules meetings, and allows others to schedule a meeting within your calendar.  Tungle had some questions for me to consider, so I thought I’d blog about them and my experience.

1. What made you decide to start Tungling?

I was looking for a calendaring system that would sync on my Mac with Entourage and Exchange, and I really like the ability to schedule meetings.  Scheduling meetings is a great option for my students, where I can say, “These are the times I have open.  You pick what works for you.”  Hat tip to Profhacker blog for the info.

2. What’s one thing we do better than any other productivity app out there?

Definitely, Tungle seems to do the syncing with Entourage and Exchange and publish it to the Web.

3. What’s one thing we could do to create a better experience for you?

I would like to be able to publish my calendar privately.  This is where I don’t necessarily want my calendar of availability published openly on the web, but I would like to publish it with a passcode that I could provide to my students or another colleague to view my calendar and schedule a meeting.

4. Do you refer Tungle.me to others?  If yes, why?

I haven’t yet; I’m still testing Tungle out.  But I’m starting to like it, and I’m blogging about it.

5. What would you Google to find an app like Tungle.me?

I’d be searching for “schedule a meeting” or “sync calendar entourage exchange.”

So, there you go.  In the past, I’ve been using MeetingWizard to schedule meetings.  But Tungle is an app that offers some integration with my existing workflow…and that’s always better.

Image from http://blog.tungle.com/.a/6a00e54efda71188330120a888d337970b-320wi

3 predictions I agree with and 3 I don’t … and why

A new year is upon us and thus we should take time to examine some of the potential changes that the year 2010 will bring. Examining potential changes is important because technology is in a constant state of change and so are the lives of those involved with instructional technology. Although this blog post will not attempt to take on all the predicted changes in instructional technology for the year 2010, this post will examine three 2010 predictions I agree with and three that I do not.

I Agree With….

At the beginning of this year, staff members and contributors to eLearn Magazine each described some of their predictions for the year 2010. The first prediction that I agreed with was from Stephen Downes who predicts that the demand for online learning will increase from both the private sector and traditional institutions. I agree with this prediction because the current economic crisis and job situation will compel citizens to take on new positions and roles, requiring them to learn new knowledge and skills. I also agree with Mark Notess’ assessment that higher education institutions will make greater movements towards open source solutions. I agree with Mr. Notess because the economy is forcing many higher education institutions to cut costs wherever they can and because open source options are becoming more accepted and understood by the technological community. Finally, I agree with Jim Hendler’s prediction that the technology gap between students and teachers will continue to expand and widen. I agree with Mr. Hendler because student’s technological exposure and experience continues to grow while many teachers technology learning remains stagnant or does not increase at the rate in which new technologies are developed.

I Don’t Agree With…

From the same eLearn Magazine article, I do not agree with Roger Schank’s prediction that mobile e-learning will go away. I believe that as mobile technologies increase, so will opportunities to learn from mobile devices. I believe that just-in-time learning will become a major form of e-learning on mobile devices. I also do not agree with Hend S. Al-Khalifa’s prediction that portable devices like Smart phones and Nintendo DS systems will make their way into traditional classrooms. I do believe that learning opportunities will increase on devices like these; however, to be implemented into the classroom there would need to be more teachers willing to teach using these devices. I do not think that many teachers are ready to make this leap yet. The final prediction I do not agree with comes from Ignatia Webs. I do not agree with the prediction that pedagogy will overtake technologies role as front and center of innovative learning. I believe that pedagogy should become the primary focus of innovative learning, however technology still offers so much motivation and interest that technology will remain in its central role.

Guest blogger: Jeremy Larson is a 7^th and 8^th grade American History teacher at Grace- St. Luke’s Episcopal School in Memphis, TN. He received his Bachelors degree in Elementary Education (K-8) at St. Cloud State University in St. Cloud, MN. While at SCSU, Jeremy also received specialties in Instructional Technology and Social Studies Education. Jeremy is currently working towards his Masters degree in Instructional Design and Technology at the University of Memphis. He is interested in K-12 technology integration and helping school districts bring technology into the classroom.

Image courtesy of iLounge at http://www.flickr.com/photos/ipodlounger/4310067280/

Plug-in to Dreamweaver: Adobe BrowserLab

Today, from the Adobe Education Technologies blog, Brian Chau mentioned how much he liked trying Adobe BrowserLab:

I like the idea of being able to test how the CSS will render on different browsers/platforms without having to have all these browsers and versions be installed on my machine. One feature I particularly like is the ability to display not just a side-by-side comparison of the page render on 2 different browsers, but to display the 2 renders on top of each other as onion skins. It is amazing that sometimes 2 CSS renderings may seem to look identical on different browsers. Yet when put on top of each other, the pixel shift becomes apparent.

I’ve heard of BrowserLab in the last couple of months or so and gave it a try.  At the site, however, I didn’t catch on that you could download the plug-in to make it work inside of Dreamweaver.  That’s pretty cool.  At the site, Adobe says that free preview is for a limited number of users.  So, I encourage you to give it a try and get in on the freebie version while you can.

It works similar to the way that BrowserShots works (which was having some time-out difficulties when I tried them today). Not to worry, though, designm.ag offers up a little of 10 resources to help you preview browser renderings (including BrowserShots).

Have you tried any of these guys out or downloaded the BrowserLab plug-in?

How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?

Well, now you can. Cloud computing has been a popular resource in the scientific research community because of its tremendous computing power. The amazing realm of cloud computing is now being used widely in the education sector. The reasons for its popularity are the ease of management, availability of consolidated resources and infinite computing power.  Before we go any further about the aspects of cloud computing that make it an invaluable resource for education, let us find out what is cloud computing.  As Christopher Dawson points out, it is “lots of computers somewhere (we don’t actually care where) doing lots of processing to deliver services to our desktops via the Internet”.  It provides computer applications to users without the need for them to purchase, install, or support software on their local computers and/or servers.

There are three key features of cloud computing. They provide Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). This implies that not only is the software hosted on a remote computer, but data are stored remotely too. These features indicate large financial benefits to educational institutions apart from the high scalability due to its infinite storage capacity and the ability for users to collaborate and access data and applications anytime, anywhere.

Cloud computing, which is touted as the next big thing in education, already has found many takers in the K-12 education sector as well as in higher education. Thomas Bittman from the  Gartner Group voices the opinion of many technology coordinators for K-12 education when he writes “cloud computing will definitely have an impact on enterprise IT – but the impact on our educational system will be astounding”. Professors at UC Berkley used cloud computing, instead of the Berkley-owned infrastructure, as part of an undergraduate course. They found that the students found it easy and faster to work with. Another promoter of cloud computing, William Hurley at InfoWorld, in an open letter to President Obama, has asked “for a government-funded computing cloud for use by all colleges and universities”. According to him, not only will such a move provide wider access to this technology, but it also will “dramatically improve our collaboration and innovation as a nation.”

As with every technology, this one comes with its bag of issues too. Security and reliability pose a big threat as it lies with the cloud provider. As security guru Bruce Schneier accurately articulates, “Be careful who you trust, be careful what you trust them with, and be careful how much you trust them. Outsourcing is the future of computing. Eventually we’ll get this right, but you don’t want to be a casualty along the way.”

Almost all the computing giants offer cloud computing options for educators. Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Microsoft’s Azure Services Platform, Google’s App Engine, IBM’s Cloud Academy and a host of open source computing tools like Sun Microsystems and Nimbus are few of the many options available. So are you ready to take your teaching to the next level?

Guest Blogger: Prashanthi Selvanarayanan is a former web developer at Arizona State University. After completing her Professional Masters in Computational Biosciences, she was involved in developing online assessment and homework delivery systems for higher education. She is currently pursuing her Masters degree in Instructional Design and Technology at the University of Memphis. She plans to be an e-learning and training developer in the corporate sector.

TETC 2009: Wednesday sessions

Wow! I’m so excited to be in Nashville at the Tennessee Educational Technology Conference.  It’s been a few years since I’ve been back to TETC, but I’m ready to meet and share with some great teachers, administrators, and technology coordinators/coaches from across Tennessee.

I’ll presenting two sessions today: one on managing communications in online courses and one on project-based learning.  All of my resources and links are linked up below to make them easy to get to.  Please let me know if you have any questions.

W63-Tips for Managing Communications in Online Courses (1:30 – 2:30pm, Ballroom C)

Here are the links to the web pages with details for all of the topics we’ll discuss:

1. Tips for Online Course Management
2. Tips for Asynchronous Communications
3. Tips for Synchronous Communications

W84-The Secrets to Project-based Learning (2:45 – 3:45pm, Ballroom C)

Here is the link to web page with the details about PBL all in one place.  I plan to be adding some more pieces here, too, so let me know if you think something is missing.

1. Secrets to Project-based Learning

eLearning and “Scooby-Doo! Where are you?”

I really enjoyed watching Scooby-Doo as a kid.  The original theme song was, of course, the best…”Scooby, Scooby-Doo, where are you?  You’ve got some work to do now.”  As my Technology Tools to Support Learning course finishes up their self-paced interactive learning modules, I was thinking, “Where are you…in your thinking about elearning and self-paced instruction?”  To take you back, though, here’s the video:

For many of us, the past couple of weeks has been an introduction to elearning and many of the students in my course are beginning instructional designers. So, I am hoping that their thinking has evolved over the time we’ve been discussing elearning.  For the module they have been producing in Powerpoint, we have been following quite of bit of the suggestions and guidelines from Tom Kuhlmann at Articulate.  Certainly one of the points that Tom emphasizes in his posts is making content necessary and meaningful for the learning, such as through scenarios, choices, and consequences.

We’ve also discussed many of the points that Steve Alessi and Stan Trollip identify as essential features for computer-based instruction, or tutorials.  These include:

1. Introduction
2. Presenting new information
3. Questioning
4. Judging responses
5. Feedback
6. Learner control
7. Closing/Exiting

In addition, we have discussed terms, such as page turners, and in another post some folks have considered what tools really contribute purposefully to the creation of learning content for this year and into the next.

So where is your thinking now about elearning? What have you learned and what do you still need to learn?  What’s still a little fuzzy for you?  Where are you?

Jane’s 10 tools for 2010: Do you know about them?

Just this morning, I received an email update fro Jane Hart at the Center for Learning and Performance Technologies in the UK.  Jane’s blog “Jane’s E-Learning Pick of the Day” is one I look forward to each day, because I get a single new tool to consider for elearning.  I encourage you to check it out.  Since my Technology Tools to Support Learning course is discussing elearning now, I thought sharing Jane’s blog, an international perspective, and her post for today would be a great opportunity.

In Jane’s email update, she writes:

I have just completed a short article for the November edition of e.learning age magazine.

e.learning age is the UK’s number one media resource for the e-learning community.  The magazine is the only one if its kind for anyone involved in the e-learning industry – from board directors responsible for skilling the workforce, to training and HR professionals choosing and implementing the best systems, to vendors who want to find out the latest news and trends in the industry.

In Jane’s post for today, she presents 10 tools that appear to be worthy of carrying into 2010.  These tools were compiled from Jane’s list of Top 10 Tools for Learning, where elearning professionals list and rank their top 10 tools for learning.  Then Jane is able to build an annual Top 100 Tool for Learning list.  The ones for today overlap both formal learning and informal learning opportunities.  So, it will be interesting to see how these continue to support one another — if at all.

Here is Jane’s Top 10 list:

1. Prezi
2. Evernote
3. dimdim
4. Etherpad
5. udutu
6. Screenr
7. Posterous
8. Yammer
9. Wordle
10. Flip video

Your turn

Now, I’m not going to give you all the details here, because I want you to go visit Jane’s  page for today.  So, do you know about these?  Are there tools that you use?  Are there tools that you’ve never heard of but would like to use?  Are there ones that are similar to tools that you use personally or professionally now?  Let me know.  Put your comments into the box below.

The landscape of Powerpoint for elearning

This week in my Technology Tools to Support Learning course, we are discussing an overview of elearning.  These novice instructional designers are on their way to producing some self-paced instruction with Powerpoint and converting it to Flash for ease of deployment.  So, I thought it would be really beneficial for them to see/read the landscape of elearning and Powerpoint.

The Landscape

Certainly, Powerpoint has a stigma attached to it.  Books like Beyond Bullet Points by Cliff Atkinson have tried to move us away from the mental model that templates and bullet points have forced us into.  Similarly, Edward Tufte’s treatise on “The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint” has emphasized the dilution of facts and thought brought about by using the hierarchy of bullet points. Wired magazine even picked up his point back in 2003.

Most recently, a slew of mainstream motivational speakers, techies, consultants, and corporate pundits have brought evangelized a number of methods to improve lecture-type and keynote presentations.  We’ve got the following:

• Godin – the power of images and big images
• Takahashi – big text only
• Lessig – each key word or phrase is isolated to a single slide
• Kawasaki – 10/20/30 with 10 slides only, 20 minutes max, and 30 point font
• Ignite – 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide

But has much changed?  We see these pockets of innovation, but the mainstream is still bound to bullet points and poor clip art.

Elearning

Does all of these ideas apply to elearning?  For elearning, the uses of Powerpoint fall into two main categories: development and delivery.

Development

For the development of elearning, Powerpoint has a number of uses.  First, numerous instructional designers and developers have told me that they use Powerpoint for storyboarding.  Powerpoint is simple enough that subject matter experts can even input the information (note that’s information not instruction).  The process of moving from design to development quickly through storyboarding offers a lot of promise for quickly presenting a visual product.

I’ve also heard of folks using Powerpoint as a wireframing tool.  This is where they mock up a user interface quickly to test the interactions and the navigation prior to building a prototype system.  By using the hyperlinking and even Action Buttons/Settings, you can quickly put together a system that responds to clicks to use as a model for a more sophisticated prototype inside Flash, Director, or even a web site.

More recently, Powerpoint has come on strong as a rapid development tool.  This is at the crux of Tom Kuhlmann’s blog. With hyperlinking, advanced graphics features, and templating, Powerpoint offers a lot of advantages to developing a unit as opposed to to building from scratch in Flash.  In addition, there are a number of tools, like Articulate (Tom’s company), that offer conversion of Powerpoint files to Flash for distribution, as well as adding in branching and assessments.

Delivery

The other way for using Powerpoint with elearning is to use it as a delivery vehicle for the instruction.  The most obvious method is for a trainer or instructor to present with a Powerpoint presentation.  This is certainly where all of the ideas above about improving presentations would most easily fit. (And yes, I get that this is technically not elearning.)  Powerpoint can also be used as a stand-alone self-paced instructional unit.  By saving as a Powerpoint show file, kiosk mode, and hyperlinking, the learner can control the presentation.  This is pretty common in K-12 schools.  Finally, I’ve been told by a number of instructional designers that they often produce Powerpoint presentations with text heavy slides for distribution.  They said this works well for their salesforce, who are on the go, and they don’t require an Internet connection, so the salesperson can look at it at any time.

You tell me.

Are there other ways Powerpoint is being used with elearning?  Are you and your organization doing other things with Powerpoint for elearning?  Did I miss something altogether?

Do you have examples to share of just how it is getting used?  Are you using it by itself or with another tools, like Articulate or Impactica?  Let me and my students know.  Put your ideas and comments below.